Steve Case
Steve Case
Stephen McConnell "Steve" Caseis an American entrepreneur, investor, and businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online. Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to invest in early and growth-stage startups through his Washington, D.C. based venture capital firm Revolution LLC...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth21 August 1958
CityHonolulu, HI
CountryUnited States of America
The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.
The attackers are the people with bold, innovative ideas, who are trying to disrupt the status quo, and usher in a better way. We need to think out of the box, and be curious, and be willing to take risks.
Having a great idea is important. But having a great team is also important.
There are no road signs to help navigate. And, in fact, no one has yet determined which side of the road we're supposed to be on.
It's actually a relatively small number of people that really are those risk takers, and a relatively small number of people that end up really having an impact on the world, and it doesn't take a lot of people. We said, 'Well, rather than just sit by and wait, or fold our tent and go do something else, let's keep at it. Maybe we can be the ones who can figure this out,' and eventually we were.
The real magic in National Geographic isn't how much money they have left at the end of the year. It's the fact that through their overall focus they are reaching hundreds of millions of people and educating people about the world. It just happens to be done in a business-oriented kind of way that is more sustainable.
Today, National Geographic has a membership side with a magazine and some television side, and they generate about a billion dollars in revenue, and they're profitable. And so at the end of the year they have some bottom line profit which they can then reinvest, because they're running it as a not-for-profit in charitable endeavors.
If you don't have both of them working together in a complementary, cohesive way, you're not going to be successful.
It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have
The pace of change and the threat of disruption creates tremendous opportunities...
What I have figured out is that I can predict the future. I just can't predict when.
The only way to continue to have a robust economy is to out-innovate other nations.
I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million.
Because I do think - not just in building AOL - but just the world in which we live is a very confusing, rapidly changing world where technology has accelerated.