On Apr. 7, Conrades signed up for a different kind of speed thrill, joining Internet startup Akamai Technologies as its CEO. It's another way to leave the road rules in the dust for the 60-year-old Conrades, who held senior positions in marketing and sales at IBM and has been considered a candidate to replace CEO Lewis E. Platt at Hewlett-Packard Co. Conrades says with a laugh that he's two years older than HP's mandatory retirement age of 58. "But I'm the perfect age for a startup," he says.

Not all big-company types can make the transition to Net entrepreneur, of course. And Conrades will need all the velocity he can muster as he tries to use his influence as a rainmaker to win corporate customers for Akamai and rapidly expand the company. But Conrades' informal management style and his experience running BBN's Internet hosting business should help him fit in at Akamai -- along with the motorcycle he'll be riding to work.

The goal: To defuse "flashcrowds," those sudden bottlenecks that can slow anyone's network to a crawl

Founded three years ago by mathematicians at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Akamai's 50 employees are building an Internet content distribution service that uses sophisticated algorithms to make high-volume Web sites run faster. The goal is to push content as quickly as possible to end users, by distributing a Web site's content on Akamai servers located in 10 U.S. cities, each one hooked into multiple networks that collectively make up the Internet. Akamai's "special sauce," as Conrades calls it, is the capacity of its algorithms to spot potential congestion problems and quickly shift Web content in high demand to the networks and servers that can deliver it fastest.

That could defuse one of the biggest headaches of the Web -- the phenomenon known as "flashcrowds." Think of the waiting time to download the Starr Report when it was posted by the U.S. Congress last year, or the 100 million curious lingerie enthusiasts who converged on VictoriasSecret.com when it ran a sizzling ad during the Super Bowl in January. Network congestion remains the most unpredictable factor in reducing the World Wide Wait. "A busy commercial Web site can have all the servers it needs and make sure they are up all the time, but that's no guarantee that their content will get across the network at a reasonable speed," says Conrades.

MIT PRIZE-WINNERS. MIT mathematician Tom Leighton recognized that the problem of load balancing on the Internet had its roots in applied mathematics. When Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, suggested it might make a challenging class assignment, Leighton harnessed a group of MIT math majors to tackle the theory of expanding networks. That group founded Akamai in 1996, winning MIT's annual $50,000 competition for student entrepreneurs the following year. Leighton joined the team, and last fall Akamai raised $8.4 million from venture investors, including Battery Ventures and Polaris Ventures, where Conrades is a partner.

Akamai's strong scientific pedigree attracted Conrades, who "learned to appreciate great science" from spending most of his career at two companies renowned for their capacity to invent new technology -- IBM and BBN. "Quite frankly, at IBM the products were sometimes good and sometimes bad," he says. "But the technology was great, as demonstrated by IBM's portfolio of patents."

Conrades led the IBM team that created a services outsourcing business by redeploying IBM's far-flung field engineers to compete against Electronic Data Systems and others. "I liked the idea of 10-year contracts with customers where we would be responsible for handling the changeover to new technology and when it occurred," he says. That business grew into IBM's Global Services organization, a $23.4 billion business in 1998 that is central to Louis V. Gerstner Jr.'s strategy for making IBM a solutions company.

Some IBM-watchers tagged Conrades for a job at the top of IBM. But the Youngstown (Ohio) native grew tired of waiting, and when BBN offered him the CEO's job in 1994, he left. BBN was badly in need of a shakeup. Its early research scientists had built the first network routers and linked them together in complex arrays to form the first Internet, under a contract for the Defense Dept. But the company remained heavily dependent on government contracts for its specialized technology and seemed hopeless at marketing such eye-popping inventions as voice-recognition systems and superfast network gear.

At Akamai, the "wizards behind the science" have a customer focus that surprises -- and delights -- Conrades

One of Conrades' first moves at BBN was to sell its Lightstream division, which had developed a powerful network switch, for $120 million to Cisco Systems Inc. in 1994. "I didn't think we had the mindset as a company, nor the capital, nor the distribution system to compete effectively in the box business," he says. What BBN did have, Conrades discovered, was a "services mindset," and he set out to exploit it. He pushed to develop BBN into a premier hosting service for private data networks, offering to run these critical assets for companies such as Intel, Fidelity, and Sun Microsystems faster and cheaper than they could do it themselves. He formed BBN Planet, one of the first Internet service providers and began to sell Internet access to businesses that were tuning in to the World Wide Web. "The world is awash in boxes," he says. "But customers need more help getting the most out of their technology."

Conrades couldn't cut BBN loose from its heritage as a slower-moving technology incubator, however, and in 1997 he struck a deal with GTE Corp., which acquired the company for $620 million. He left and eventually turned to venture capital, joining Polaris Ventures in Waltham, Mass., as a partner. But the problems of providing high-performance Internet access stuck with him, and when Polaris asked him to look at Akamai, the company's approach to Net congestion struck Conrades as "a breakthrough idea."

Conrades says his goal as CEO of Akamai is to "create a sense-and-respond organization, that's sensitive to what customers are looking for." He grew wary at IBM and BBN of "companies that are enamored of their technology and their products," he says. So far, the young scientists at Akamai have surprised him with their customer focus. "Not only are there wizards behind the science at Akamai but to my delight, they want to participate in a commercial environment," he says. "That's a nice change."

Who knows? Maybe one of them will even show the new CEO a thing or two about cornering a motorcycle at high speed -- if they can catch him.

By Paul Judge covers technology companies from Business Week's Boston bureau

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