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Maybe so, but that same persistence has now brought the 43-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology math professor fame and fortune beyond his wildest dreams. Since 1995, Leighton has directed a team of MIT math wizards that produced a revolutionary breakthrough in delivering content over the Internet. In 1998, that led to the formation of Akamai. And now, with everyone from Apple Computer to Yahoo! awed by Akamai's solution to Net congestion, the company has become a darling of tech investors, with a market cap of nearly $20 billion. That has made Leighton, who holds a 10.5% stake in his offspring, a billionaire twice over. "A REAL WHIRLWIND." All this acclaim reflects the fact that Leighton helped solve one of the Internet's most perplexing problems. Though it works beautifully for simple transactions like e-mail, "the Net wasn't built to scale [up to handle] a large number of users," explains Leighton. The inevitable result: As Net use has exploded, Web sites have often been overwhelmed by surges in traffic, and individual surfers have faced congestion-related delays. By 1995, even Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the Web, was worried these problems would prevent the Net from realizing its potential. So he went down the hall from his office at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science to ask Leighton if "we might come up with something that might be useful." Leighton was a natural choice. The MIT prof had a stellar reputation as an expert in algorithms, the complex branch of math that lies at the heart of computer science. "He has very deep insights," says Ronald Graham, former president of the American Mathematical Society, who recently retired as chief scientist at AT&T Labs. Adds Graham: "It was clear to me even 15 years ago that Tom was going to be one of the stars of the future." Leighton quickly assembled a team of his top MIT students to help solve the puzzle posed by Berners-Lee. "I was the guy with the gray hair," jokes Leighton, who was nearly twice as old as most of his students. But he still supplied much of the spark that kept the group going. "It was a real whirlwind, and we sometimes had to work all night," recalls Will Koffel, 22, an MIT student who joined the effort in 1998. To break the tension, Koffel recalls, Leighton, an avid golfer, often "brought in some putters and staged impromptu indoor putting tournaments." "SMART GUYS." It wasn't until 1998 that Leighton and his students had developed an elegant and effective new way of delivering content over the Net. Like earlier attempts to alleviate Net congestion, Akamai pushes much Web content to a network of servers located around the Internet, thus reducing the load on a Web site's central computers. It's called network caching. But while earlier attempts indiscriminately pushed all content from a Web site to outlying servers, Akamai selects only the hottest and most data-rich content -- like graphics and photos -- to put on its servers. This sophisticated sorting represents one major breakthrough. Akamai's system then must decide within milliseconds the fastest route to deliver each request for Web content to an individual surfer. To do that, Akamai continually tracks Internet traffic from its monitors on more than 100 of the networks that together make up the Internet. Rather than funneling all this information to a central point of control and risking a meltdown at the center that would knock out the entire system, Leighton's team distributed this decision-making authority throughout its system. Leighton and his team get rave reviews for their work. By pushing the hottest content onto its network of over 2,000 servers, the technology at once sharply reduces the risk that a Web site will crash, while delivering Web content 2 to 10 times as fast as before. On top of that, it still keeps Web sites like Yahoo! in constant contact with individual surfers, allowing Yahoo! to customize its response to each individual. "They are really smart guys," marvels Farzad Nazem, chief technology officer at Yahoo!, Akamai's first big customer. "They had the right idea, and it was very complementary to what we needed."
These days, Leighton has little to do with managing Akamai. Though he serves on the board, "no one reports to me." Instead, as chief scientist, he spends his days worrying about "the challenges that lie ahead." There's plenty to worry about. "This industry is in its infancy," he says. And with competitors looming, he spends much of his time expanding the menu of services that Akamai can offer Web sites, such as ad customization for individuals. PERFECT LIFE. For all Akamai's success, "Leighton hasn't changed much," says Graham, who has known him for 20 years. He remains extremely modest, insisting that much of the credit for Akamai's success belongs to his students. "This is not a one-person show, and it never was," says Leighton. And while his Akamai stock makes him a billionaire, you'd never know it from his lifestyle. He still lives in the same modest house and drives the same 10-year-old car, which is showing signs of rust. Indeed, the money seems almost incidental to the man who still retains his high school yearning to solve math problems. "I loved being a professor, proving theorems that only five people would ever read," says Leighton. "Tom used to say he had the perfect life as a professor," adds his good friend Graham. "Now he has a different kind of life, running on hyper-Internet time." But for all the excitement, "I'm sure he's hoping this will be a temporary situation," says Graham. Indeed, Leighton says his biggest regret "is that I don't play golf much anymore." For now, he'll have to be content to play cache. Symonds is chief of Business Week's Boston bureau |
