Sagan is a managing director at General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Palo Alto, California, and New York City.

Previously he was CEO at Akamai Technologies after being COO and president. He continues to serve on Akamai’s board. He joined the Cambridge, Mass.-based company in October 1998. He was elected to Akamai’s Board of Directors in January 2005, and became CEO in April 2005. Sagan was senior advisor to the World Economic Forum from 1997 to 1998, consulting to the Geneva-based organization on information technologies for the world's 1,000 foremost multi-national corporations.

In 1995, Sagan was named president and editor of new media at Time Inc., a position he held until 1997.

Mr. Sagan's career began in broadcast television news. He joined WCBS-TV in 1981 as a news writer and was named news director in 1987. He is a three-time Emmy Award winner.

Mr. Sagan is also chairman of ProPublica and a Life Trustee of Northwestern.

Paul Sagan, information technology executive. Achievements include designing and launching New York 1 News; co-founder Roadrunner and Pathfinder. Named a Global Leader of Tomorrow, World Economic Forum, 1996; named Public Company Chief Executive Officer of Year, Massachusetts Networks Communications Council, 2007.

Background

Sagan, Paul was born in 1959.

Education

Graduate, Medill School Journalism, Northwestern University.

Career

He formerly served as the Executive Vice Chairman of Akamai Technologies. Sagan joined Akamai in October 1998 as Chief Operating Officer, became President the following year and was elected to the Akamai board of directors in January 2005. He is also a trustee of his alma mater, Northwestern University.

He also served for a period of time on the boards of Experience, Incorporated. iRobot Corporation and Medialink Worldwide, Incorporated.

Upon graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Sagan began his career at WCBS-television as a news writer and was named news director in 1987. In 1991, he joined Time Warner to design and launch NY1.

In 1995 he was named president and editor of new media at Time Incorporated., a position he held until 1997. From 1997 to 1998 Sagan served as senior adviser to the World Economic Forum.

Sagan is married to Ann Burks Sagan and they have three children, Katharine, Michael, and Emma.

Sagan was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President"s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2010.

Achievements

• Paul Sagan has been listed as a noteworthy information technology executive by Marquis Who's Who.

Membership

He is a member of the board of directors of Akamai, Datto, Incorporated., Electric Membership Corporation Corporation, L2, Incorporated., VMWare, Incorporated., and the not-for-profit ProPublica. Previously, he was a member of the board of directors of Dow Jones & Company, Digitas, Maven Networks, OpenMarket, FutureTense, Incorporated., and VDONet Corporation before each company was sold. In 2008 he was named as a member of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

[George Sagan (born 1895)], founder and former chairman of the New York Girl Coat Company and a dealer in Jewish philanthropy, died Tuesday in West Orange, N. J. He was 79 years old and hived in Verona, N. J.

Mr. Sagan, who retired as chairman in 1971 but continued as a consultant to the apparel company, was born in Russia and came to the United States in 1910. He founded the company in 1916.

He established the Sagan Foundation in Summit, N. J., and endowed a chair of performing arts at Brandeis University. He had been an overseer of the Jewish Theological Seminary and a director of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Mr. Sagan was an honorary alumnus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and had been active in support of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

A former co‐chairman of the United Jewish Appeal in Essex County, N. J., and former chairman of the Newark Placement of Immigrants Service, he had also been a member of the board of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and received its award of merit.

[Surviving] are his widow, the former Esther Gooen; three sons, Eugene ([Eugene "Gene" Benjamin Sagan (born 1925)]), Eli ([Elias "Eli" Jacob Sagan (born 1927)]) and Bruce ([Bruce Lewis Sagan (born 1929)], and nine grandchildren.

The first television images to come out of Cove Neck, L.I., after the crash of an Avianca Boeing 707 were unedited and graphic, as New York's six commercial stations rushed to get the story to viewers. The stations broke into their programs just after 10 P.M. on Thursday with information, all of it sketchy and speculative, adding more as it became available.

Television photographers focused on the seriously injured and the medical crews, on the shattered fuselage and the chaos at the scene. The first pictures came from a 28,000-pound satellite truck owned by News 12, a 24-hour cable news station serving Long Island that is based in Woodbury, not far from the site of the crash. Some of News 12's coverage was broadcast nationally by ABC, CBS and NBC.

Executives at the three network-owned stations and three independent stations in New York City said yesterday that they had received no calls critical of the coverage, and attributed the acceptance of the pictures to factors including the late hour and the decision not to focus on the dead.

''It was graphic, it was dramatic, but we thought it was within the bounds of what we have done in the past,'' said Lloyd Siegel, the executive producer of special coverage at NBC News. ''There is a basic standard of taste for what we put out on the air. Part of that standard is determined by the nature of the story and the time it is going out. We would not do it that way on a Saturday morning, when there are likely to be a lot of children watching.''

Paul Sagan, the news director at Channel 2, which is owned by CBS, said viewers were regularly warned that the pictures they were about to see were graphic.

The local stations sent their own crews, and by yesterday morning, tales of their efforts were circulating. John Frasse, a cameraman for Channel 11, was blocked from the North Shore site by traffic; he borrowed a rowboat and rowed four miles to Cove Neck, took footage of the crash, rowed back and returned to the station with pictures.

In the end, the news executives asserted that the use of often gory pictures was called for by the drama of the event.

''Yes, you run a risk when you show tough stuff,'' said Norman Fein, News 12's news director. ''But this was a story that ranged from tragedy to almost miracle. There were no identifiable shots of clearly dead people. Most were obviously alive and being treated. That's life, and that's what we do.''

Time Warner will begin its first 24-hour, all-news cable channel serving New York City on Sept. 1, the company announced yesterday. The channel will be the first solely devoted to an urban community, said Paul Sagan, the vice president of news and programming for the channel. It will be available in about 800,000 households in the city, on the five cable systems owned by Time Warner. The service, called "New York 1 News," will be seen on Channel 1 on all the cable systems. Time Warner said that it had signed a 10-year lease for a studio on West 42d Street in Manhattan, to use as the channel's main operating center.

Last Wednesday, in the midst of his protracted negotiations with Ted Turner, Gerald M. Levin took time out for a tour of Cable News Network's sprawling newsroom in Atlanta. Mr. Levin, the chairman of Time Warner Inc., greeted some of CNN's senior news producers and lingered at a presentation of the network's fledgling interactive ventures.

With Time Warner seemingly on the verge of clinching a deal to acquire CNN's parent company, Turner Broadcasting System Inc., for about $8 billion, Mr. Levin's visit to the CNN newsroom was fraught with meaning.

Executives at Time Warner and Turner said Mr. Levin was determined to give the 24-hour news network a central role in what would be the world's largest entertainment company.

Editors at CNN and Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner, held a series of meetings last week to begin hatching ideas for editorial services that bridge print and electronic media: TV shows based on magazines like Time and People; on-line services that use CNN's news feed; even a sports cable network drawing on the resources of Sports Illustrated.

"When you add the editorial clout of Time and Fortune to the worldwide distribution of CNN, you've got a substantial powerhouse," said Porter Bibb, a media-industry banker at Ladenburg, Thalmann & Company.

But CNN and Time reporters would do well to ask some follow-up questions: How will Turner's scrappy news operation fit with Time Warner's more stolid magazines? Will CNN be able to turbocharge Time's halting efforts to break into electronic media? Will Time bring some editorial sophistication to CNN's rip-and-read style?

The editor in chief of Time Inc., Norman Pearlstine, and the president of CNN, Tom Johnson, both declined to comment on any plans before a deal is announced. But Mr. Pearlstine and two other Time Inc. executives, Walter Isaacson and Paul Sagan, met with Mr. Johnson in Atlanta a week ago to discuss potential synergies.

At this point in the talks, Mr. Turner, chairman and president of Turner Broadcasting, would continue to run CNN and the network would remain in Atlanta. But longer term, said people inside the companies, Mr. Turner and Mr. Levin may merge the news operations. At a minimum, the news bureaus of CNN and Time Inc. would share office space.

Turner Broadcasting does not stand to gain huge savings by merging CNN with Time Inc., as it would if it merged the network with CBS News or NBC News. But one senior Turner executive said there could be "very substantive cooperation" between CNN and Time Inc.

Still, no company has ever tried to integrate print and TV news organizations of this size. CNN has 2,500 editorial employees, 30 news bureaus around the world and $600 million in annual revenue. Time Inc. publishes 24 magazines and has $3.4 billion in revenue.

Even on a smaller scale, some media experts said, print and electronic news operations do not easily mesh. Reese Schonfeld, a veteran cable-television executive who was the first president of CNN, said the network might be able to draw on Time's magazines for help in soft news areas like fashion. But Mr. Schonfeld predicted that the collaboration would not go beyond that.

"There's just too much competition," said Mr. Schonfeld, who began his career in the 1940's at United Press when the wire service was trying unsuccessfully to break into electronic media through a venture with Movietone, the newsreel producer owned by 20th Century Fox.

One area where Time Inc. and CNN plan to cooperate is in financial news. CNN is starting a business news channel, CNN Financial News, or CNNFN, next January. And executives at CNN said Fortune and Money magazines would be tremendous resources for the fledgling network: Through Fortune, CNNFN would gain access to top corporate executives; drawing on Money, it would be able to offer personal finance news to compete with NBC's business cable network, CNBC.

Multimedia is another area of potential collaboration. CNN is already testing an interactive service on Time Warner's full-service cable network in Orlando, Fla. The network will probably also have a presence on Pathfinder, Time Warner's site on the World Wide Web, an area of the Internet where text, graphics, sound and video are blended.

CNN has its own on-line service and a venture with the Intel Corporation to deliver news programming to desktop computers. But some media experts said that the venture had a slow start. If a deal is reached, the service, CNN at Work, could add material from Fortune.

Conversely, some executives said CNN could help Time Inc. expand its magazines into television formats -- an area where the company has met with scant success. Although Time Warner's cable division started a successful 24-hour news service, New York One, the magazine division has had a surprisingly low profile on the channel.

"They have such a strong editorial core that it's almost shocking that Time has not elevated them into electronic media," Mr. Bibb said.

But if Time Inc. has been slow to break into television journalism, its magazines have mastered the craft of analytical and investigative journalism. Some media experts said CNN could use that expertise.

"We still do primarily breaking news," said a Turner executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I think that has been a valid criticism of CNN, in comparison to newspapers and magazines."

Mr. Bibb also said CNN could benefit from editorial executives like Mr. Pearlstine, a former executive editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Mr. Isaacson, a former senior editor of Time magazine who now heads the new-media efforts of the magazine division.

"Lou Dobbs and Ed Turner are running that shop themselves," said Mr. Bibb, referring to Mr. Dobbs, an executive vice president of CNN and anchor of its daily business news program, and Mr. Turner, an executive vice president and news director of the network.

Indeed, some CNN executives said they were worried that Time Inc. would end up dominating the network. Mr. Pearlstine has close ties to Mr. Levin. Before joining Time Warner, he briefly ran a venture firm that experimented with delivering print media in new ways.

Time is not about to move CNN to New York. "It would be nuts to take a low-cost, efficient news operation and move it into the Time-Life Building," said a senior Time Inc. executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Yet some media experts said CNN could use an injection of new editorial blood, even if its center of gravity shifts to New York. Mr. Schonberg said CNN would thrive as part of a broader media empire because the network had grown far beyond its Atlanta roots.

"To the extent that the focus shifts from Atlanta to New York, that's for the good," Mr. Schonfeld said. "You wouldn't publish the International Herald Tribune in Lyons; you'd publish it in Paris."

Pathfinder, Time Warner Inc.'s on-line arm, has signed an agreement with Alt.Culture, a New York-based content provider, to update an advanced, on-line encyclopedia of Generation X culture.

The agreement, expected to be announced Thursday, marks the first time Pathfinder has gone outside the Time Warner family to develop on-line content.

It is also significant because it suggests that Pathfinder, which has had its share of financial and management turmoil, is determined to reach a younger audience.

''Pathfinder has been about a mainstream audience, and Alt.Culture definitely seems to be skewed toward people who aren't typical Fortune or Time magazine readers,'' said Mark Mooradian, the group director of consumer content for Jupiter Communications, an on-line research firm. ''I think we're about to see Pathfinder go in a different direction, and I think it's going to be a savvy move.''

Pathfinder, which includes the on-line versions of such well-known Time Warner magazines as Time, People and Money, began in October 1994 as one of the first on-line endeavors by a major media company. But it has hardly been smooth sailing: on Friday, Bruce Judson, who had helped found Pathfinder, resigned as general manager of Time Inc. New Media; a replacement may be named later this week. At the end of 1996, Paul Sagan resigned as president and editor; while a new president has not been named, Dan Okrent, who had been managing editor of Life magazine, was named editor of Pathfinder.

In addition, analysts estimate that Time Warner Inc. may be losing as much as $10 million a year on Pathfinder (http:// www.pathfinder.com).

Time Warner hopes that Alt.Culture, coupled with an Entertainment Weekly site to be revamped later this spring, will make people think of Pathfinder more as a provider of original content and interactive forums than as an electronic version of printed matter, said Meg Siesfeld, managing editor of Time Inc. New Media.

Alt.Culture is essentially an on-line version of a 1996 book, ''Alt.Culture: An A-to-Z Guide to the 90's -- Underground, Online and Over-the-Counter,'' by Nathaniel Wice and Steven Daly. The book contains about 900 entries on such varied topics as ''Nintendo thumb,'' ''Communications Decency Act'' and ''undergraduate credit card offers.''

Under the deal, valued in the low six figures, Mr. Wice and Mr. Daly will add about five new entries a week, plus regularly update the site (http://www.altculture.com).

NEW YORK -- Time Inc. announced Wednesday a plan to restructure its new-media operations, consolidating Internet positions into the Time Inc. new-media division, moving them from individual publications.

The Time Warner Inc. unit, which publishes Time, Money, Life and a host of other magazines, also named Linda McCutcheon Conneally president of the new-media division, effective immediately. Norman Pearlstine, editor-in-chief at Time Warner, had been serving as acting president since Paul Sagan resigned from the position late last year. Ms. McCutcheon Conneally had been vice president of sales and marketing at the new-media unit.

The restructuring, which will take people employed in new-media jobs at the individual magazines and move them into the Time Inc. new-media unit, is aimed at increasing the efficiency of the company's sprawling presence on the World Wide Web. Time Inc. officials said they expect to realize cost savings from the change, though they declined to estimate the amount of the savings. There are no plans to reduce staff, the officials said.

The Time Inc. new-media efforts, led by the company's money-losing Pathfinder site on the World Wide Web (www.pathfinder.com ), have become a symbol of the difficulty in finding profits in Internet publishing. Pathfinder is an ambitious attempt to create an umbrella site for the Time Inc. magazines, a starting point for Internet surfers to venture into content from the various publications.

Another Time Warner interactive project, the Dreamshop on-line shopping mall on the Web, may undergo a restructuring in coming months pending the outcome of discussions with potential outside investors, people familiar with the project said. Dreamshop is produced by Time Warner's cable division.

In addition to taking new-media staff from individual publications and consolidating them at the new-media division, Time Inc. will also organize the division into five separate units. One will focus on the company's efforts with the Pathfinder site. Others will work on: syndication of on-line content; niche interactive products, such as international versions; selling subscriptions to Time Inc. print publications on-line; and electronic commerce.

Ms. McCutcheon Conneally's appointment as president of new media follows the resignation last week of Bruce Judson, who had been general manager of the division and helped found Pathfinder. Before joining Time Inc.'s new-media division, Ms. McCutcheon Conneally was director of marketing for Time magazine.

Akamai overcomes the Internet's hot spot problem.

[Paul Lewis Sagan (born 1959)] says that Danny could leave the company to finish his PhD and publish his thesis, but then they'd have to kill him. Everyone else at [Akamai Technologies, Incorporated] is encouraged to complete their academic work, a slew of them at MIT, but Danny - him they'd have to off. He knows too much.

[Daniel Mark Lewin (born 1970)] is an algorithms guy, and at Akamai Technologies, algorithms rule. After years of research, he and his adviser, professor [Frank Thomson Leighton (born 1956)], have designed a few that solve one of the direst problems holding back growth of the Internet. This spring, Tom and Danny's seven-month-old company launched a service built on these secret formulas.

The Akamai solution recalls great historical shifts - discoveries of better, faster ways - like the invention of Arabic numerals, or the development of seafaring. Take the latter: For most of prehistory, people traveled exclusively over land. Then, around 5,000 years ago, they discovered that floating cargo on water was easier than lugging it across terrain - no mountains to climb, no roads to negotiate. Seafaring transformed most of the world's surface from unusable space into a vast ubiquitous shortcut, a portal to faraway lands and great riches. Natural harbors blossomed into sophisticated cities. And although societies continued exchanging goods with their neighbors over land, the first world powers, the first empires, commanded the seas.

In some ways, sending information around the traditional Internet resembles human transport, pre-Phoenicia. The Net was originally designed like a series of roads connecting distinct sources of content. Different servers, physical hardware, specialized in their own individual data domains. As first conceived, an address like nasa.gov would always correspond to dedicated servers located at a NASA facility. When you visited www.ksc.nasa.gov to see a shuttle launch, you connected to NASA's servers at Kennedy Space Center, just as you traveled to Tivoli for travertine marble instead of picking it up at your local port. When you ran a site, your servers and only your servers delivered its content.

This routing system worked fine for years, but as users move to fatter pipes, like DSL and broadband cable, and as event-driven supersites emerge, the protocols tying information to location cause a bottleneck. Back when The Starr Report was posted, Congress' servers couldn't keep up with hungry surfers. When Victoria's Secret ran its Super Bowl ad last February, similar lusts went unsated. The Heaven's Gate site in 1997 quickly followed its cult members into oblivion. And when The Phantom Menace trailers hit the Web this spring, a couple of sites distributing them went down.

This is the "hot spot" problem: When too many people visit a site, the excessive load heats it up like an overloaded circuit and causes a meltdown. Just as something on the Net gets interesting, access to it fails.

For more time-critical applications, the stakes are higher. When the stock market lurches and online traders go berserk, brokerage sites can hardly afford to buckle. In retail, slow responses will send impatient customers clicking over to the competition. Users may have Pentium IIIs and ISDN lines, but when a site can't keep up with demand, they feel like they're on a slow dialup. And users on relatively remote parts of the network - even tech hubs like Singapore - often suffer slow responses, not just during peak traffic.

ISPs address this problem by adding connections, expanding capacity, and running server farms to host client sites on many machines, but this still leaves content clustered in one place on the network. Publishers can mirror sites at multiple hosting companies, helping to spread out traffic, but this means duplicating everything everywhere, even the files no one wants. A third remedy, caching, temporarily stores copies of popular files on servers closer to the user, but out of the original site's control. Naturally, site publishers don't like this - it delivers stale content, preserves errors, and skews usage stats. In other words, massive landlock.

So in 1998, with their new algorithms in hand, [Frank Thomson Leighton (born 1956)] and [Daniel Mark Lewin (born 1970)] found themselves facing a sort of manifest destiny. The Web's largest sites were straining to meet demand - and frequently failing. Most needed better traffic handling, a way to cool down hot spots and speed content delivery overall. And Tom and Danny had conceived a solution, a grand-scale alternative to the Net's routing system.

In September, a California company called Sandpiper Networks introduced a service perilously similar to what they'd envisioned, but Tom and Danny's load-balancing solution was one step more radical, and the problem was plenty big for two contenders. [Paul Lewis Sagan (born 1959)], a content guy from Time Warner's Pathfinder, signed up to lead them, and the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup began building its own globe-spanning network of servers that would handle Web content in a brand-new way.

It worked. With Akamai's FreeFlow service, all content pours through the entire network, instantly responding to demand, ebbing and flowing as needed, changing routes and locations in response to current conditions. Its ocean of servers connects to the terra firma of the rest of the Net at scores of ports, all of which move data more quickly as conditions continually change.

No Fixed Address

In January, Akamai began running beta versions of FreeFlow, serving content for ESPN.com, Paramount Pictures, Apple, and other high-volume clients. (Akamai withholds the names of the others, but you can tell if a site is using the service by viewing the page source and looking for akamaitech.net in the URLs. A cursory test reveals "Akamaized" content at Yahoo! and GeoCities.)

ESPN.com and Paramount have been good beta testers - ESPN.com because it requires frequent updates and is sensitive to region as well as time, and Paramount because it delivers a lot of pipe-hogging video. On March 11, while ESPN was covering the first day of NCAA hoops' March Madness, Paramount's Entertainment Tonight Online posted the second Phantom Menace trailer. FreeFlow handled up to 3,000 hits per second for the two sites - 250 million in total, many of them 25-Mbyte downloads of the trailer. But the system never exceeded even 1 percent of its capacity. In fact, as the download frenzy overwhelmed other sites, Akamai picked up the slack. Before long, Akamai became the exclusive distributor of all Phantom Menace QuickTimes, serving both of the official sites, starwars.com and apple.com.

So how does it work? Companies sign up for Akamai's FreeFlow, agreeing to pay according to the amount of their traffic. Then they run a simple utility to modify tags, and the Akamai network takes over. Throughout the site, the system rewrites the URLs of files, changing the links into variables to break the connection between domain and location. On www.apple.com, for example, the link www.apple.com/home/media/menace_640qt4.mov, specifying the 640 x 288 Phantom Menace QuickTime trailer, might be rewritten as a941.akamai.com/7/941/51/256097340036aa/www.apple.com/home/media/menace_640qt4.mov. Under standard protocols, a941.akamaitech.net would refer to a particular machine. But with Akamai's system, the address can resolve to any one of hundreds of servers, depending on current conditions and where you are on the Net. And it can resolve a different way for someone else - or even for you, a few seconds later. (The /7/941/51/256097340036aa in the URL is a fingerprint string used for authentication.) This new method is more complicated, but like modern navigation, it opens new vistas of capacity and commerce.

Sandpiper remains Akamai's only direct competitor. In April it signed a deal with AOL and Inktomi to begin serving their sites and incorporating their servers into the Sandpiper network. But a month out of the starting gate, Akamai was running immediately neck and neck with its rival, both promising more than 1,000 servers by the end of the year.

Academic Hot Spot

Partly because it arrived second, Akamai has had to differentiate its product. The company has done this not only by focusing on fine points of the technology, but also by positioning itself as the intelligent solution. FreeFlow is the masterwork of leading scientists from MIT.

What's more, the scientists of Akamai are algorithms people. Whereas network hackers tend to be masters of improvisation, spotting local problems and using intuition and quick experimentation to fire off fixes, algorithms people tend to be slower and more rigorous, examining and proving everything along the way. They start with the most pared-down problems - sorting numbers, stacking rectangles, connecting dots - and build up to more complicated situations. They study how efficiently computer programs run under all conditions - the best, average, and worst-possible cases - as the mass of processors, connections, and information become infinitely large. It may take them a while to find a solution they like, but when they do, they know it will work, both on paper and in any reality.

This is the hot spot phenomenon: just as something on the Net gets interesting, access to it fails.

So network growth doesn't scare algorithms people; they always push things to infinity anyway.

You can trace Akamai's genesis to LCS, MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, where Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Consortium and [Frank Thomson Leighton (born 1956)]'s algorithms group both have their offices. In 1995 Tim asked Tom if he thought distributed algorithms could reliably solve the hot spot problem, and Tom's algorithms posse was intrigued. The problem raised interesting theoretical issues, the group's forte, while at the same time the graphs of nodes and edges they drew on whiteboards represented actual machines and Net connections. Real-world relevance! Several semesters and ideas later - some published, some still proprietary - Tom and Danny had blueprints for server software that would cool down traffic everywhere. But better, they had formally proven that most of their algorithms were optimal. In other words, different solutions might give equally good results, but none could ever possibly do better.

For their nonoptimal algorithms, Tom and Danny demonstrated that the problems were, in computer-science shorthand, "hard" problems. This means there are no major shortcuts to finding the best solution; the problem is inherently difficult, and you just have to do the best you can with finite time and computational resources.

Lastly, Tom and Danny knew with total certainty that, given their descriptions of the hot spot problem and the workings of the Net, the larger the network grew, the better their solution would perform. They not only had a solution, they had a solution that was literally - demonstrably - unbeatable.

La Sauce Est Tout

The name Akamai means "clever" in Hawaiian, or more colloquially, "cool." At Danny's suggestion, the team found it by trying out words in an online English-Hawaiian dictionary. In a sense, FreeFlow is an attempt to put smartness into the Web page, the URL, and the network itself.

Although at first Akamai's founders imagined selling their traffic-calming solution as server software - ISPs would buy it and install it themselves to boost performance - they soon realized they should be a service for publishers, content providers, and ecommerce companies of all kinds, not a software company. With Akamai's service, publishers could forget about servers and ISPs, and concentrate on content. Akamai would run its software on its own broadly deployed server network and sell guaranteed fast delivery, subscription style. The idea was to work with as many ISPs as possible to create a new layer of infrastructure on top of the Net, a fluid system that would run everywhere and reach out to remote populations.

Small ISPs operate at a single location; the big ones have their own subnetworks encompassing multiple POPs in different locations. Both are basically facilities where a bunch of servers share one or more network connections. Akamai calls these facilities "regions," and to get close to all users, the company tries to locate its servers in as many regions as it can. Singapore's SingNet has Akamai servers in its single region, while Teleglobe has them all over. Partnering ISPs small and large benefit from improved capacity, while their users get faster delivery of FreeFlow sites. (The company targets content providers and ecommerce sites, but hopes to cultivate an Intel-style status among consumers as well, who would look for ISPs with "Akamai Inside.")

So Akamai servers are in diaspora, but they remain clannish. They keep in constant contact with each other all over the map, speaking their own special dialect of Linux. Each region has one mapping server and one or more content servers. All content servers, no matter where they are, are eligible to serve any content. The mapping servers monitor the local state of the network: How fast are the current connections to neighboring regions? Which connections seem to have gone down completely? They figure out which servers should carry which files, and then how to evenly distribute the hits for a requested file among the servers that carry it.

Web pages themselves break down into units: the HTML page plus each embedded file it contains - images, animations, sounds, video. Akamai's system wisely leaves the HTML alone and scatters only the embedded elements, the rationale being that these larger files cause the traffic jams, while plain HTML is fast and cheap. In a big cafeteria, FreeFlow might pick up your meat loaf, green beans, and rice pudding at three different counters, calculating which steam tables look hotter and where the lines are long. But your tray, the HTML, always comes from the same place. Keeping the HTML on the home server also keeps the user database and customization scripts in one place, where publishers want them.

When a user requests a file, the mapping servers decide on a content server in two stages: They choose first the best region and then the content server within that region. In computer-science terms, the first stage represents a classic "min-cost" flow problem, where the cost associated with each hop between neighboring regions - or how easy it is for traffic to flow between them - is weighted. As traffic conditions change, the mapping servers update these weights and continually find a low-cost route based on a user's place on the network. As Akamai and Sandpiper both know, this is an expensive, "hard" calculation. The mapping servers have to be fast.

Within a region, for the second stage of routing, the system divides the traffic evenly among all the servers using "consistent hashing," a wonderful double-randomized hashing algorithm that Danny invented, earning him MIT's 1998 Morris Joseph Lewin Award (no relation) for best master's thesis. Simple hashing algorithms, which assign objects to locations the way a card dealer deals out hands, break down completely when players drop out or come in; the original formula for who will receive what card, which relies on knowing the number of players, no longer works. But consistent hashing splits up and mixes the assignments so thoroughly, while still using a fairly simple formula, that if locations drop out and throw things off, the correct location will still be close by. As more server problems and network glitches arise, the algorithm has to do more second-guessing, but it achieves the best results possible in an unsteady environment.

Routing and spreading the hits intelligently is important, but it isn't the whole solution. The real hot spot cooler is balancing the content load - determining which servers should have which files in the first place, before they fulfill requests routed to them. Akamai's solution replicates the popular files on multiple servers, spreads total loads evenly, and minimizes copying files around. The ingenious algorithm underlying this process is Akamai's secret sauce, and as the French say, the sauce is everything.

It was a solution that was literally - demonstrably - unbeatable.

Cambridge Dons

Underlying algorithms aside, a private network service business is a different beast entirely from a software business - for one thing, it requires far more money.

Discovered by Battery Ventures through MIT's student-run "$50K" Entrepreneurship Competition (the Akamai team failed to win the trial's whopping $50,000 grant for starting a new business, though the winner turned out virtuous and offered to split the take with the four other finalists), Akamai later secured funding from several angel investors. Among them were Gil Friesen (formerly of Classic Sports) and Art Bilger (formerly of Apollo Fund and New World Communications). Polaris Venture Partners of Boston and Seattle also joined, and by the end of 1998 the startup had more than $8 million in first-round funding.

The talent snowballed. Battery Ventures' Todd Dagres recruited [Paul Lewis Sagan (born 1959)] as chief operating officer last January. In March David Goodtree joined as head of marketing, after years of studying the IT industry at Forrester Research. In April [George Henry Conrades (born 1939)] became Akamai's CEO and chair. At [BBN Technologies, Incorporated] George had overseen the acquisition of [Genuity Incorporated], authors of the traffic-management software tool Hopscotch, and when he learned about Akamai, it seemed the perfect big-thinking, out-of-the-box idea: a Hopscotch for the entire Internet. Everyone believed.

Today Akamai employs about 130 people. Many are MIT students, both graduate and undergrad. But alongside them in the trenches is a surprising number of actual faculty on temporary leave - full professors and associate professors from places like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and UC Berkeley.

The Sandpiper Approach

Akamai and Sandpiper are not the first in their field of distributed traffic management. Older systems, many still available and useful, perform sophisticated routing and load balancing over groups of servers installed on a single subnetwork. Companies like Cisco (DistributedDirector), GTE Internetworking (which acquired [BBN Technologies, Incorporated] and with it [Genuity Incorporated]'s Hopscotch), and Resonate (Central Dispatch) have been selling such solutions as installable software or hardware. Digex and GTE Internetworking (Web Advantage) offer hosting that uses intelligent load balancing and routing within a single ISP. These work like Akamai's and Sandpiper's services, but with a narrower focus.

But only Akamai and Sandpiper are selling the service of whole server networks spanning numerous ISPs, and only Akamai and Sandpiper use the trick of rewriting URLs as a hook into the alternative system.

Both companies' services are powerful, but they're not identical. Footprint customers specify which part of their content the system should handle by defining rules through a user interface, rather than by adding tag lines to page source. Sites project expected traffic levels ahead of time and pay for levels of service, rather than paying by the meter.

Footprint users can choose from many content distribution options - some simple, some advanced - for different parts of a site, while FreeFlow optimizes everything automatically. Footprint also distributes HTML, not just embedded files, spreading database information through the network. Akamai leaves HTML at home.

Under unusual circumstances, Footprint may be less bulletproof than FreeFlow, but it has proven itself well. It kept The Starr Report available on the Los Angeles Times site, when many others buckled, and served Intuit's site reliably all through tax season. As long as speed is scarce on the Net, the two companies are going to find fans.

Both companies, if they continue to grow, will route traffic more efficiently over the Net as a whole, increasing delivery speeds for subscribers and nonsubscribers as well. But there's a downside. Content delivered via these subscription-based networks will make content routed by the old, free Internet seem slow. A page that loads in six seconds seems fine until you visit one that loads in four. This effect will be magnified as people upgrade their connections to DSL and broadband cable. With fatter pipes, users will demand more information-intensive experiences, and the newly available last-mile bandwidth will be filled up with fast, dazzling content from supersites, served from networks like Akamai. ESPN.com will appear instantly, but you'll have to wait an age for anything homegrown or poorly financed.

Others argue, however, that the Internet is already a tiered environment, where cash-rich content providers can add more and more hardware to improve delivery, while your cousin's homepage, with no traffic management resources behind it, is already slow. Akamai and Sandpiper just allow more publishers to tap into premium services.

Either way you look at it, the stakes are high. The winner, if there is one, will have its hand in the major revenue-generating sites on the Web. More than any other company in the medium's short history, the winner will own the Net - or at least the parts of it that pay.

Sea Change

Akamaiians compare their company to FedEx, delivering content faster and more reliably than the old USPS. It's not a bad comparison - as good, at least, as the glorious advent of sea travel thousands of years before Christ - but it raises the specter of huge capital needs and about 10 more years till ubiquity.

Akamai wants to be everywhere: says Paul, "a server in every POP."

Yet in less than a year, the little-known company is well on its way toward global domination. Akamai wants to be universal, as widespread as the Net itself, with, in Paul's terms, "a server in every POP." If the company has its way, every computer on the Net will connect to Akamai servers, which will push and pull content around with the tides, constantly running calculations on the turbulence and fluid dynamics of information. As each new site and ISP signs on, Akamai's ocean will swell, carrying ships ever closer to their final goals. For now at least, the ordinary user ought to be glad that the company in charge of the Earth's oceans wants only to give each of us beachfront property.

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 24 — Attorney General John Ashcroft came to a snowbound ski resort here today to explain to the world's rich, powerful and just plain pushy the rectitude of his tactics in America's war on terror. In the process, he faced a gantlet of questions, not all of them from the usual suspects.

Paul Sagan, an American technology executive from Cambridge, Mass., for instance, inquired of Mr. Ashcroft after lunch in an upscale hotel "about the way Americans are perceived."

"Why do you think we are perceived as being not on the right side by a lot of the world?" Mr. Sagan asked. "Often we are seen on the wrong side."

Earlier, at a set-piece gathering of the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of some 2,000 business, political, religious and other leaders, Kumi Naidoo, the head of an umbrella organization of civil rights groups, took Mr. Ashcroft to task over the way America has conducted its antiterror campaign since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"We are seeing large levels of alienation across this planet from the war on terrorism," he said in one of several snappy exchanges with Mr. Ashcroft. "What we are saying is that certain fundamental tenets of democracy are being violated."

Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch U.S.A, an advocacy group, said America's "unwillingness to be bound by international standards has bred distrust and is harming the U.S.'s standing in the world and the war against terrorism."

At a separate debate earlier, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a senior Princeton academic, said the central issue was American power and opposition to it.

The remarks might come as a bit of a shock after the World Economic Forum's session last year in New York turned into a schmoozefest of post-Sept. 11 sympathy for the city's beleaguered citizens.

"The agenda has shifted," Professor Slaughter said, highlighting an ambiguity among those who see the United States simultaneously as protector and persecutor, beat cop and bully. And the American response, by and large, seemed today to be the United States can live with that because, in the end, the world needs America as much as it may bridle at Washington's overwhelming political, military and economic power.

"There may be many people who don't like the pre-eminence of America, but they do like Americans to be there" in times of crisis," said David Dreier, a Republican congressman from California.

As one motto making the rounds among Americans here puts it: "They don't like America on top. They do like America on tap."

"The U.S. is essentially a provider of most of the building blocks of international peace and security," said Richard N. Haass, a senior State Department official. Or, as Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, expressed it: "Nobody likes the big guy on the block. We are every country's problem and every country's solution."

As the United States prepares for possible war with Baghdad, though, the challenge facing Mr. Ashcroft and other American officials is to counter an argument among Washington's critics that the twin campaigns against terror and Iraq will, in fact, create so much resentment as to build a breeding ground for a new generation of anti-American terrorists.

Critics in Europe and the Arab and Muslim world argue that the combination of America's measures against terrorism at home and its readiness to intervene abroad do not address the root causes of terror attacks.

While Mr. Ashcroft said that the Washington's aim was to prevent acts of terror before they took place rather than prosecute the perpetrators later, the prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, turned to the American official across the stage and admonished in front of hundreds of participants, "To say you must do preventive actions irrespective of the causes is wrong."

The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center, Mr. Mahathir said, "did it because they were incensed with something, and we have to find out why they were incensed. We should try not to amplify the situation, anger them more and lead more people to join this group of people."

Mr. Ashcroft replied, "I am not prepared to say we have to give up values to appease the terrorist."

Moreover, critics from both the United States, Europe and the Muslim world specifically challenged many of the Bush administration's antiterrorism measures, including the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, its refusal to name people detained in the United States and a decision to register some foreigners.

It is, though, the looming possibility of war with Iraq that underpins a sense among some critics that the way Washington has handled its overwhelming dominance as the world's only superpower has lessened its standing.

"We expect more wise guy than big guy," said Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League.

Akamai Technologies has named Paul Sagan, the company's president, as its chief executive. He'll fill both roles going forward. Sagan's promotion to the position of CEO had been expected since early January, when George Conrades stepped down from Akamai's top job and named Sagan his eventual successor.

Sagan, who has been Akamai's president since 1999 and also serves on the company's board of directors, is a former broadcast TV executive who once served as president and editor of Time New Media and as senior vice president of Time Warner Cable Programming. Sagan co-founded Roadrunner, an early entrant into the cable Internet market, and helped launch Pathfinder, one of the Web's first portal sites. Immediately prior to joining Akamai as chief operating officer in 1998, Sagan served as senior adviser to the World Economic Forum.

Two major newspapers publishers are taking steps to outsource international coverage, as falling revenue is causing more U.S. papers to shrink their foreign and national footprint.

Tribune which owns the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is in talks with the Washington Post about a deal to pay the Post for foreign and national coverage for Tribune's eight major dailies. Meantime, the New York Daily News has reached an agreement with a Boston-based start-up called GlobalPost to use the company's network of part-time foreign correspondents.

Together, the agreements could substantially overhaul the foreign news operations of three of the 10 largest U.S. newspapers.

Talks between Tribune and the Post Co. have been under way for more than a month, but no agreement has been reached, according to people familiar with the matter. One possibility is that Tribune's eight major dailies could close dozens of news bureaus, in favor of publishing the Washington Post's stories from areas where Tribune doesn't have operations.

Such a deal could save Tribune millions of dollars a year at a time when the company is operating in bankruptcy protection. It is possible no deal will be reached, or that Tribune and the Washington Post could reach a looser collaboration on news, these people said.

The two sides already have a decades-old collaboration: the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, which syndicates stories from Tribune, Washington Post and other chains to other papers for a monthly fee.

A Tribune spokesman declined to comment.

The New York Daily News, the fifth-largest U.S. newspaper, has no foreign bureaus, and its international coverage has waned in recent years. Owner Mortimer Zuckerman, however, has an abiding interest in foreign affairs, and the paper has always served immigrant readers.

GlobalPost is built around a network of part-time foreign correspondents who will file weekly dispatches from around the world on GlobalPost.com, the hub of the new service. Because GlobalPost doesn't expect to be able to support the venture with online advertising, it is banking on a syndication business under which newspapers and Web sites will pay the company to effectively be their foreign correspondents. Philip Balboni, GlobalPost's president and chief executive officer, said the cost would be less than $50,000 a year for even the largest metro newspapers.

The recent efforts by the Daily News and Tribune reflect the financial strain U.S. newspapers are under. Faced with a sharp downturn in profits, many newspapers have retreated from writing about Washington politics and foreign affairs in favor of local coverage, which is cheaper and less susceptible to duplication on the Internet.

Sensing an opportunity, Web sites Politico and Politicker are trying to get newspapers to pay them for coverage of state and national politics. Politico has struck deals for coverage with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.

GlobalPost's founders don't consider the company a competitor to wire services like the AP and Reuters. GlobalPost is backed by a group of investors that includes Amos Hostetter, the billionaire founder of Continental Cablevision, Benjamin Taylor, former publisher of the Boston Globe and Paul Sagan, chief executive of Akamai Technologies Inc. AKAM -1.35%▼

Helping companies protect and restore their data is a growing business. Now, a six-year-old start-up is aiming to get a bigger piece of the action.

Datto, which provides both local and cloud-based data backup and continuity services, plans to announce on Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in its first round of venture capital financing, led by General Catalyst Partners.

Steve Herrod, a managing director at General Catalyst, and Paul Sagan, the executive vice chairman of [Akamai Technologies, Incorporated], will join Datto’s board.

The financing is the latest bet that cloud computing – relying on an array of remote servers to power a dizzying number of computing services – will help transform data backup and recovery.

Datto is aimed at companies who generally cannot afford the traditional, expensive data backup and continuity offerings. By keeping smaller businesses up and running longer, argues the company founder, Austin McChord, they can better compete against larger rivals as society becomes less tolerant of downtime and user outages.

“This is something new, with more availability of something that before only the biggest of big companies could take care of,” Mr. McChord said by phone. “Instead, we can provide a service and make it available for businesses that are much smaller.”

Among Datto’s current clients are Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the breast cancer research foundation, and several National Football League teams.

“These are companies that were used to having coffee wipe out their machines. Before, they were resigned to losing some data,” Mr. Sagan said in an interview. “But the cloud levels the playing field, so even small and medium-sized companies can compete on a global scale.”

Datto, founded in 2007, has grown to about 225 employees and counts customers on six continents without help from venture capital firms. While the company does not disclose its financial information, it says it has posted four consecutive years of 300 percent annual growth.

But Mr. McChord said that a push to significantly expand internationally unearthed a colleague’s connection to a General Catalyst co-founder, David Fialkow, which led to meetings with the venture capital firm.

Mr. Sagan added that after having stepped down as Akamai’s chief executive this year, he had been looking to invest in young entrepreneurs focused on information technology services. Mr. Fialkow, a longtime acquaintance, introduced him to Mr. McChord.

“He’s gotten great growth and impressive sales in four years from a standing start,” Mr. Sagan said of Mr. McChord. “Austin has created a new model.”

Mr. McChord, who will remain Datto’s biggest shareholder, said he would continue to focus on his international expansion plans, particularly in Western Europe. He said he was not looking to take the company public or look for a sale in the near term.

“We’re focused on growing,” he said.

Mr. Sagan added, “My advice is, if the company’s successful, the future takes care of itself.”

The fact that Paul Sagan is a very smart guy shouldn't surprise anyone. It runs in the family: He's a second cousin of the late Carl Sagan — the astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist and astrobiologist.

A pioneer of the broadband and digital media industries, Paul Sagan is a three-time Emmy Award winning newsman who helped build Akamai Technologies into an S&P 500-listed tech giant.

He joined Akamai in October 1998 as employee No. 15 and Chief Operating Officer, became President the following year, and joined the Akamai board of directors and became CEO in 2005. He held that post until he became Executive Vice Chairman and was succeeded as CEO in 2013 by Tom Leighton, the company’s Co-Founder and Chief Scientist.

Today, in addition to his role as Vice Chair of the Akamai board, he's Executive in Residence (XIR) at General Catalyst Partners, a Cambridge, Mass.-based venture capital firm that makes early stage and growth equity investments in rapidly growing companies.

From TV to Technology

But that's not all. Sagan is also a director of EMC, VMware, iRobot, Datto and L2, and he serves on the boards of two not-for-profit organizations, ProPublica and Northwestern University, his alma matter. He's a former board member of numerous organizations, including of Dow Jones & Company, Digitas, Maven Networks, OpenMarket, FutureTense, VDONet, Experience and Medialink Worldwide.

Sagan started his career in broadcast news. He held various positions, including news director, at WCBS in New York City before turning his attention to cable TV. He co-founded both NY1, Time Warner Cable's 24-hour news channel in New York City and Road Runner, the world's first broadband cable modem service.

In 2010, President Obama appointed him to the President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.

He's a bright, interesting, busy man who also happens to be a friend — and agreed to share some of his thoughts with CMSWire.

• Sobel: You and I became friends back in 1991, shortly after you left WCBS to join Time Warner Cable, where you helped launch NY1. Move the clock ahead: You joined Akamai in 1998 as COO, rose to CEO in 2005 and you’re now part of General Catalyst. Can you give a brief overview of your journey from TV news to venture capitalist?

• Sagan: I think of it as a career with three very different but connected chapters. One, journalist. Two, tech entrepreneur and executive. And now, investor and mentor to CEOs of large and small tech businesses. The common thread is that I always try to understand what the consumer – the customer – wants and then to work with the engineers at tech firms or the so-called “creative types” at media businesses to translate their big ideas into practical outcomes. When it works, it’s been an incredible experience. Like helping engineers figure out how to make always-on broadband Internet in the home a reality by creating Road Runner, or making the Internet scalable, fast and more secure at Akamai, or making the idea of great local news real on TV at NY1.

• Sobel: You were a senior advisor to the World Economic Forum from 1997 to 1998 and, more recently, appointed to the President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. Can you explain a bit about those two positions?

• Sagan: Near the end of my tenure at Time Warner I had an itch to do more on the Internet but also to find a way to give my family an international experience. I knew the founder of the Forum, [Klaus Martin Schwab (born 1938)], and he invited me and my family to move to Switzerland for a year to work closely with him and his team on some early projects they’d dubbed “Network Society.” Essentially, it was how pervasive connectivity from the Internet was going to change every business over the course of several decades. They had foresight, as that’s what’s come to pass. My relationship since has been as an executive at a member-company of the Forum, through Akamai. As for the White House appointment, that came about because Akamai is both very involved in developing Internet security products and integral to the fabric of sustaining the performance and reliability of the Internet. So the President asked me to join his advisory committee to make non-commercial recommendations about protecting our communications systems, including the ‘Net itself.

• Sobel: The XIR program at General Catalyst Partners is something very new and unique. Can you explain a bit about the program, how you got involved and some of your current projects or programs?

• Sagan: The easiest way to think about what General Catalyst calls an XIR – or others might think of as executive in residence – is to picture a group of former CEOs of large companies, generally ones with more than $500 million in annual revenue, working together to identify great emerging tech businesses that are just starting to hit their stride. What the CEOs of those firms need most is mentorship from someone who’s “seen the movie before.” And they also usually need some growth equity capital. We come with both. General Catalyst can provide the capital and an XIR can provide operational and strategic leadership and guidance by taking an active role. The XIR usually joins as chairman of the board of the business. That’s what I’ve done at Datto and L2. The XIR program includes some accomplished former chief executives. To name just two, for example, Scott Griffith, the former chairman and CEO of ZipCar, and Yuchun Lee, co-founder and former CEO of Unica.

• Sobel: You were once quoted as saying “My advice for other CEOs is to pick what you are passionate about and figure out how you can get involved." Can you elaborate?

• Sagan: There are so many demands on a CEO’s time and that’s a danger. Many CEOs lose track of what they should be doing and pay too much attention to what’s either right in front of them or what seems really interesting off to the side, but is only a distraction. If you’re running a tech firm, for example, what really matters – once you’ve got a great management team in place and you’re setting the right “tone at the top” about ethics and integrity – is that you focus on technology innovation in your firm and how that applies to what you have permission to sell to your clients. You have to be driving a fast pace of innovation. Now you can’t do it if you’re not passionate about that, which means you’re likely to do a sub-standard job. You’re either defocused or in the wrong position. In any business, some passion got you to the top, so my advice is to make sure you don’t lose focus on what’s really driving you, in the tech field or any business.

• Sobel: Jumping back to Akamai for a moment, I’m interested to hear your thoughts about this whole notion of a succession plan. How well did you know Akamai co-founder, the late Danny Lewin? What was it like when you found out he was aboard one of the 9/11 flights? Did this teach you anything about the potential succession plan at Akamai, especially when you decided to leave?

• Sagan: That’s a heavy topic for many reasons, starting with the fact that we lost not only a colleague but a friend when Danny Lewin was murdered on the first plane on 9/11. He was Tom Leighton’s student at MIT, and they were the first two co-founders of Akamai. I met them in 1998 when they were still in Tom’s lab, trying to figure out how to take their ideas and make a business, a business that became Akamai. We knew Danny was on the plane within no more than an hour of it hit hitting the first tower. We only learned later that he most likely was killed in mid-air while trying to stop the hijacking. He was a former anti-terrorist commando who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and outnumbered by the murderous thugs. There were so many great lessons from Danny’s life, especially around being a great leader. What I think I learned from his death is that you have to be prepared for almost anything. We ultimately faced down the long odds that confronted us when we lost the company’s heart and soul at the same time our business was cratering during the dot-com meltdown. We knew we had a real business with Danny’s great contributions of vision and technology. Plus we were a determined, and then a very angry lot, so we just didn’t listen when other folks told us we were down and out, and should pack it in. And the rest is history. Danny’s idea is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise touching the Internet in nearly every corner of Earth. As for leaving Akamai, it was just time. I never intended to be CEO of a public company, let alone one that got as big as Akamai. Someone once called me “the reluctant CEO” and I think that was an apt description. But I had a great mentor in George Conrades, the first CEO. When he retired, he helped inspire me to drive the company forward. After being a senior executive there for about 15 years, nearly all of that time helping to run Akamai as a public company with all of what that entails, I knew in my gut it was time for someone else to sit in the corner office and make decisions weighted to the long-term. Fortunately, we found we had a great in-house candidate in Tom. I believe great technology companies are best run by either gifted engineering visionaries or by low-ego managers who partner with exceptional technologists in the C-suite to make the big decisions. Tom’s an example of the former, and I hope at least a bit of the latter description can by applied to me.

• Sobel: You were involved in a $25 million investment in Datto, a data backup business in Norwalk, Conn. In a blog post, a Forbes described it as going from “scrappy” to a billion-dollar business. Can you explain a bit about how that deal came to be, how it's doing and whether it is typical of the kinds of investments you make?

• Sagan: Datto is an amazing company and similar to Akamai in at least one important way: the CEO and founder, Austin McChord, is a passionate and visionary engineer who’s focused almost exclusively on his clients’ needs. He’s essentially invented a new category: Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) or maybe Business Continuity-as-a-Service. Let’s call it RaaS. He’s done it by combining cloud computing and virtualization, two things that couldn’t have happened in this way a decade ago, and he’s made it available to a new class of customers, small- and medium-size businesses. When we met Austin he owned 100 percent of the company, had never taken outside investors, didn’t need capital, and had just turned down an offer of $100 million to sell Datto. What he was looking for were partners who knew how to scale a great idea into a great company. For me, that’s the great adventure in my new gig, and an honor to be part of it. In a role like this, I think I can draw on what I referred to earlier as the three chapters of my business life to help someone like Austin McChord write his own story of success. At least in business, it doesn’t get better than that. Of course, opportunities like that don’t come along every day, so we have look hard to find more.

• Sobel: Any final thoughts?

• Sagan: Because of hyper-connectivity, mobility and the pervasive nature of the Internet in our lives now, everything in business is on the table. It’s such an exciting time to be looking at new ideas with great entrepreneurs.