Paul Sagan is a former award-winning journalist and an internet technology entrepreneur who now advises organizations on strategy and execution. He works primarily as a board member of public and private businesses. Sagan is an executive in residence (XIR), Catalyst Partners, the venture capital firm where he was previously a managing director.

Sagan was elected chair of our board effective Jan. 1, 2017, succeeding the late Herbert Sandler, our founding chair.

Sagan is also a director of one public company, Moderna Inc., and he serves on the boards of several private businesses. In addition, he is a director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Boston, and he is a life trustee of Northwestern University, where he graduated with a degree in journalism.

Earlier in his career, Sagan worked at Akamai Technologies Inc., the MIT spin-out company he joined as employee No. 15 and chief operating officer in 1998, and then became its president in 1999, and CEO and board member in 2005. He served as chief executive through 2012 and as a director, including as executive vice chairman, until 2019.

Sagan began his career in broadcast television news. He joined WCBS-TV in 1981 as a news writer and was named news director in 1987.

When he left CBS in 1991, Sagan joined Time Warner and held several executive positions until 1997, including senior vice president of cable programming to design and launch NY1 News, the cable news network based in New York City; and president and editor of new media at Time Inc., a division of Time Warner. He was a senior member of the team responsible for the development of many of the company’s early online businesses. At Time Warner, Sagan was a founder of Road Runner, the world’s first broadband cable modem service, and Pathfinder, one of the early web properties that pioneered internet advertising.

President Barack Obama appointed Sagan to the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2010, and he served until January 2017. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker appointed Sagan to chair the commonwealth’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from 2015 until 2019.

Sagan is a three-time Emmy Award winner for broadcast journalism in New York; a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008; and the 2009 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the technology category. Sagan was also a member of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.