Today, WorkingNation joins the rest of the nation in remembering the 2,977 lives lost on September 11, 2001, and honoring the thousands of first responders who became chronically ill when terrorists intentionally crashed planes into the World Trade Centers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and in rural Pennsylvania.
Akamai Technologies co-founder Danny Lewin died at age 31 aboard American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, the first plane to be intentionally-crashed into the World Trade Centers by terrorists. The 9/11 Commission confirmed Lewin was stabbed to death as he confronted the terrorists in an attempt to thwart the hijacking, becoming the first victim of the attackers that day.
Lewin was a friend and colleague to WorkingNation founder and CEO Art Bilger who remembers Lewin as a visionary computer scientist who changed the course of the internet during his brief career and as “the most remarkable” person he has ever met.
Without Lewin’s pioneering work in the late 1990s, and the company he created with Akamai CEO Tom Leighton, the internet as we know it today may have evolved along a different course. Since its founding, Akamai has grown into a multibillion-dollar company dedicated to making the internet “fast, reliable and secure” and is responsible for handling internet traffic and security for billions of people globally.
“He was the rare person of incredible intellect and action. A truly one-of-a-kind person. It is safe to say that meeting Danny completely altered the trajectory of my life,” Bilger recalls. “Without him, I don’t think WorkingNation would exist.”
This video remembering and honoring Danny Lewin was first released at WorkingNation’s “Cracking the Code: A Town Hall Event on Bridging the Cybersecurity Skills Gap” in June of 2018.
