Paul Sagan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Akamai, joined the company in October 1998. Mr. Sagan was elected to the Akamai Board of Directors in January 2005, and he became CEO in April 2005. He also served as President of Akamai from May 1999 until September 2010 and again from October 2011, and he brings to Akamai the experience of leading visionary technology companies and media businesses, and a wealth of management experience.
Previously, Mr. Sagan served as senior advisor to the World Economic Forum from 1997 to 1998, consulting to the Geneva-based organization on information technology for the world's 1,000 foremost multinational corporations.
In 1995, Mr. Sagan was named president and editor of new media at Time Inc., a division of Time Warner, and worked in that position until 1997. Previously, he served as managing editor of Time Warner's News on Demand project and was a senior member of the team responsible for the development of the company's online, cable online, electronic publishing, and Internet publishing activities. He was a founder of Road Runner, the world's first broadband cable modem service, and Pathfinder, one of the early Web properties that pioneered Internet advertising.
Mr. Sagan joined Time Warner in 1991 to design and launch NY 1 News, the cable news network based in New York City. NY 1 became known for its use of digital video technology and video journalists carrying their own small-format cameras. His career began in broadcast television news. He joined WCBS-TV in 1981 as a news writer and was named news director in 1987 at age 28, the youngest person to hold the position in the network's history.
Mr. Sagan was appointed by President Obama to the President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2010. He is a three-time Emmy Award winner for broadcast journalism, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008, and the 2009 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the technology category. In 1996 he was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.
He is a director of Massachusetts-based EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and iRobot Corp. (NASDAQ: IRBT), and previously served as a director of Dow Jones & Company, Digitas Inc., and Maven Networks before they were acquired.
Mr. Sagan is a director of ProPublica; a trustee of Northwestern University; a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern; co-chairman of the Medill Board of Advisors; a member of the MIT Visiting Committee in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; a member of the Dean's Council at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; a member of the advisory board of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at the Kennedy School; and an advisor to the MATCH Charter Public School in Boston. He was a member of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.
