No Better Time  

Just finished Molly Knight Raskin’s incredible biography of Danny Levin. Levin was one of the founders of Akamai, which could justly be called the first real CDN provider, responsible for enhancing the reliability and responsiveness of properties such as CNN.com and Ticketmaster.com. Prior to Akamai, he served in the Israeli special forces, attended MIT as a graduate student, and worked at Bell Labs (specifically on consistent hashing, something Akamai later utilized heavily).

Levin was also a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which departed at 8:00 AM from Boston on September 11th, 2001 and was the first airliner hijacked during the 9/11 attacks. He was 31.

Akamai continues today, having survived the triple-pronged devastation of the dot-com bust, the 9/11 attacks, and the loss of their principle founder. An incredible story that I am so fortunate to have picked up on a whim from Powell’s in Portland. Highly, highly recommended.