Leighton ’78 lectures on determination at Keller Center Symposium

Anyone with the right determination and perseverance can start a successful company, Tom Leighton ’78 said at the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education Symposium, which was held to commemorate the Keller Center’s 10th anniversary.

Leighton, an MIT applied math professor turned CEO of Akamai said he never would have guessed he would start a company 20 years ago. Akamai, he said, is a leader in content delivery network services, or services that provide servers. He noted that he had always been afraid of real analysis and said that he considered himself a ‘closet mathematician.’

“Being on the mathematical side of computer science was about as low as you could be,”Leighton said.

He explained that his company was able to grow quickly and innovate effectively because he and his colleagues never gave up.

“Perseverance in the face of adversity is essential,” he said. “You can’t be afraid to make mistakes, but try to correct them as quickly as possible. You have to take risks. It’s fine to fail, or else you don’t get there.”

He noted that hardships abounded, especially from 2001 to 2002, as corporate customers and student staffers went bankrupt, the company downsized and co-founder Danny Lewin was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Wall Street left us for dead. We had been demoted to junk status,” Leighton said, “but there is a light at the end of the tunnel, even when you know [your team] is thinking that light’s a train that’s coming at you.”

He added that Akamai was able to reverse its fortunes, breaking even in 2004.

He also noted that he and his team could have sold Akamai after their first big breaks with ESPN’s website during March Madness in 1999 and Entertainment Tonight’s release of the first Star Wars trailer in 1999, and that Steve Jobs even called Akamai to buy them out on April Fool’s Day of the same year. However, they decided they did not want to sell, he said.

“If we were going to start a company, we wanted to make sure it was successful,”Leighton said. “The only way to get the technology out there was to start the company ourselves.”

Leighton explained that research for the company began in 1997 when Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, came to Leighton’s theoretical algorithms group at MIT and asked them to start working on possible solutions to web congestion. Leighton and his team received a grant from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and began work in earnest. Leighton and his team finally formed Akamai as a CDN by the summer of 1998.

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He noted that the company started out with only one pixel and one hit every few minutes, made manually by a team member on an obscure webpage of the Disney website. Akamai now serves 15 to 30 percent of web traffic today, uses more than 30 terabits per second and gets more than 40 million hits per second.

The current four great challenges he is facing include expanding the capacity of online video streaming, making the cellular ecosystem more instantaneous and capable, ensuring the security of the web and focusing on enterprise networks.

“I really try to fan the flames of innovation,” Leighton said. “As you get bigger, you do slow down some, you do have a bureaucracy, and the real innovators start wanting a smaller company again.”

He noted that creativity does need some infrastructure, but that policies should not be too rigid.

“You have to put a lot of things in place to make that happen,” Leighton said. “Rules are great, but sometimes it’s good to have a flexible policy.”

Noting that the Internet did not exist 30 years ago and Google did not exist 20 years ago, Leighton said that we do not realize the impact of recent and current innovations. He said that students, innovators and entrepreneurs should expect to work hard, take risks and always operate with a sense of urgency.

“Be tenacious as hell,” he said. “You can start a successful company. If we can do it, you can do it.”