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
Over the past twenty years, innovative entrepreneurs have been working to build a new class of companies that strive to do good as well as doing well. The success of companies like Whole Foods has demonstrated that ideas that once seemed on the margins are now becoming mainstream -- as consumers strive to make better choices, seek to do business with companies they respect, and buy products and services that promote a more balanced and sustainable lifestyle.
And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal.
The idea that maybe you don't have to own a car if you only need one occasionally may catch on, just like time-sharing caught on in real estate
But the idea that some day people would want to be able to interact and get stock quotes and talk with other people or all these different things, I just believed that was going to happen
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.
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 like ... what I characterize as more built-to-last ideas rather than built-to-flip ideas.
All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.
We went from one million to 20 million subscribers in the past five years. That's great, but a billion people watch CNN.
We do not intend to limit content diversity on any of our systems. If we limit content, if we do not promote a diversity of voices ... then consumers will waste no time migrating to other Internet and media services.
Couple that with their distribution (OS) muscle, then Netscape clearly has an uphill battle.
And when I was 24, I think, I moved to Washington, D.C., and started focusing on interactive services, and that's really what I then did for 20 years.