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
We went from one million to 20 million subscribers in the past five years. That's great, but a billion people watch CNN.
I want to find people who have had to work hard and who have learned from their failures. Perseverance is no guarantee you’ll succeed, but without it, it’s almost guaranteed you won’t.
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
One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible
Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind
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.
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 resources you happen to accumulate, what do you do with them? You can spend the money and buy some houses or whatever, and people do some of that and that's fine. You can give the money to other people, your family, but usually when you do that you screw them up and it ends up counterproductive. Or, you take those resources and reinvest them in things that you believe in, and that could be reinvesting in a philanthropic cause.
You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.
In less than a year Revolution has gone from being a concept to a reality, with three rapidly growing sector companies, overseeing a dozen acquired firms that collectively employ more than 2,500 people. But we're just scratching the surface in terms of the potential to build Revolution into a new kind of company that gives consumers more choice, control and convenience in the important aspects of their lives.
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.
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.