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MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: I just wanted
to start out by thanking Google here
in New York for inviting me here to speak today
about my book, which was just published
a couple weeks ago by Da Capo Press.
It's called "No Better Time-- The Brief,
Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius
Who Transformed the Internet."
First, just a little background about me.
I am a journalist.
I've worked in the field since my first job
as a local radio reporter in college.
Actually, even earlier than that,
since my first job as a newspaper
reporter in elementary school.
And over the past 15 years, I've had the good fortune
to work in print, television, and documentary film,
and often, when possible, travel the world
in search of a good story.
And I got my real start here in New York, actually.
I moved here right after college.
Like a lot of idealistic, young college graduates,
I packed up a U-Haul with some friends
and moved here into a tiny, cramped apartment.
And I was thinking about it last night.
It's almost funny to stand here today and think
how I applied for jobs back then.
To date myself a little bit, I applied
with paper cover letters, which I hand-delivered
to offices all over New York.
And I followed up with phone calls from landlines.
And that's really when I set out on my career path
here in the city.
And at the time, I guess, I could
say the internet was in its-- I look at it
as its teenage years, still finding its identity and place
in the world.
And we were all trying to figure it out
as users and businesses and academics and thinkers.
And I'm often asked how I decided
to write a book about a mathematician and computer
scientist, particularly by those who know me well.
I didn't have any math or science training.
I somehow, as an English major, managed
to avoid any math and science subjects all through college.
And I didn't pass calculus.
But the answer is really simple.
The reason I wrote this book is because it
was a story that was so inspiring to me,
so exciting and so captivating that I couldn't go of it.
And that's what I'm here to talk to you about today.
It's the story of Danny Lewin.
And of course, given the audience here at Google,
talk a little bit also about the innovation and the science
underlying the technology that Danny helped create.
The story of "No Better Time--" the subtitle of my book
is "The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who
Transformed the Internet."
And I realize that at a place like Google,
that's probably a bold claim to make.
You probably have a lot of people who you know,
or many of you may be geniuses yourself,
and you're working to transform the internet.
But I hope the book makes a case for--
and I'd like to make a case today for-- Danny Lewin's
genius, the genius of his company, the people who
surrounded him, and the great things they did with Akamai
Technologies, and how it was born.
I'm just going to read you a little bit from the preface
of the book to give you an idea of the incredible span
of Danny's short life.
"No Better Time" is the story of Danny Mark Lewin, who
was almost certainly the first victim of the 9/11 attacks.
It's the story of an extraordinarily gifted
young man who believed that anything was possible
and let nothing stand in his way.
Of an all-American kid who moved to Israel against his will,
ended up falling hopelessly in love with the country,
and served as an officer in the most elite unit
of the Israeli army.
Of a young soldier who was trained to hunt and kill
terrorists and who, in a tragic twist of irony,
later died at their hands.
Of a loud, irreverent young computer science student
who formed a beautiful friendship
with a soft-spoken, reserved professor.
Of a husband and father who spent
years struggling to make ends meet and became a billionaire
almost overnight.
Of a theoretical mathematician who wrote a set of algorithms
that would change the internet forever.
Until now, it's a story that has remained largely untold.
When Danny Lewin was alive, business journalists
categorized him and his company, Akamai,
as breakout stars of the dot-com boom.
After his death on 9/11, the mainstream media
eulogized him as one of the 2,975 victims of the attacks,
but never fully investigated his actions
on American Airlines Flight 11.
His family and friends have remained largely silent.
They are certain that Lewin courageously
tried to stop the terrorists, and that he was likely
the first victim of the attacks.
But they have been reluctant to share publicly
why they believe this to be fact.
Some stories, I have learned, simply
can't be told without the passage of time.
You can dig at them, push them, and pound the pavement
in search of ways to bring them to life,
but you cannot be true to them until their keepers are ready
to share a part of their lives long shrouded in privacy.
It's not until that point that they will reach willingly
into the wells of their memory, perhaps
even back to those moments hardest to relive,
and begin to tell the story.
So Danny Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1970.
And in many ways, he had an all-American childhood.
He was the eldest of three boys.
His parents were both doctors, and they
lived in a very nice suburb of Denver
called Englewood, Colorado.
He and his brothers were athletic and smart.
And they just enjoyed a very nice childhood there
near the mountains.
They skied and played all sorts of sports, loved the outdoors.
But his childhood was different for a few reasons.
And I think many of them help explain the success he later
achieved as an academic and entrepreneur, computer
scientist and mathematician.
First, there was the fact that Danny's parents believed
strongly in nurturing their children intellectually.
And they taught them all subjects around the kitchen
table while other children their age
were probably watching cartoons or playing outside.
One of the stories Danny's brothers, who still live
in Israel today and work in business and high tech,
love to tell is the time they were sitting
around the breakfast table, and their father promptly
removed the cereal box that they were all
enjoying reading the cartoons on the back.
And he returned a few minutes later with the cereal box.
And on it, pasted over the cartoons,
was an article from "Scientific American" magazine.
And that led to sort of a family tradition of these almost
intellectual jousting matches over the table
and around the table where they would
speak about subjects in math and science.
And truly, it excited them all.
Another interesting fact is that Danny's father brought home
a home computer very early on, when
Danny was just a young boy, and his brothers.
And it was a make-at-home computer.
It was an Altair.
And it was a build-it-yourself kit.
And that was followed by an Apple II
when Danny was only about nine years old.
And from neighbors of theirs, I've
learned that they were the first family on the block
to have a home computer, and that Danny and his brothers
taught themselves to program it.
And by about age 10, Danny was going around the neighborhood
helping anybody and everybody who
got a home computer to program it and teach them
how to use it.
Then at age 14, Danny's life took a pretty unexpected turn,
and an unwanted one for him.
He grew up in a family of practicing Jews.
His father became increasingly enamored with Zionist ideology,
and in 1984, a little bit before then, decided
to uproot the family and move to Israel.
And this was not a popular decision
with three children in their early teenage years.
They didn't speak Hebrew.
They didn't have any friends and family in Israel.
And they were happy in Colorado.
So they protested.
And of all of them, Danny, as the eldest
and perhaps most vocal in the family,
went to Israel kicking and screaming.
He was very unhappy.
And at first, it was very difficult for Danny
to find his way in a new country.
Israel in 1984 was a difficult place to live.
The economy was in a bad place.
There was, obviously, and still is,
the daily threat of terrorism.
And all these things were very new to a family
from Denver, Colorado.
But they moved there.
And Danny was just too innately bright and grounded--
and, many of his friends say, wise beyond his years--
to rebel in the typical teenage way, which
we don't need to elaborate on here.
But if any of us were rebellious teenagers,
we know some of those ways.
Instead of going out late at night
and doing things he shouldn't be doing,
Danny kind of rebelled in his own way.
He didn't spend a lot of time at home,
and he didn't speak to his parents a lot.
But he was very productive with his time.
And as a young teen, he spent a lot of time
at the local gymnasium, which was
filled with tough Israeli guys, building his physical strength
into what his friends called this almost
Biblical-like proportions.
By age 16, he was a spectacle at this gym in Jerusalem,
where he was bench pressing and weightlifting
more than guys two times his age.
And he also managed to sail through school.
He went to science and technology high school
in Jerusalem.
And despite what some say was not the most stellar attendance
record, he sailed through.
He found school very easy.
And he taught himself a lot.
He loved to read, and loved to go to the library,
and loved computers.
And his best friend, Marco Greenberg,
who works and lives here now in New York,
said he remembers that it occurred to him just how
smart Danny probably was when he mentioned that if Danny wanted
to go to college in the United States,
he would have to take the SATs or the PSATs.
And Danny looked at him and just said, I already took them.
And Marco was somewhat taken aback, and said, really?
Well, how did you do?
And the answer, which he said without any fanfare,
and very modestly, was, well, perfectly,
almost perfectly on both the English and the math.
And that just wasn't a big deal to him.
That was the way he operated.
At age 18, like native Israelis, there's
compulsive military service.
And Danny, as I mentioned in the preface,
joined the Israeli defense forces.
And much to the surprise of anybody
who knew this bubbly, cheerful, sometimes-all-American teenager
who was still speaking in broken Hebrew,
there was a lot of surprise when he
was admitted to a unit called Sayeret Matkal, which
is the most elite counterterrorism
unit of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Up until the 1980s, this was a unit that was hand-selected.
And Danny set this goal early on of being
admitted into this unit.
And he achieved it.
And not only did he achieve it, but he rose very quickly
to the rank of officer in that unit.
From there, Danny went on to the Technion
in Israel, which I'm sure many of you
know is often called the MIT of Israel,
the best and brightest minds in science and engineering,
and a really wonderful place, where everybody says Danny
really for the first time found his intellectual haven.
He was an incredible student there.
People today still marvel at what
he was able to accomplish there in just three years.
I spent some time in Haifa researching the book.
And one of Danny's professors, who's still there today,
said he'll never forget this bright-eyed, excited student
crashing into his office one day,
telling him how excited he was about knot theory,
and how, even though it wasn't really
a part of his curriculum, he would absolutely
love the opportunity to work with this professor on a paper
he was doing on robots and knots.
And that led to the first of many intellectual courtships
and partnerships that Danny had in his short life.
He really became interested at the Technion
in the hardest problems.
He was someone who really always wanted
to take the most challenging problems,
the problems everybody said you can't possibly solve.
Oh, everybody's working to solve that.
And he went straight for them with almost
a guided-missile-like precision.
And what he was interested in was using the highest level
of math to solve the problems.
At the Technion, Danny juggled two
of the most difficult degrees, computer science
and engineering, which very few students did,
and very few still do today.
He also juggled a wife and two young children
and a full-time job at IBM Research Labs
in Haifa, where he quickly stood out
among the crowd for his research in verification processes.
And two years into his time at the Technion,
he won Best Student Paper award.
And by 1996, he was bound for MIT, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
The wonderful part of Danny's story-- and there
are many-- for me was the reason that he decided to attend MIT.
He was accepted, after all, to the top 10 graduate programs
in computer science in the country, in the world.
And turns out that there was one book
that he found in the library that spoke to him.
And it spoke to him so beautifully
that he decided that MIT was the place he simply had to go.
The author of the book, who was a professor
at MIT's Lab for Computer Science, the legendary lab
where the internet was, in part, born,
was a professor named Tom Leighton, who
had been at both Princeton and MIT
and was already a world-renowned expert at a very young age
on algorithms and distributed systems
and using theoretical math to find ways to route information
through these distributed systems.
Danny pulled this book out of a shelf in the library.
He looked at it.
And he said to himself and to his family,
this is the man that I want to work with.
And this was a time before algorithms were considered
sexy or interesting in any way.
It was still a term that scared people in some ways
when applied to math or computer science.
But Danny saw in Tom's work something truly spectacular.
And more specifically, it was that he spoke the same language
as Tom, this rarefied abstract language
of theoretical computer science.
Tom Leighton and his colleagues at MIT
had been working for some time by the time Danny arrived there
at MIT on a way to end what they had called the World Wide Wait.
I probably don't have to tell any of you here about this.
But as a reminder-- and it's very hard to imagine now,
at a time when we can type anything in and have instant
gratification-- there was this interminable wait, often,
when you logged on the internet in the mid-'90s.
And we can all remember that chirping, beeping,
and straining of the modem as it connected,
and then the very frustrating, sometimes infuriating message
you would receive that was, please try again later.
The server is busy.
And at the time, this was obviously a huge impediment
to the growth of the internet, particularly
in the business community.
So at MIT, in the Lab for Computer Science,
Tom Leighton's group was working on using theoretical math
to solve this problem.
And Tom will say today that nobody was really
looking at their group for real answers.
They appreciated the work they were doing,
but it was looked at as kind of ivory tower
and too abstract and too high-minded
to have any real practical application.
And at the time, the way people were,
as you know, trying to solve this problem of the World Wide
Wait and problem of congestion on the internet
was to build out their hardware, build these huge server
farms, experiment with caching and mirroring technology.
And all of these worked, but they
didn't work in a way that would survive
a huge crush of traffic.
And by the mid-'90s, we were obviously learning this when
huge events would take place, and everybody would try and log
on, and major websites would crash.
So Danny joined up at MIT and, eager to impress Professor
Leighton, started working on an idea for his master's thesis.
At the time, he didn't think it was a great idea.
He was, like a lot of graduate students at such
a prestigious academic institution,
slightly insecure about his research.
Initially, he didn't get great feedback on it.
But he came up with this concept called consistent hashing,
which, as you may know, is a method of accessing data
by assigning it a set of unique numbers.
Hashing schemes work very well when the number of servers
is known and fixed.
But on the internet, when the number of servers is in flux,
it can be relatively useless.
So with this in mind, Danny set out
to develop a new set of algorithms
that would claim something that no other caching
strategy could, which was fault tolerance.
He thought the idea was OK.
But he did deep-down believe that it
could have some practical application,
despite the early feedback he received.
Fortunately for him, Tom Leighton agreed.
They spoke this same beautiful, rarefied language
of theoretical math that I spoke about earlier.
And when Danny took his thesis to Tom for Tom to look at,
Tom had a bit of an aha moment where,
as he explained it to me, he looked at the papers.
And he saw immediately something that he
called a gem of an algorithm, something that he believed
actually had practical application.
And told Danny, this needs a name.
We need to do something with this.
And that's how Akamai Technologies,
the Cambridge-based company that Tom and Danny co-founded
with two others, was born.
By 1997, they had formed the start of a company that
promised to end the World Wide Wait,
an audacious claim in the mid-to-late-'90s.
And Akamai, as you may know, exploded.
Despite the early naysayers, and there were many-- businessmen
who called algorithms logarithms and looked at Danny completely
perplexed when he would get up and do his work on a whiteboard
and lay out all of his theoretical math.
And they would sit there scratching their heads and say,
this sounds really interesting.
But maybe you should go back to your ivory tower
and just keep this to your academic community,
because we've got our own solution.
But Danny was unrelenting.
And he built a group of people around him
at Akamai in the early days who were also unrelenting
and believed in the power of the business
that they were proposing, which was
to program these servers with intelligent software that
would effectively route traffic around the internet in a way
that nobody had really done before.
It was a magic layer on the internet,
or what they called back then, as a marketing
term, the FedEx of the Internet.
That by using Akamai's technology, these companies
that were experiencing crushes of traffic
could seamlessly, effectively, and quickly
transmit information to users, despite traffic jams.
They could circumvent the traffic.
By 1999, the company had exploded.
Fortunately, because of a couple of early evangelists of Danny's
message, he won over a couple of key people in the early days.
The stories are in the book, but some of them
are pretty incredible.
I think by-- it was 1998, Steve Jobs was calling and saying,
I want to buy the company.
Danny was still probably in his MIT dorm at this point,
or maybe had just moved out.
And by 1999, just nine months after the company was founded,
Danny, Tom, and their co-founders and investors
took the company public in October of 1999.
And the company became stuff of the dot-com boom legend.
It was the breakout star.
It was the fourth most successful or largest IPO
of the dot-com boom.
And because of this, Danny and Tom and their colleagues
became overnight billionaires and millionaires.
There were, of course, others in the game
with caching and mirroring technologies.
There were competitors to Akamai and still are.
But the magic in Akamai's solution,
which effectively created this magic layer
on top of the internet, circumventing the traffic,
could be found in Danny and Tom's algorithms,
or what they called the secret sauce, and they still do today.
I've been talking a lot about my book
recently to various audiences.
And I typically don't linger too much on the word "algorithm."
It still sort of scares people.
And within these walls, you may find that surprising.
But if you ask 10 people on the street, what is an algorithm,
you're likely to get some rather bewildered looks
and some puzzling answers.
And I have to say, I was the same
before I started working on this book.
And here I am today at Google, where algorithms are king.
And of course, just last night, the very exciting news
of a new search algorithm, one that
promises to be even more precise and faster than the one
that we use today.
And so I had to think last night,
when I heard that news, that no doubt it would be something
that Danny would be absolutely thrilled by.
Donald Knuth, who is often called the father of computer
science, once said, "An algorithm
must be seen to be believed."
And I love that quote.
And I think it's one of the extraordinary things
about Danny Lewin's story.
It's that, at first, the power and the beauty
of these algorithms were not obvious to people.
Professors rejected them.
People in the academic community rejected them.
One of Danny's papers came back with a stamp
on it saying something like, this is very interesting,
but it has no practical application.
But those who could really see them and understand them
and appreciate what Danny and Tom and others were trying
to do knew that what they had on paper,
and then in a prototype at MIT, had the potential
to change the way the internet worked.
Danny's story is spectacular in many ways for all the reasons
I've talked about up until this point.
But by this time, when Akamai had taken off,
Danny was still in his late 20s, the time
before most people have achieved most of their dreams,
or any of their dreams.
And unfortunately, Danny's story has a very sad ending,
his personal story.
On 9/11, he got on a flight from Logan Airport
bound for Los Angeles.
It was a tough time for Akamai, as you know.
By 2001, the bubble had burst.
And Akamai and Danny and Tom and all of the others
who they worked with were struggling
to keep the company afloat in a time of a lot of change.
And they were really struggling.
And that morning, Danny got on this flight
bound for Los Angeles.
He had made that flight so many times that year
that he knew the flight attendants by name.
He had his seat.
He was on his phone making phone calls,
working up until the minute the flight took off.
And we don't know exactly what happened
on that flight that day.
But we do know that 14 minutes into the flight, a hijacking
began on board.
And it began in business class, where
Danny was seated in his Gap jeans and T-shirt,
looking nothing like an entrepreneur or billionaire.
And we know from the very courageous and harrowing
recordings that the flight attendants
transmitted to ground control that there
was a struggle in business class,
and that the passenger in Danny's seat,
which was 9B in business class, had been engaged
in a skirmish with one of the terrorists
and had been stabbed in the neck from behind.
Again, we don't know exactly what happened on that flight.
But if Danny was killed instantly, which is likely,
he would be the first victim of the September 11 attacks.
And if, as the evidence, I think,
strongly suggests, and also the anecdotal evidence,
which I gathered from more than 120 interviews with his friends
and family, all of whom said, without question,
that the moment they knew the flight had been hijacked,
that Danny had fought back.
Danny was only 31.
He left behind a wife and two children.
And in a very tragic twist of irony,
that day proved so much of what Danny
predicted for the internet to be true.
It was the web equivalent of the 100-year flood.
News organizations, federal agencies,
airlines were all struggling to keep their websites
live in a complete crush of traffic.
Many people, myself included, sitting at home,
trying desperately to find out information about friends
and loved ones and exactly what was going on.
And phone lines were down.
And it was chaos.
And at that time, unbeknownst to anybody
that Danny was on that flight, a lot
of these news organizations and federal agencies
were picking up the phone to call Akamai and ask for help.
And the company, which was already
struggling, as I mentioned, with the weight
of the dot-com crash, that day lost the heart and soul
of their company and still managed to press forward.
They say today that they did so in Danny's name
and in his spirit, and that he would have never, ever let them
be discouraged, consumed by grief, or given up.
So that day, Akamai Technologies helped
major websites stay live.
CNN, which went down for a little bit of time
that morning, was back up and running
that day and in the following days,
and managing unprecedented traffic seamlessly because
of Akamai's help.
And that's just one example.
And I think that it's really an honor to be here today
at Google to speak about Danny and his legacy.
Akamai Technologies, as most of you know,
is still very much alive today.
At any given moment, the company controls almost 30%
of the world's internet traffic.
It had offices around the world, thousands of employees,
and is a multi-billion dollar company today,
something Danny would have loved to have seen.
But the honor is really that the beauty and the inspiration
and the excitement in the story of Danny
and what he and his co-workers achieved at Akamai
is one that bears so many similarities to what happened,
for example, in Menlo Park in a garage 15 years ago
and what, as we sit here today, is happening in dorm rooms,
laboratories, college campuses across the country.
And it's really not just the spirit of innovation,
but also the belief that we can achieve something so much
greater than ourselves and achieve something that
has a lasting impact beyond our time.
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
It's no doubt that if Danny were alive today,
you would know his name.
He would be a household name.
And more people would know his incredible story.
But we don't have to see the algorithms clearly
to believe that we can achieve.
It does seem somewhat like magic, especially
to those of us with no computer science or math to their name.
But we see the fruits and benefits of it every day
when we log on to the internet.
And the power of these algorithms
allow us to do so many extraordinary things.
So again, it's an honor to be here today.
And if you have any questions for me about the book,
please ask.
And copies are available.
If you like what you read, and you're excited about it,
please spread the word on social networking, whatever you use.
And if anything today, I think this is a wonderful place
to be and to take inspiration from Danny's story.
He toiled away at a cubicle, and in a dorm room,
and in a laboratory, and in an academic setting,
for enough time to have gotten discouraged
and to have gotten down, and to have
moved on to something else.
But he believed.
And it's an incredible thing, an extraordinary story,
and I hope that you enjoy it.
Thank you so much for having me today.
[APPLAUSE]
MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: Does anybody have any questions?
AUDIENCE: I actually had a question
about-- I mean, as best as you can tell,
was his intent when he went to graduate school
at MIT to become an academic, and then he sort of evolved
into this entrepreneur because of his relationship
with his professor?
Or was that a driver all along with him?
MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: That's such a great question.
It was never a driver.
His big dream was to become a professor like Tom Leighton,
to get his PhD at MIT, and to become
a professor of computer science and math.
And he dreamed of going back to the Technion in Israel.
In fact, his professor there really believed
that he would come back some day.
And I think he probably would have.
And another wonderful part of this story
is that, as I mentioned, Danny and others
who were studying at MIT at the time
became very rich off of Akamai's success.
And I set out as a journalist sort of thinking,
oh, come on, really, that much money?
It must have changed him.
It must have.
And the skeptic in me really wanted
to find out what that meant for him, because, again,
his dream was absolutely and squarely to be an academic.
And he came to Boston, Cambridge,
with really no other plan other than to stand out
in the world of theoretical math and computer science.
And Akamai was, in some ways, an accident,
in the sense of the business success.
I mean, if it hadn't happened at that precise moment,
and these beautiful ideas hadn't been given life to
by this person with such incredible drive,
the story would have been very different.
So really, to wrap up my answer to your question,
I think this really speaks for itself.
So Danny became very rich very quickly.
He had, obviously, very little time
to enjoy it, which is very sad.
But he didn't want to, really.
He went out and bought a couple toys--
some motorcycles, a new house.
And then he just really went back to work.
And when I asked his colleagues, what did he want to do?
What was he going to do with all that wealth?
Tom Leighton, who was still teaching at MIT
at the time, and his wife, who was also
a very successful professor at MIT and world-renowned,
said, he wanted to go back to MIT.
And before his death, he enrolled to get his PhD.
And that was his goal, and that's what he really wanted.
And when somebody said to him, well,
a PhD will be easy for you.
Now you can just go back, write up Akamai's secret sauce,
and you'll be handed your PhD on a silver platter.
So, you know, no problem.
And he looked at them-- this was actually Tom Leighton's wife--
and said, no way.
I have to find something so much better.
I have to do something totally different.
I have to change the world again.
And that was really his goal.
And according to everybody, he was a wonderful teacher.
And his work at the whiteboard is
what won over so many skeptical businessmen
and corporate entrepreneurs at the time
when Akamai was first taking off.
Any other questions?
Well, thank you again.
It's an honor again to be here at Google New York
to speak to you, and I hope you enjoy the book.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]