AOL, every mention
78 scenes, the whole family · ← back to AOL
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Harry Stebbings 31Bob Pittman 13Steve Case 8Peter Rojas 7Greg Rogers 6Chamath Palihapitiya 5Amanda Bradford 5Sridhar Ramaswamy 4Rory O'Driscoll 4Gary Liu 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where AOL comes up
Coinbase Cuts AI Spend by 50% | Kalshi's $40B Valuation & Impending IPO | The Year for SaaS Roll-Ups · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 43:22 Rory O'Driscoll It's by company, and they own AOL for God's sake, right? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 43:25 Rory O'Driscoll Which by the way, I remember has killed their AOL email product, but still is an ad network.
SpaceX Launches Largest Ever IPO | OpenAI Files to Go Public | Uber Cuts 23% of HR · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 0:56 unnamed speaker If AOL becomes the next hot thing, I mean, these guys are fucking geniuses. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 59:43 Harry Stebbings Um, you know, some of their properties are very well known, but, you know, Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, AOL, Eventbrite, a very massively executed roll-up strategy, a 1,000,000,003 in revenue, and they're filing to go public at twenty… 4 times in the scene
Thrive Raises New $10B Fund | OpenAI Buys OpenClaw | Stripe at $140B: Is Adyen Wildly Undervalued? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:32:24 Jason Lemkin Durability doesn't count as dial up at AOL shrinking every year.
The SaaS Massacre: Public Market Collapse |Microsoft Lost $360B & NVIDIA’s $100B Dispute with OpenAI
- ▶ 18:08 Jason Lemkin There's always a subset of folks that kept the AOL account, and their Yahoo, Yahoo Mail seems to be still doing okay.
Anthropic’s $10B Raise | a16z’s $15B Fund: Is the Middle Dead in VC? | How OpenAI Could Go to Zero? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 22:11 unnamed speaker Or be like AOL and dial up. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato
- ▶ 50:59 Harry Stebbings Going back to the structure, when you acquire a new business, a Vimeo, an AOL, 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:00:23 Federico Simionato So I, I tweeted about the AOL acquisition, and the tweet went viral, and I noticed randomly a few large accounts followed me.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO @Snowflake: Deepseek is Not a Threat to OpenAI & OpenAI Beats Anthropic|E1258 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 45:37 Sridhar Ramaswamy Yahoo, AOL, um, and then soon, uh, people like Firefox, um, and then all the PC manufacturers.
- ▶ 48:16 Sridhar Ramaswamy Yahoo and AOL. 3 times in the scene
Mike Maples: Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups and Founders | E1242 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 45:00 Mike Maples Everybody thought AT&T is going to build a digital highway, or that, you know, Time Warner, or Microsoft Network, or AOL, or maybe the government should build the digital superhighway.
Klaus Hommels: Why "Portfolios are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy"? | E1231 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 46:00 Klaus Hommels So basically when I started with AOL in 1995, I was responsible for online banking. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 49:16 Klaus Hommels So all this I thought was very, very cool for, for way more people than, than we think, and people become more health sensitive, and that's why I implicitly felt there's a very, very big market, and as I'm always been a product guy,…
Imran Khan: Why the IPO Market is Not Closed & Lessons From Taking Snap & Alibaba Public | E1194 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 44:35 Imran Khan Because AOL, they gave them a 95% revenue share when AOL search box was powered by Google. 3 times in the scene
Mike Schroepfer: Former Meta CTO on "Why The Best Leaders are Like Music Conductors" | E1158 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 21:12 Mike Schroepfer Look at AOL instant messenger.
Kevin Ryan: Are the Best CEOs the Best Fundraisers & Why Ownership Should Not Be a Focus in VC|E1138 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:02:07 Kevin Ryan You know, don't forget, 15 years ago, the number one, uh, internet company on the, on the east coast was AOL, based in D.C.
Frank Quattrone: Lessons from 650 M&A Deals Worth Over $1TRN & Taking Amazon and Cisco Public| E1121 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 8:33 Frank Quattrone We did AOL second deal.
- ▶ 54:16 unnamed speaker In a, uh, in a research analyst, and we left Morgan Stanley, and I thought for sure Mary Meeker, who I had recruited to Morgan Stanley as our PC software and hardware analyst, and ultimately became our internet analyst when we did deals…
Davis Smith: From Selling $6M of Pool Tables to Scaling Cotopaxi to $150M in Revenues | E1095 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 4:30 Davis Smith And, uh, this is back when like the internet, like I actually used these AOL discs that would get sent in the mail to our home
Emad Mostaque: These 5 Companies Will Win the AI War; Why We Need National Data Sets | E1015 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 40:26 Emad Mostaque You've got good products, good distribution, you know, you lock it in, like, 1.5 million people still use AOL.
Hadi Partovi: How I Became an Advisor to Mark Zuckerberg; Lessons from Steve Ballmer | 20VC #961 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 14:31 Hadi Partovi I was at Microsoft at the time, and I was in charge of the Microsoft Internet portal at the time, uh, back when Microsoft was competing with Yahoo and AOL and, and the upstart Google in the world of search.
Bob Pittman: How I Went from Creator of MTV to CEO of iHeartMedia | 20VC #958 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 3:13 Bob Pittman He worked for me for a while at AOL, uh, and I've had him in other capacities, but it just, he said, you just, wow, you just impressed me.
- ▶ 3:56 Bob Pittman Um, and so it's sort of dumb luck, and I went with Steve Case at AOL. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:05 Bob Pittman I'm trying to give everyone in America a friend anytime, anywhere using my, is there more your mission statement, or by the way, we're going to make, in the case of AOL, we're going to make the internet 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:53 Bob Pittman I mean, we were just looking for an excuse to hang on, but we did sort of the same thing at six at, at AOL. 6 times in the scene
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone: The Yahoo Turnaround Plan | 20VC #911 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 40:54 Jim Lanzone So we, we also own AOL, which is still very profitable and does a lot of free cash flow. 2 times in the scene
Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 16:05 Matt Mullenweg Um, it had been mismanaged, I think under Yahoo and AWOL and Verizon, and, um, we felt like we could turn it around.
20VC: WTF Is Going On? 3 Outcomes for What Could Happen From Here; What Needs to Happen To Avoid Recession? Why Stagnation is Most Likely and What This Means for Startups and Venture & Why Catastrophe is More Likely Than Ever and Switzerland Could Be a "H
- ▶ 49:18 Fabrice Grinda It was ICQ of China or AIM of China, and I'm like, AIM didn't really get big. 2 times in the scene
20VC: The Memo: Chris Sacca on Why We Are Breeding a Generation of Entitled Assholes, Harley Finkelstein on What Great Fatherhood Really Means, Deena Shakir on How Kids Make You a Better Investor and Anne Wojcicki on How Children Change Your Approach to R
- ▶ 17:26 Anne Wojcicki It was a good friend who is actually the one who started AOL instant messaging.
20VC: 23andMe's Anne Wojcicki on How To Approach Trust in Business and Personal Relationships, Leadership Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg and Reflections on How The Best Founders Manage Their Boards
- ▶ 12:11 Anne Wojcicki And I remember very well, there was somebody named Yossi Vardy, who's a good friend who is actually the one who started AOL instant messaging.
20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva
- ▶ 0:48 Harry Stebbings And before Lightspeed, Jeremy was with AOL,
20VC: Chamath Palihapitiya on Why IPOs and Direct Listings Are Broken, Turning Social Capital Into A Combination of Berkshire Hathaway, Koch Industries and The Red Cross, Why Forecasts Are Worthless, What Creates True Defensibility & Why You Have To Be Pr
- ▶ 4:00 Chamath Palihapitiya And so I moved to Silicon Valley and I worked for a small music startup called Winamp, which was bought by AOL and became part of AOL music. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:00 Chamath Palihapitiya And so I moved to Silicon Valley and I worked for a small music startup called Winamp, which was bought by AOL and became part of AOL music.
20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research
- ▶ 5:27 unnamed speaker We did end up getting acquired by AOL, which gave me some more space to keep thinking about the problem.
20VC: Ashton Kutcher on Early Lessons From Investing in Airbnb and Spotify, Why VC Ownership Requirements Are Becoming More and More Egregious & What Being Good At Product Truly Means
- ▶ 4:43 Ashton Kutcher Not to mention, like, when my first film came out that I was starring in Dude Where's My Car, I was in AOL chat rooms starting, like, dude suite arguments as, like, a marketing technique.
20VC: BoxGroup's David Tisch on Whether Concentrated Investing At Seed Works, Do Founders Really Want Direct Feedback and Is It Good For Them & Why Consumer Social Is Interesting Again
- ▶ 3:43 David Tisch I grew up loving the internet, and I think it's the internet, not technology, that I fell in love with, and so I watched the internet get deployed through Prodigy and CompuServe and then on to AOL, and AOL was really my entry point into…
20VC: a16z's Scott Kupor on The Biggest Learnings From Scaling a16z from $300m to $7Bn AUM, The Biggest Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Pitching VCs & Why VC Is Simply A Customer Service Business
- ▶ 8:18 Scott Kupor The second thing is just pure market sizing, which is obvious, but you know, you've probably heard the story from Mark, but when they sold Netscape to AOL in 2008, I think the total size of the internet population was under a hundred…
20VC: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on Why It Is More Important To Be Right Than Contrarian, The Most Common Mistakes Made By Hyper-Growth Companies & 3 Characteristics That Make An Individual Incredible At Sourcing
- ▶ 0:56 Harry Stebbings And before Lightspeed, Jeremy was with AOL, first as SVP of Corporate Development, and Chief of Staff to the CEO, and then as General Manager of Netscape.
- ▶ 4:00 Jeremy Liew Back in 2006, there were not that many people who were focused on the consumer world, and I'd spent the first 10 years of my career working for a variety of Web one point O companies, Netscape, AOL, and so forth, and so when there was…
20VC: AOL Founder, Steve Case on Why The Best Venture Investments of The Next 10 Years Will Likely Not Be In The Valley, Why The CEO Must Be The Shock Absorber For Company Morale and Why Vision Without Execution is Hallucination
- ▶ 0:30 Harry Stebbings On the other side of the table, Steve is recognized as one of America's best-known and most accomplished entrepreneurs, as the co-founder of America Online, or AOL. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:57 Steve Case Co-founding America Online AOL in 1985, so what's that, 33 years ago, and that was the early days of the internet at the time. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:39 Steve Case As you said, I lived through that with this first wave of the internet with AOL. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:49 Steve Case Sometimes harder to attract the attention of potential kind of business partners to scale your company, but there's no question there are great entrepreneurs that are doing super innovative things, and my overall view, and it ties in with…
- ▶ 17:41 Steve Case Well, I tell them a little bit of my own story and the, and the story of those early days of AOL and the early days of the internet now seems obvious because everybody's connected, but in those early days, it was a real struggle.
- ▶ 26:27 Steve Case Whether it be when I was running AOL or now running Revolution, I surround myself with people that are way better at managing your day-to-day priorities than I am.
20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League
- ▶ 2:45 Amanda Bradford I love that you asked that question, because I was actually known as Internet Amanda as a girl, because I was sort of crawling the social networks before there were social networks, so I was one of the people that used AOL Instant… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:59 Amanda Bradford There was buddy chat, and if you filled out certain profiles in buddy chat in AOL, you were able to find other people that matched your middle school, for example.
- ▶ 24:43 Harry Stebbings Was it that AOL friendship?
20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely
- ▶ 0:53 Harry Stebbings Teller, an ad tech company he sold to AOL in 2010, and also a long-time media and advertising executive.
20VC: Oren Zeev on Why Diversification Does Not Work, Thesis Based Investing Is Sceptical & Partners Mostly Stay Together For LPs
20VC: Why Investors Have The Biggest Problem with Bias, Why Our Job Is To Maximise Risk & Why It Is Essential To Get Good at Losing with True Ventures Founder, Jon Callaghan
- ▶ 0:29 Harry Stebbings Prior to True, John founded three of his own companies, the first being in 1986 with Mountain Bike Outfitters Inc., but following several years founding companies, John made his move into VC with Summit Partners, and then enjoyed roles…
20VC: The First ICO Blockchain Incubator Ever, Why ICO's Will Change The World of Venture As We Know It & How The M&A Market Will Respond To ICO's with Mike, Jones, Co-Founder @ Science Inc
- ▶ 2:57 Mike Jones Then my second company was acquired by AOL, and then I became a super active angel.
20VC: Jason Calacanis on The 4 Questions Investors Must Ask Founders, Whether YC Have Scaled Their Process Successfully & Why Early Founder Liquidity Is Good Not Bad
- ▶ 0:44 Harry Stebbings On the operational side, Jason was previously a Sequoia founder, with web blogs sold to AOL for a reported 25 to forty million dollars.
- ▶ 15:30 Jason Calacanis So even AOL and Yahoo, which went through decades of mismanagement each, they are still alive and they still exist and they still have a combined billion users, right? 2 times in the scene
20VC: Tony Conrad on Straddling The Role Of Founder & Investor, What True Founder/Product Fit Looks Like & The Dangers of Party Rounds
- ▶ 0:34 Harry Stebbings Tony's also the co-founder and CEO at About.me, acquired by AOL in 2010, and they've since raised funding from some of our true favorites in the industry, including Brad at Foundry, Softech, and Bullpen, just to name a few. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Can Founders Really Trust Their VC & How To Navigate The Acquisition Process Successfully with Josh Felser, Co-Founder @ Freestyle.vc
- ▶ 0:37 Harry Stebbings As for Josh, prior to being in VC with Freestyle, Josh started two successful internet companies, Spinner and Grouper, which were acquired by AOL, Time Warner, and Sony, for three hundred and twenty million dollars, and sixty-five million…
- ▶ 16:48 Josh Felser So with the spinner, we were asked what our number was, and we, and I remember, I was sitting in the boardroom with AOL, and I, I said, five hundred million.
20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year
- ▶ 4:16 John Borthwick And so I was, I ended up selling my first company to AOL. 2 times in the scene
20VC: CEO Whisperer Jerry Colonna on How Investors Mimic Aggressive Behaviour To Cover Insecurity and Why Vulnerability is Key To Success In VC
- ▶ 4:12 Jerry Colonna In the same month, in the same period in November, we launched this business at Comdex in Vegas, and he sold his company BookLink to America Online.
20VC: Do VC's Really Hustle Enough? The Takeaways From Watching Twitter Scale From 30 to 2,500 & Why Chris Sacca Is Like Yoda with Ryan Sarver, Partner @ Redpoint
- ▶ 2:55 Ryan Sarver Uh, but along the way, kind of in middle school, became kind of a self-taught programmer, starting out in kind of AWOL chat rooms and BBSs.
20VC: Sam Lessin on Why Bots Will Change Business & The Internet Has Mostly Failed
- ▶ 10:19 Sam Lessin Like, you know, I remember very distinctly the days of active buddy, um, and smarter child on aim, this whole pattern of, uh, websites and immersive experiences becoming messaging as the primary thing, and then messaging becoming bots.
20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content
- ▶ 0:32 Harry Stebbings And Gary joined Spotify from AOL, where he was the director of sales strategy and operations at Patch. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:48 Gary Liu In, I left to join AOL to lead revenue operations and strategy at what is now the infamous patch.com.
- ▶ 5:33 Gary Liu The funny thing is, at all of these three companies that you mentioned, Google, AOL, and Spotify, I entered into those companies. 3 times in the scene
20 VC: David Tisch @ Box Group on The Future of Consumer Mobile, Developing Pattern Recognition and FOMO
- ▶ 2:16 David Tisch and so I've had an internet obsession, uh, I think from, you know, the day I got my first modem, which was a 2400 baud modem, um, and, and used AOL, and it sort of grew from there, and so AOL for me was this, this entryway into the…
20 VC 079: BETAWORKS WEEK: East vs West Coast Investing with Peter Rojas, EIR @ Betaworks, Co-Founder @ Weblogs & Engadget
- ▶ 0:30 Harry Stebbings Prior to joining Betaworks, he was VP of strategy at AOL, and he was also the co-founder of several startups, including WebBlogs, Inc., with previous guest Jason Calacanis, which was acquired by AOL in 2005. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:46 Peter Rojas We sold that business to AOL in 2005. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:08 Peter Rojas Uh, producing, uh, you know, hit products over the years, which I think is, is having tried to do it at AOL, I, I, I know it's no, no simple matter.
20 VC 069: Jeff Clavier, King of Seed Funding @ SoftTech VC on Brad Feld, Fitbit and Standout Startups
- ▶ 0:53 Harry Stebbings Facebook, Yahoo, and AOL.
20 VC 068: Why Now Is The Best Time To Be An Entrepreneur with Sean Seton-Rogers @ PROfounders Capital
- ▶ 24:42 unnamed speaker So whether it's something like Bebo that was sold to AOL, um, or others, it's, uh, it's about the ability to work alongside those great entrepreneurs.
Jason Calacanis: The World's Greatest Angel Investor
- ▶ 0:30 Harry Stebbings He's the founder at Launch and Launch Festival, and he sold his previous company, WebBlogs, to AOL for thirty million.
- ▶ 3:05 Jason Calacanis Yeah, I mean, we, we super distribute, so you'll see on YouTube, like, you know, maybe an episode gets a thousand there, or it might get 20,000, um, and then this archive power is just crazy, but most people are using, uh, podcasting apps…
20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO
- ▶ 0:26 Harry Stebbings Following game replays, Chris has held leadership positions at AOL and Bain, before making his foray into venture capital with Atomico, the London-based venture fund founded by Skype founder Nicholas Zenstorm.
- ▶ 2:39 Chris Dark Um, I was the product director there in Europe, um, and that was acquired by AOL Time Warner, um, and ultimately then spun out of AOL Time Warner when AOL, um, IPO'd.
20 VC 028: Co-Founding TechCrunch and The Benefits of Not Raising Venture Funding with Keith Teare
- ▶ 14:48 Harry Stebbings Did that change for you with the AOL outcome?
20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech
- ▶ 0:27 Harry Stebbings However, most recently, he was the founder and CEO of Pictella, a super rich media technology company that was acquired by AOL in 2010. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:55 Greg Rogers So soon after that sale, um, I spent a little time at AOL, but then I decided that I wanted to create my own destiny, and I launched a company with, um, a, a dear friend of mine, um, and the company is called Pictella, and Pictella was a… 6 times in the scene