Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Paul Sagan, Executive Vice Chairman of Akamai Technologies, joined the company in October 1998 as chief operating officer and became president the following year. Sagan was elected to the Akamai Board of Directors in January 2005, and he became CEO in April 2005 and served as chief executive until 2013. Sagan is a director of Massachusetts-based EMC Corp. and iRobot Corp., and he served as a director of Dow Jones & Company, Digitas Inc., and Maven Networks before they were acquired.

Previously, Sagan served as senior advisor to the World Economic Forum from 1997 to 1998, and from 1991 until 1997 he held a number of management positions at Time Warner, including president and editor of new media at Time Inc. from 1995 until 1997, and he 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.

Sagan joined Time Warner Cable in 1991 to design and launch NY 1 News, the television 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.

Sagan's career began in broadcast television news. He joined WCBS-TV in 1981 as a news writer and was named news director in 1987.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 in New York, 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 the World Economic Forum named him a Global Leader for Tomorrow.

Sagan is a trustee of Northwestern University and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where he is co-chairman of the advisory board; 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; and a Winter 2013 Fellow and a member of the advisory board of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at the Kennedy School.

He was a member of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.