Paul Sagan

Catalyst Advisor, General Catalyst

Paul Sagan is a Senior Advisor to and an Executive in Resident (XIR) at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm, where he focuses on investments in internet software, services, and infrastructure companies. He was previously a Managing Director at the firm, with responsibility for helping to build the firm’s growth equity investing practice.



Prior to joining General Catalyst, Mr. Sagan was CEO of Akamai Technologies, a pioneer in internet content delivery, application performance and cloud security, and now one of the largest cloud services providers. He joined Akamai in October 1998 as chief operating officer, became president the following year, and was CEO from April 2005 until 2013. Mr. Sagan was elected to the Akamai Board of Directors in January 2005 and served until 2019.

Mr. Sagan is also a director of VMware, Inc. Previously, he served as a director of iRobot Corp, as well as Catalina Labs (acquired by Asurion), Dow Jones & Company (acquired by News Corp.), Digitas, Inc. (acquired by Publicis Group), EMC Corp. (acquired by Dell Technologies), and Maven Networks (acquired by Yahoo!).

Mr. Sagan began his career as a television journalist and his work was recognized with three Emmy Awards for broadcast news in New York City. Later he joined Time Warner to co-found three businesses: NY1, the 24-hour cable news network; Roadrunner, the world’s first consumer broadband service; and Pathfinder, one of the first internet advertising platforms.

President Obama appointed Mr. Sagan to the President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2010 and he served until 2017.

He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008, and in 2009 was named Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in the technology category. In 1996 the World Economic Forum named Mr. Sagan a Global Leader for Tomorrow.

Mr. Sagan is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where he is a life trustee. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of ProPublica, and was appointed by Governor Charlie Baker to be Chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from 2015 to 2019.