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
In the entrepreneurial world, when you launch a company, you have a particular idea, a particular product, a particular service, almost always you pivot, you shift. The market reacts to your initial idea. You make some adjustments. It's only after making a few adjustments that you see the success.
I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii
So we believed that strategic alliances and partnerships were critical, and we did that for five years.
So you have to force yourself out of a comfort zone and really try to figure out what are the key ingredients, the key skill sets, the key perspectives that are necessary, and then figure out a way to attract the very best people to fill those particular roles.
Steve Jobs always believed that you didn't want to do focus groups or research and ask people what they wanted. You wanted to create products that they didn't know they wanted yet and they would fall in love with. And I think that was part of the magic of his design philosophy.
At AOL, we thought the killer app was people
Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.
Most of the people who had PCs did not have modems and could not use those PCs as communicating devices. They really were using them for spreadsheets or word processing or storing recipes or playing games or what have you.
I think the support of the other team at AOL and everybody's really shared passion and belief about this and - saying that some day everybody was going to be on line.
I enjoyed high school and college, and I think I learned a lot, but that was not really my focus. My focus was on trying to figure out what businesses to start
If you really got the right people, and you've got them working together as a team, whether it's in business, whether it's in science, whether it's in politics, you can make a big difference.
Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home
Nowadays people seem to switch schools, either because they have to, and certain schools only serve certain grades, or because they move to a different place or have some particular interest, but I was in the same school for 13 years
There are lots of cycles to markets - boom and bust - and also in perceptions of people. The conventional wisdom of Steve Case as genius or fool was highly cyclical. The truth was always in the middle.