Paul Sagan (born 1959) is an American businessman and managing partner 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 American and international television industry. A number of annual Emmy Award ceremonies are held throughout the calendar year, each with the ...

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

WCBS-TV WCBS-TV (channel 2) 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–licensed independent station WL ...

as a news writer and news director. Joining

Time Warner Warner Media, LLC ( traded as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City, United States. It was originally established in 1972 by ...

to design and launch

NY1 NY1 (also officially known as Spectrum News NY1 and spoken as New York One) is an American cable news television channel founded by Time Warner Cable, which itself is owned by Charter Communications through its acquisition in May 2016. The channe ...

, in 1995 he was named president and editor of new media at

Time Inc. Time Inc. was an American worldwide mass media corporation founded on November 28, 1922, by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and based in New York City. It owned and published over 100 magazine brands, including its namesake ''Time'', ''Sports Illu ...

Sagan joined

Akamai Technologies Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery networkJ. Dilley, B. Maggs, J. Parikh, H. Prokop, R. Sitaraman, and B. Weihl. (CDN), cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services. Akamai's Inte ...

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, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications is a constituent school of Northwestern University that offers both undergraduate and graduate programs. It frequently ranks as the top school of journalism in the Unite ...

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

, Sagan began his career at

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

to design and launch

. 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 and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...

Akamai

Sagan joined

in October 1998 as

chief operating officer A chief operating officer or chief operations officer, also called a COO, is one of the highest-ranking executive positions in an organization, composing part of the "C-suite". The COO is usually the second-in-command at the firm, especially if t ...

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

board of directors A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organiz ...

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. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

. 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, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, Sagan served as Senior Advisor and Executive-in-Residence 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 produ ...

as a member of the Board of directors working on vaccines.

Boards

He is a member of the board of directors of Akamai, VMware, Inc., and the not-for-profit

ProPublica ProPublica (), legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit organization based in New York City. In 2010, it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece written by one of its journalists''The Guardian'', April 13, 2010P ...

, of which he named chairman in December 2016. He is also a trustee of his alma mater,

. Previously, he was a member of the board of directors of Datto Inc.,

Dow Jones & Company Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 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'', ''Financial News'' and ''Private Equ ...

Digitas Publicis Groupe is a French multinational advertising and public relations company. One of the oldest and largest marketing and communications companies in the world by revenue, it is headquartered in Paris. After 1945, the little-known Paris ...

EMC Corporation Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud ...

, L2, Inc., Maven Networks,

OpenMarket OpenMarket Inc. is a privately owned subsidiary of Infobip that provides cloud-based mobile messaging solutions to enterprises, including global one-way and two-way SMS, MMS, RCS, short codes, local numbers and text-enabled toll-free messaging ...

, 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 served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...

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 and businessman serving as the 72nd governor of Massachusetts since 2015. A member of the Republican Party, Baker was a cabinet official under two governors of Massach ...

appointed Sagan to be chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2015. 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 auto ...

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 (abbreviation: AAA&S) 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 ...

in 2008. In 2009 Sagan was named the

Ernst & Young Ernst & Young Global Limited, trade name EY, is a multinational professional services partnership headquartered in London, England. EY is one of the largest professional services networks in the world. Along with Deloitte, KPMG and Pricewaterh ...

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