When Akamai Froze Its Network, Edward Tsinovoi Saw What Everyone Else Missed
At one of the world's largest CDN companies, a decision was made that would never make headlines: stop everything.
No deployments. No changes. No innovation. Freeze the entire network for a full year.
Edward Tsinovoi was inside that decision at Akamai. A series of major outages — "similar to what Cloudflare experienced just a few months ago," he says — had made the calculus uncomfortably clear. "It doesn't worth the risk, the pay or the price for a mistake. The outage of this network is much higher than any innovation that you can bring in."
For most engineers, that was an operational verdict. For Edward, it was a structural diagnosis that the entire industry had been avoiding for decades. "This fact actually pushed us to understand that this industry, the Edge CDN industry, it's actually frozen. It's stuck in the 90s without any ability to move forward."
The reason it had stayed frozen was also clear to him: multi-edge infrastructure — routing traffic across multiple CDN providers rather than depending on one — required years of expensive internal engineering. "Giants like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, LinkedIn, they are all building multi edge strategies. They are not relying on single edge provider. But for large and medium sized companies, it's too complicated."
What nobody had built was the abstraction layer that made multi-edge accessible without a dedicated platform team to implement and maintain it. Edward Tsinovoi left Akamai with his co-founder and started IO River to build exactly that. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, he walked through what it took to bring that product to market — as a first-time founder with 25 years of engineering experience and no sales background.
The Hire That Broke the Rules
The standard advice Edward received from founders and VCs was unanimous: do founder-led sales alone, prove the motion is repeatable, then bring in sales leadership. He heard it from enough people that he took it seriously. Then he rejected it.
"I don't want to pay the learning curve of myself in my baby, in my first time company."
One month after founding IO River, he hired Amos Benyakov — a sales leader who had made the GTM journey in the CDN industry multiple times before — to co-lead go-to-market alongside him. The structure was deliberate: Edward brought domain authority and industry credibility; Benyakov brought customer relationship architecture and sales process. Neither alone would have been enough.
Two months after founding IO River — before they had a product that could actually be deployed in a customer environment — they were in front of buyers. "We started to meet customers and trying to sell them the product. By doing that we learned a lot in the process. Much before we had a real product that could be deployed on the customer in the customer's environment."
The pre-product sales motion wasn't premature optimism. It was deliberate customer discovery with a sales professional structuring the conversations — compressing the feedback loop that most technical founders spend their first year fumbling through alone.
Why "Disruption" Messaging Kills Infrastructure Deals
With customers in front of them, the next problem was message. IO River's instinct, like most founders entering a stagnant market, was to go loud: new architecture, old model broken, the incumbents are the past.
It didn't work.
"Online services want a reliable, predictable, conservative partners and solutions," Edward explains. "To go and adopt totally something new — it totally sounds crazy. It's too aggressive messaging."
The insight is precise and non-obvious: the same buyers who intellectually understand that single-vendor CDN dependency is a problem are the same buyers who cannot afford to introduce perceived instability into the infrastructure their business runs on. Disruption language signals instability. It activates risk aversion, not curiosity.
IO River's response was to reframe entirely — not around what they were replacing, but around what they were extending. "Instead of trying to come and say let's beat the giants — we came and said listen, we will collaborate with them. We will partner with them and we will allow this industry to build the next generation together."
The same technology. A frame that reads as complement rather than threat.
The Parenthetical That Did the Positioning Work
Repositioning the competitive narrative was one problem. Getting buyers to understand what IO River had actually built was a separate one.
Edward's product is a Virtual Edge — a software orchestration layer that sits above multiple CDN providers and routes traffic intelligently across them based on performance, cost, and availability. The problem: "No one know what virtual edge is. It's a new term. Customer that enter to our platform doesn't really know what is virtual edge."
The closest legacy term was "Multi-CDN" — present in every infrastructure team's vocabulary, immediately understood. But Multi-CDN wasn't accurate. It described a manual approach to splitting traffic across providers; IO River's orchestration layer was something architecturally different.
The solution was surgical. "We said virtual edge and in the brackets put non multi CDN in order to somehow connect between the new term that we're trying to bring to the market — which is innovative, disruptive but unknown — with a term which is kind of a legacy term existing in the market."
The label "Virtual Edge (not Multi-CDN)" does specific work: the new term anchors the positioning, the parenthetical orients the buyer with familiar language, and the "not" signals a distinction without requiring the buyer to understand the full architectural difference before they can process the pitch. It collapses the vocabulary problem into a single line.
The Kindergarten Strategy
With a product, a co-selling motion, and a messaging framework, IO River still had to decide where to start geographically. The US was the obvious answer. They chose Europe.
The logic wasn't romantic. The entire founding team was based in Israel. Time zones, existing networks, and cost-to-reach all favored Europe as the first market. "It looked for us like the chances to success in the European market will be higher than the chances that we will success succeed in the US market in Phase 0. We prefer to optimize the chances for success."
Edward calls it "our kindergarten" — not because it was easier, but because it was the right environment to learn in before entering the highest-stakes market in the world.
Europe also forced a channel insight that wouldn't have surfaced in the US. European buyers in IO River's industry route heavily through local resellers and system integrators — not by preference, but because the market is structurally fragmented. "The European market is broken to a lot of small countries with different languages, different cultures. They find much better or easier to buy from a system integrator which talking their language."
In the US, that fragmentation doesn't exist at the same scale. "The people in Miami, the customers in Miami, they are totally fine to buy from companies in Miami, but they will be probably also good enough to buy from companies from Boston and New York. And it doesn't really matter a lot." Direct selling is the expected motion. The channel strategy that produced results in Europe would have underperformed in the US — not because the product was different, but because the trust architecture of each market is built differently.
Edward has since relocated to Boston. IO River has crossed the ocean, arriving in the US market with proof of a sales motion, a refined message, and a clear-eyed understanding of why the same playbook requires a different chapter for every geography it enters.
Listen to the full episode with Edward Tsinovoi, Co-Founder & CEO of IO River, on BUILDERS.