Few, if any, know the IT and artificial intelligence space as well as Dr. Tom Leighton, the CEO & co-founder of Akamai Technologies. Dr. Leighton also happens to be this year’s ORBIE Awards keynote speaker.
Dr. Leighton co-founded Akamai Technologies in 1998 and served as the company’s chief scientist until he became CEO in 2013. Under his leadership, Akamai has evolved from its origins as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) into one of the most essential and trusted cloud delivery and cybersecurity platforms, upon which many of the world’s leading brands and enterprises build and secure their digital experiences.
As one of the world’s preeminent authorities on algorithms for network applications and cybersecurity, Dr. Leighton discovered a solution to freeing up web congestion using applied mathematics and distributed computing. Akamai used this technology to create the world’s largest distributed computing platform, which today delivers and secures tens of millions of requests per second to billions of users around the world.
“Akamai’s mission is to make the Internet fast, intelligent, and secure,” said Dr. Leighton. “We enable and protect business online for the world’s leading enterprises, helping them to deliver fast, intelligent and secure online experiences. We do this though our intelligent edge platform that spans the world in more than 4,000 locations and through our cybersecurity portfolio that generated $1 billion in revenue last year and grew 25% over the year before.”
During Dr. Leighton’s time as CEO, Akamai’s revenue has more than doubled, growing from less than $1.4 billion in 2012 to $3.2 billion in 2020, while earnings per share has more than tripled. Over the same period, annual revenue from Akamai’s security business grew from less than $25 million to more than $1 billion, growing 25% year-over-year in 2020.
“I am so immensely proud of and grateful for the hard work of all the Akamai employees who have worked alongside me for the past two decades to fulfill a vision,” added Dr. Leighton. “It all started in the 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee, who was down the hall from me at MIT, predicted Internet congestion would be a problem – ultimately, they called it the ‘World Wide Wait’ – and he challenged some of us at MIT to solve the problem. From the beginning, we have always believed that the best way to deliver content and protect assets on the Internet is through a distributed edge platform or edge network, close to where the end users are. Thanks to the hard work of so many talented people over 23 years, that vision has grown into the Akamai we know today.”
“Akamai was founded with the vision of enabling the Internet to scale so that it could support millions of enterprises and billions of people everywhere,” Dr. Leighton continued. “We’ve scaled successfully thanks to our talented employees and the skilled work they do on behalf of our customers and the billions of Internet users around the world. Through ups and downs – from the dot com crash and 9/11 of 20 years ago, through the financial crisis of 2008, and now this worldwide pandemic – Akamai employees have continued their can-do attitude and customer-first mindset, enabling our platform to manage more traffic, more web transactions, and more cyberattacks than ever before. Their creativity, teamwork and tenacity are key to what makes Akamai such a unique and strong growth company.”
Dr. Leighton holds more than 50 patents involving content delivery, Internet protocols, algorithms for networks, cryptography and digital rights management. He and Akamai’s co-founder Danny Lewin were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2017 for having invented the methods needed to intelligently replicate and deliver content over a large network of distributed servers.
“To be honored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame is a recognition I accept on behalf of all the people who have contributed to Akamai, and all the people who inspired and taught me,” explained Dr. Leighton. “We knew we were on to something on one day in March 1999, when other platforms crashed while they tried to deliver the NCAA’s March Madness for ESPN and a new trailer that was streamed online for the Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform successfully handled an unprecedented volume of hits that day for ESPN and for Entertainment Tonight, the only site that showed the trailer that evening that didn’t crash.”
In 2018, the Marconi Society selected Dr. Leighton to receive the Marconi Prize for “his fundamental contributions to technology and the establishment of content delivery networks.” He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Leighton has served on numerous government, industry and academic advisory panels. He was one of 18 CEOs invited to the White House in 2017 for the launch of the American Technology Council to develop solutions to modernize and secure the U.S. government’s IT systems. From 2003 to 2005, he served on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and chaired its Subcommittee on Cybersecurity. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Leighton has also been personally committed to increasing the pipeline of students pursuing STEM careers for over thirty years, first as a mathematics professor at MIT and now through his leadership at Akamai. He is a strong supporter of the Akamai Foundation, which promotes mathematics education, and he oversaw the creation of the Akamai Technical Academy, an innovative program developed in-house, aimed at training diverse non-technical professionals for technical careers. He also supports numerous charitable organizations dedicated to improving STEM education and opportunities for K-12 students, including The Center for Excellence in Education, the Society for Science and the Public (sponsor of the Intel Science Search), The Mathematical Association of America (sponsor of the Math Olympiad), the Math Competition for Girls, and Girls Who Code.
Dr. Leighton graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1978 with a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT in 1981.
“Research has shown that students who are exposed earlier to hands-on STEM learning opportunities, in culturally relevant ways, show increased interest in STEM,” commented Dr. Leighton. “For this reason, the Akamai Foundation supports learning experiences for students like the ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) and Girls Who Code, and STEM education in general, with a focus on the pursuit of excellence in mathematics in grades K-12. Our foundation also makes grants to local and nongovernment organizations around the world to help them develop STEM-related skills in populations that are underrepresented in today’s technology workforce.”
Touching on ways to improve equity in the STEM field, Dr. Leighton shared his belief that improvement will come when more employers make a concerted effort to train and recruit people from populations that are underrepresented in STEM professions.
“We started the Akamai Technical Academy to train people without STEM backgrounds for technical roles at our company. The program has proven to be successful in launching careers in tech, particularly for women and for people of color, and the outcome and results have been beneficial to our company and our workforce. Harvard Business School recently published a case study about it, touting the model and its achievements.”
