Paul Sagan (born 1959) is an American businessman and special advisor and former managing director at General Catalyst Partners. A three-time

Emmy award The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the television industry. A number of annual Emmy Award ceremonies are held throughout the year, each with their own set of rules and award categor ...

winner for broadcast journalism in New York, Sagan began his career at

WCBS-TV WCBS-TV (channel 2), branded CBS New York, is a television station in New York City, serving as the flagship of the CBS network. It is owned and operated by the network's CBS News and Stations division alongside Riverhead, New York–lic ...

as a news writer and news director. Joining

Time Warner Warner Media, LLC ( doing business as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate owned by AT&T. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City. It was established as Time Warne ...

to design and launch NY1, in 1995 he was named president and editor of new media at

Time Inc. Time Inc. (also referred to as Time & Life, Inc. later on, after their two onetime flagship magazine publications) was an American worldwide mass media corporation founded on November 28, 1922, by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and based in New ...

Sagan joined

Akamai Technologies Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American company specialized in content delivery networkJ. Dilley, B. Maggs, J. Parikh, H. Prokop, R. Sitaraman, and B. Weihl. (CDN), cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and cloud services. It is headquartered in ...

in 1998, becoming CEO in 2005. In 2014, he became a venture capitalist at General Catalyst Partners. He became chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2015.

Career

Media and news

Upon graduating from the

Medill School of Journalism The Medill School of Journalism (branded as Northwestern Medill; formally the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications) is the journalism school of Northwestern University. It offers both undergraduate and graduat ...

Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...

, Sagan began his career at

as a news writer. He was named news director in 1987. In 1991, he joined

to design and launch NY1. In 1995 he was named president and editor of new media at

, a position he held until 1997. From 1997 to 1998 Sagan served as senior adviser to the

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental organization, international advocacy non-governmental organization and think tank, based in Cologny, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German ...

Akamai

Sagan joined

in October 1998 as

chief operating officer A chief operating officer (COO), also called chief operations officer, is an executive in charge of the daily operations of an organization (i.e. personnel, resources, and logistics). COOs are usually second-in-command immediately after the C ...

, became president the following year in 1999. He was elected to the Akamai

board of directors A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

in January 2005, and would serve as the executive vice chairman of

. He became CEO in April 2005. During his tenure, he oversaw a number of acquisitions. He was succeeded as Akamai CEO by Akamai co-founder Tom Leighton on January 1, 2013.

General Catalyst

In January 2014, he became a venture capitalist at General Catalyst Partners in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

. He became a partner at the firm. He kept his role as vice chairman of Akamai's board.

Moderna

Throughout the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, Sagan served as a member of the Board of Directors at

Moderna Moderna, Inc. ( ) is an American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that focuses on RNA therapeutics, primarily mRNA vaccines. These vaccines use a copy of a molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA) to carry inst ...

as the company was working on vaccines. He joined the Board when the company was still private in 2018.

Boards

In addition to serving as a director of Moderna, he was named chair of the not-for-profit

ProPublica ProPublica (), legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in New York City. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time reporters, and the resulting stories are distributed to ne ...

, in December 2016. He is also a trustee of his alma mater,

, and a trustee of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Previously, he was a member of the board of directors of VMware, Inc., and Datto Inc.,

Dow Jones & Company Dow Jones & Company, Inc. (also known simply as Dow Jones) is an American publishing firm owned by News Corp, and led by CEO Almar Latour. The company publishes ''The Wall Street Journal'', '' Barron's'', '' MarketWatch'', ''Mansion Global'' ...

, Digitas,

EMC Corporation EMC Corporation (stylized as EMC²) was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which sold data storage device, data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other pro ...

, L2, Inc., Maven Networks, OpenMarket, FutureTense, Inc., and VDONet Corp. before each company was sold. He also served for a period of time on the boards of Experience, Inc. iRobot Corp. and Medialink Worldwide, Inc. He resigned from the iRobot board in June 2015.

Committees and public positions

Sagan was appointed by President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...

to the President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2010 and served until 2017. Governor

Charlie Baker Charles Duane Baker Jr. (born November 13, 1956) is an American politician serving as the sixth president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, since 2023. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 72nd governor of Massa ...

appointed Sagan to be chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2015 until his term ended in 2019. In 2017, there was a controversy when a state investigation found that he had donated $500,000 to the nonprofit Families for Excellent Schools, a

charter school A charter school is a school that receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located. It is independent in the sense that it operates according to the basic principle of autono ...

advocacy group that had been fined for hiding donors' identities in 2016, and which had been involved in a ballot question the year before. Sagan defended his decision to keep the donation private. The Massachusetts Teachers Association and some others called for Sagan to be fired from his chairmanship for the donation, but the Governor had defended Sagan.'It's a nothingburger,' Gov. Charlie Baker says when asked about education board chair's $100K to charter schools group, Mass Live, Sept. 12, 2016
/ref> As of 2018, Sagan remained chair of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Honors

He is a three-time

winner for broadcast journalism in New York. He became a fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

in 2008. In 2009 Sagan was named the

Ernst & Young EY, previously known as Ernst & Young, is a multinational corporation, multinational professional services partnership, network based in London, United Kingdom. Along with Deloitte, KPMG and PwC, it is one of the Big Four accounting firms, Big F ...

Entrepreneur of the Year award in the technology category. In 2008 he was named as a member of the

Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy is a group of 17 American media, policy and community leaders formed to assess the information needs of communities in the United States in the 21st century, and recommend ...

References

External links

Official Company Biography, Akamai Website

Executive Profile, Bloomberg Businessweek

MIT Innovative Leader Series, Website, speaker bios

Harvard Kennedy School Dean's Council, Shorenstein Center On the Press, Website, members

World Economic Forum, Website, contributors

The Knight Commission, Website, members
* The Alliance for Business Leadership, Website, Board of Directors
ProPublica, Website, Board of Directors
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sagan, Paul American computer businesspeople Living people 1959 births Medill School of Journalism alumni American chief operating officers American technology chief executives Moderna people Akamai Technologies people