Among the major companies availing us the advantage of cloud service and networking, content delivery network (CDN) is rare. Many of us don’t know what does CDN actually means. In simple words, it is a content distribution system which distributes proxy serves geographically. The main aim of CDN is to provide an efficient and better quality network to the end-user. So, one of the most embarking breakthroughs in this domain was successfully achieved by Akamai Technologies.
Akamai Technologies is an American based technology conglomerate founded in 1998. The main product of the company is CDN. Currently, Akamai is in the top position for its content delivery network. The other services of Akamai are cloud service and cybersecurity.
The four co-founders of Akamai Technologies are Frank Thomson Leighton, Daniel Lewin, Randall Kaplan, and Jonathan Seelig.
About the Founders
Frank Thomson Leighton
Frank Thomson Leighton is an Electrical Engineer who acquired a B.S.E degree in 1978 from Princeton University. After his undergraduate program, Leighton went to MIT and completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics. Leighton was very much interested in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. This passion drove him to co-establish a software company.
Apart from co-founding Akamai Technologies, Leighton served as a professor at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT). He has bagged many awards and served as an advisor for industrial and academic organizations as well.
Daniel Lewin
Born in Denver, Lewin moved to Israel at the age of fourteen. In his early career, Lewin was highly dedicated to serving his country. Lewin served in the Israel Defense Forces for four years and served as a captain in one of the Special Forces.
Lewin started rising as a tech pro after beginning his work at IBM’s research laboratory. He developed a system that is still used as a verification tool in many companies. Lewin completed Bachelor’s and went to Cambridge for PhD at MIT. He faced a tragic death in 2001 in an airplane highjack.
Randall Kaplan
Kaplan went to the University of Michigan and later moved to Chicago to study law. He was inclined towards being an entrepreneur from an early age. Prior to co-founding Akamai, he served as the Assistant Chairman of SunAmerica.
After leaving Akamai, he started his own venture capital firm, JUMP Investors. Kaplan is also a well-known philanthropist.
Jonathan Seelig
After completing his B.Sc. from Stanford University in Physics, Seelig went to MIT Sloan School of Management. Seelig dropped out after a year and co-founded Akamai. He served as a Board Member of innumerable companies including Dotomi, Provident, oDesk, SundaySky, etc.
Seelig co-founded Ridge, an Israel based start-up in October 2018.
Challenge Accepted!
The beginning of Akamai Technologies has a very interesting story to narrate. Leighton didn’t plan to start a company until he accepted a challenge by one of his MIT colleagues.
Right after the era of the Internet started revolutionizing the world, web congestion stood in its way. This hindered the swift delivery of web content to the users. Tim Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, thus challenged everyone to find a solution to it.
After brainstorming, kudos to Leighton that he came up with a solution. Lewin started working under Leighton and they made significant progress. Leighton’s knowledge in Applied Mathematics led to developing some algorithm that solved the problem of congestion and came up with something excellent. This led to the founding of Akamai.
Setting up the business
To set up the business they needed capital and thus enrolled in the $50,000 Entrepreneurship Competition. The judges saw the immense potential in CDN and thus they received both capital and access to some of MIT’s intellectual properties. Akamai’s business started running in 1998. The commercial services of Akamai started in 1999 and it was listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market.
Success
In the same year, Akamai and Apple came into a partnership for building Apple’s new Media Network. This was followed by a strategic partnership between Akamai and Microsoft in the same year.
The success of Akamai surely surprised all its competitors. The idea and the efficiency of CDN were very unique to the company. By 2005, the company’s annual revenue summed up to $1.37 billion. Some of the biggest customers of Akamai are Al-Jazeera, Adobe, Sony, ESPN, Airbnb, etc.
The headquarters of Akamai is based on Cambridge, US. The company currently has over 7,000 employees and made more than thirty big acquisitions.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more