Finance History | 145 Broadway, Cambridge — Twenty-Six Dollars Became One Hundred Forty-Five

People treat Akamai as a Kendall Square cloud firm and a box on a network map.

The first rooms were MIT offices that sold a way to keep a web page from dying in a crowd.

In early 1995 Tim Berners-Lee, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put a congestion problem to the laboratory. Tom Leighton took the problem as applied mathematics.

Daniel Lewin arrived at MIT in 1996 and worked with Leighton on consistent hashing, a method for spreading requests across many machines without reshuffling the whole map when one machine failed.

They entered the MIT 50,000-dollar entrepreneurship competition in 1997 and finished among six finalists from about 100 plans. Akamai Technologies was incorporated in Delaware on 20 August 1998.

The name is a Hawaiian word for clever.

MIT licensed intellectual property to the company. Early staff were students who had built the prototype.

On 29 October 1999 Akamai sold 9 million shares on Nasdaq at 26 dollars each under the ticker AKAM. The shares opened near 114.50 dollars and closed at 145.19 dollars.

In the first nine months of 1999 the firm had recorded 1.2 million dollars of revenue and a net loss of 28 million dollars in 1999 currency. The first-day price was a bet on the algorithm, not on the year's sales.

The present headquarters at 145 Broadway opened in December 2019 on a fifteen-year lease from Boston Properties.

The pin is the public sidewalk in Kendall Square. The floors inside are a working office.

The mechanism is a hash that sends each request to a nearby copy of the file, so a popular page does not have to leave a single origin server.

Photo: Daderot, 7 December 2019, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Akamai headquarters, 145 Broadway, Cambridge.