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
I continue to have a special pride and passion for AOL, and I strongly believe that AOL - once the leading Internet company in the world - can return to its past greatness
I was not an outstanding student. I did a reasonable amount of work. I got generally good - pretty good grades, but I was not that passionate about getting straight A's.
When I was trying to popularize the concept of the Internet - ten or 15 years ago - I came up with this concept of "the 5 Cs." Services needed to have content, context, community, commerce, and connectivity. After that, when I was trying to think of what the key management principles were to build into the culture, I started talking about the Ps. The P's were things like passion, perseverance, perspective and people. I think the people aspect is really the most important one.
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.
It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have if they have the right passion, perspective and are able to align the interest of a great team.
If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.
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.
Our expanding membership and surging usage confirm that consumers want the content, services, features and ease of use that are uniquely AOL,
We don't want to suddenly mess around with people's normal viewing habits and force them to do interactive things. Above all, we want to expand the viewer's experience, either through a very simple directory or by providing additional information to the program that's currently showing.
We don't want to turn the TV into a computer.
There's no question that we're on the eve of an explosion in consumers' move to wireless and how they use interactive devices.