SM: Let’s take that question and apply it to all these recent media reactions you are getting about Level 3’s announcement that CDN is going to be a commodity and all these telcos are going to provide CDNs. [My previous coverage here.] TL: I think the Telcos have always provided CDN. There has been no
SM: Okay, so August Capital funded Series B and you came in after Series C? JH: No, actually I came in 2005, after Doll Capital had done a series D, and put in another $9M. SM: How far along was the company when you arrived? JH: We had 60-70 people, and about 13,000 customers. SM:
SM: You are saying that the middle does not have a business model supporting it. The first mile and last mile have business models, but the middle does not. TL: Right. The middle mile is where you get into a lot of problems with the Internet. It is because there is no money flowing in
SM: Let’s start talking about PayCycle which is where you are now. This is your old team from Intuit, right? JH: The team I came to work with at PayCycle are all people I have worked with before except one person. I feel really lucky to be able to work with people I know. They
SM: Let me ask you a couple of detailed questions on that framework. You have servers inside of various ISPs. The intelligence in that server is your technology and that is how you route traffic. Is that fair to say? TL: At a very high level that is correct. There is a lot of detail
SM: Can you talk about the Adobe experience a bit more? Where did you find the Creative Professionals business? JH: There was a lot of work going on in bundling Adobe applications together. We figured out how to go beyond just bundling different applications in a box and we created synergy between the products. In
SM: Even though you had entered the 50K competition, and had started talking to potential customers, Akamai was not a company yet? TL: We really had no desire to make a company out of our research. We were all academics and we liked writing papers, proving theorems, and giving talks. We were not businessmen in
SM: You decided to stay with Adobe for a few years after selling them Fotiva, correct? JH: Initially I got out and I spent a few months looking around for the next smaller thing to do, but the market had dried up so badly there were no B and C round deals going on, and