AOL, every mention
116 scenes, the whole family · ← back to AOL
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 59Ben Gilbert 35Brendan Eich 12Jason Calacanis 8Brad Gerstner 1Anthony Gonzalez 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where AOL comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 1:18:14 Ben Gilbert AOL approached him.
- ▶ 1:18:15 David Rosenthal Steve Case approached him before Time Warner about an AOL Disney combination.
- ▶ 1:18:29 David Rosenthal But yeah, I was, I was say thanks, but no thanks to AOL.
- ▶ 1:18:33 Ben Gilbert I mean, looking at what AOL did with Time Warner, AOL merged its stock that was highly marked, but the intrinsic value of the company was actually worthless with Warner Brothers, like a, a real durable, stable company, at least at the time.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:46 Ben Gilbert The universe at the time is Microsoft sells sort of enterprise grade mail for a lot of money, or there's all these free web-based services popping up like Hotmail that Microsoft would end up buying and Yahoo Mail and AOL.
- ▶ 33:34 David Rosenthal AOL has MapQuest, which they've just bought for a billion dollars, and I'm hearing through the grapevine that Yahoo is about to make a big push and launch Yahoo Maps.
- ▶ 1:43:41 Ben Gilbert There's a whole presentation series that happens where Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google are basically all getting the pitch and DoubleClick is now showing.
- ▶ 1:58:19 David Rosenthal Mozilla was the nonprofit organization that was founded and spun off from Netscape when AOL bought Netscape.
- ▶ 2:08:08 Ben Gilbert Which AOL tried to do.
- ▶ 3:22:26 David Rosenthal Like, oh my gosh, what if this becomes AOL all over again?
- ▶ 3:22:34 David Rosenthal At least with AOL, we could do a deal with them and power their monetization.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:23:22 Ben Gilbert And I think he quickly gets the sense, maybe, but Netscape just got bought by AOL.
- ▶ 1:31:47 David Rosenthal Netscape, Yahoo, AOL.
- ▶ 1:32:58 David Rosenthal He goes back to his old colleagues at Netscape slash AOL and gets essentially like a proof of concept deal done with them.
- ▶ 1:33:30 David Rosenthal And I presume, having been acquired by AOL, this was now more of a strategic priority for Netscape, because this is AOL's, like, whole business model at this point, besides the, you know, monthly dial-up fees.
- ▶ 1:33:41 Ben Gilbert Worth remembering, AOL, way, way bigger.
- ▶ 1:33:44 Ben Gilbert At this .10 of millions of people using AOL, way fewer
- ▶ 2:00:56 Ben Gilbert They start powering the ads for Dogpile, Metasearch, then they get to the big boys with AOL and MSN, and eventually they get Yahoo.
- ▶ 2:19:24 David Rosenthal The landmark summer, 2002 deal with AOL.
- ▶ 2:21:33 Ben Gilbert Okay, so the AOL deal.
- ▶ 2:23:21 Ben Gilbert To go to AOL.
- ▶ 2:23:24 Ben Gilbert I mean, AOL has thirty-four million users at this point.
- ▶ 2:23:28 Ben Gilbert It's funny imagining this recently, AOL was still a big and important company, but if they could figure out how to be the search results provider, and more importantly, the ad provider for AOL, that is a potentially company-making event.
- ▶ 2:23:48 David Rosenthal Probably just transitioning from using AOL as my way to access the internet as a senior in high school.
- ▶ 2:24:13 David Rosenthal Google goes to AOL.
- ▶ 2:25:01 Ben Gilbert So, this AOL deal.
- ▶ 2:25:03 Ben Gilbert The current state of things is that the thirty-four million AOL users, their search experience is powered by Inktomi.
- ▶ 2:25:41 Ben Gilbert So Google can sign them up, or AOL can say, hey, advertiser, I know we have a longstanding relationship.
- ▶ 2:26:03 Ben Gilbert 85 cents on the dollar to AOL for all of that revenue.
- ▶ 2:26:09 Ben Gilbert AOL wants two things in exchange for turning over their entire business in the search advertising world to Google.
- ▶ 2:27:15 Ben Gilbert They took on a fixed dollar denominated obligation with that revenue guaranteed AOL.
- ▶ 2:27:28 David Rosenthal If they couldn't make it work on AOL.
- ▶ 2:28:46 David Rosenthal And so onboarding all of AOL's search ad inventory into Google's system was hugely strategically valuable.
- ▶ 2:30:37 Ben Gilbert So the ink to me comment on this, they commented to the Wall Street Journal on AOL's decision.
- ▶ 2:31:09 Ben Gilbert AOL made thirty-five million dollars in 2002, the first half year of the deal alone, and then in 2003 made two hundred million dollars.
- ▶ 2:31:36 David Rosenthal And they were taking all that inventory effectively from Overture, who was AOL's partner before this.
- ▶ 2:32:04 Ben Gilbert And he said, we have this huge AOL deal that we just signed.
- ▶ 2:32:35 Ben Gilbert And she basically hired all these great people, built out the entire AdWords sales function to service this monster AOL deal.
- ▶ 2:37:24 Ben Gilbert But even earlier, we heard with that, ah, AOL deal, they were willing to give AOL 85%.
- ▶ 2:53:35 David Rosenthal Portal ad deals that they were doing with AOL and others of sharing revenue with the publisher.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 12:25 David Rosenthal And then, speaking of family and friends chat, in 1997, when Mark is 13 years old, AOL launches AIM.
- ▶ 12:25 David Rosenthal And then, speaking of family and friends chat, in 1997, when Mark is 13 years old, AOL launches AIM.
- ▶ 12:37 David Rosenthal AOL Instant Messenger.
- ▶ 12:40 Ben Gilbert Many, many, many hours lost to AIM, and, uh, warning my friends and other dynamics of the AIM system to gang up on people, and to have other people gang up on me, and.
- ▶ 12:53 David Rosenthal Oh man, punting people off AIM, and.
- ▶ 13:08 David Rosenthal The crazy thing about AIM, to go on just a quick little digression here, I had no idea until doing the research.
- ▶ 13:13 David Rosenthal It was actually like a rogue skunkworks project within AOL.
- ▶ 13:38 David Rosenthal They ended up using it internally at AOL to communicate, and that's actually where away messages come from.
- ▶ 14:26 David Rosenthal So the other important thing about AIM, when it came out that I had no real conception of at all as a kid, was that it was free.
- ▶ 14:36 David Rosenthal So my family was an AOL family, like we were AOL subscribers, we had the You Got Mail, etc.
- ▶ 14:42 David Rosenthal But you didn't have to be a paying AOL subscriber to download and use AIM and join the network.
- ▶ 14:42 David Rosenthal But you didn't have to be a paying AOL subscriber to download and use AIM and join the network.
- ▶ 14:50 David Rosenthal AIM goes on to become this total viral thing in North America.
- ▶ 15:43 David Rosenthal And basically all of them and certainly all the young people were on AIM.
- ▶ 15:48 David Rosenthal So the other important thing about AIM and AOL here is it was pretty easy to hack, but
- ▶ 15:48 David Rosenthal So the other important thing about AIM and AOL here is it was pretty easy to hack, but
- ▶ 15:54 David Rosenthal like, oh man, there was just a field day that kids and teenagers had with like AIM bots, punting software, wares, hacking programs.
- ▶ 16:15 David Rosenthal And it let you kind of be a punk and like kick people off of AIM by bombarding them with messages.
- ▶ 16:22 David Rosenthal You know, you could do some like teenage punk stuff, but it also let you extend the functionality of what AOL and AIM was.
- ▶ 16:22 David Rosenthal You know, you could do some like teenage punk stuff, but it also let you extend the functionality of what AOL and AIM was.
- ▶ 16:48 David Rosenthal It's like all this personalization of like, hey, I don't want just what AOL gives me.
- ▶ 17:18 David Rosenthal He was doing ZuckNet, he was doing all these little projects, but like, you know, here's AOL, this sort of unintentionally, infinitely hackable and extensible canvas that he can play around on.
- ▶ 18:58 David Rosenthal And there, Mark meets another kid who's a lot like himself, who also is really into computers, really into AIM and everything going on there, and Mark's like, yeah, man, I really made the right choice.
- ▶ 20:44 David Rosenthal And in fact, AOL, I think, would acquire Winamp a couple years later.
- ▶ 25:35 David Rosenthal BuddyZoo takes your buddy list from AIM, from AOL, and effectively turns it into a social network.
- ▶ 25:35 David Rosenthal BuddyZoo takes your buddy list from AIM, from AOL, and effectively turns it into a social network.
- ▶ 26:46 David Rosenthal This feels like something more on the order of AIM itself.
- ▶ 27:16 David Rosenthal They're staying in touch the whole time and collaborating and working through coding challenges together on, what else, on AIM.
- ▶ 42:36 David Rosenthal In addition to, technically, because of open source and the LAMP stack, and also socially because of AIM and everything going on, the world sorta, for the first time, something like Facebook being able to be built for no money and no…
- ▶ 50:24 David Rosenthal You put in your AIM screen name, you put in your cell phone, you put in your interests, you put in your classes.
- ▶ 1:29:55 David Rosenthal Adam D'Angelo does go back to Caltech and then through AIM, I guess, remotely helps collaborate with the company until he graduates and in 2006 and becomes CTO officially.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:33 David Rosenthal But if you rewind just a little bit back to, like, 92, 93, 94, even into early 95, going online for consumers meant using a service like CompuServe or Prodigy or, of course, the big one, AOL.
- ▶ 7:18 Ben Gilbert It was like you had to have some negotiating power and know someone at AOL to go do a deal to get your content on their platform.
- ▶ 7:57 David Rosenthal So in 1993, they start sniffing around AOL and see if maybe Microsoft could acquire AOL.
- ▶ 8:05 David Rosenthal Steve Case, the founder of AOL, isn't interested in selling, but there's this whole thing where Paul Allen goes off by himself and he buys a large stake and that creates all sorts of headaches because Microsoft is like, well, if we can't…
- ▶ 27:26 David Rosenthal Anyway, ok, meanwhile, remember the online services, the CompuServe, you know, Prodigy, AOL, etc.
- ▶ 27:45 Ben Gilbert So I think it was late 93 or early 94, but this was a seminal moment where the AOLs of the world interconnected with the internet, and now you could not just navigate the proprietary services, but also surf the open web.
- ▶ 28:46 David Rosenthal And all of a sudden, AOL comes in and buys the whole company of Booklink for thirty million dollars.
- ▶ 29:02 David Rosenthal There's Booklink that AOL just bought.
- ▶ 42:36 David Rosenthal Microsoft has now done deals with AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, all the old online services to ditch whatever browsers they were using and bundle in Internet Explorer.
- ▶ 48:18 David Rosenthal So, to close the book on Netscape, in November, 1998, AOL acquires Netscape in an all stock deal for just over four billion dollars, but again, all stock.
- ▶ 1:23:42 Ben Gilbert Sun, AOL, real networks.
- ▶ 4:16:56 Ben Gilbert You had Yahoo, AOL, the whole cable and media sector.
Visa (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:12:20 David Rosenthal And for folks who either weren't alive in the U.S. at this time or not Americans, CompuServe was like an AOL competitor in the early days of the internet.
- ▶ 2:12:33 David Rosenthal So as a consumer, you would pay a monthly fee to CompuServe or AOL or whatever, and it would be your internet service provider, but also like your email and, you know, your portal to the web.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 8:33 Ben Gilbert Everything you sold to AOL.
- ▶ 8:34 Jason Calacanis I think I sold to AOL.
- ▶ 13:04 Jason Calacanis At AOL, and I had sold my company AOL, and, like, the revolving door of AOL.
- ▶ 13:19 Jason Calacanis And so I went to this, and I just sold Weblogs Inc to them.
- ▶ 13:21 Ben Gilbert Like a million AOL users?
- ▶ 13:27 Jason Calacanis And with AOL and other assets they wanted to buy, they were gonna march to a billion users.
- ▶ 1:35:59 Jason Calacanis And when I sold weblogs to AOL, people were like,
- ▶ 1:36:21 Jason Calacanis So then they would put an Engadget or an Autoblog story or Blogging Baby or whatever other blog we had on the homepage of AOL, and a half million people would flow through, and then they would put those ads on our sites.
- ▶ 1:36:39 Jason Calacanis And those people were like, great, um, because it was costing AOL to make content like 500 dollars per piece of content.
- ▶ 2:14:50 David Rosenthal You get that AOL weblogs exit.
- ▶ 2:15:11 Jason Calacanis Five or 10 on it, and I'm sitting there, and they're like, oh, wires are good, you know, the BD people are AOL, and so I'm like, hitting refresh.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 12:47 David Rosenthal This was the AOL days leading into the Netscape days.
- ▶ 2:42:26 Ben Gilbert And due to the court documents, there was a, uh, conversation leaked about Kevin strategizing over AIM with a very strategic advisor about how to position the sale to Facebook.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 3:58:28 Ben Gilbert and oh, now I'm old enough for it to be on our AppleTalk network, and old enough for it to be connected to the actual internet so I can use things like AIM.
From NFL to Startup COO to Congressman Regulating Crypto (with Rep. Anthony Gonzalez) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:01:38 Anthony Gonzalez Um, I think my first AOL chat room I was in, I was definitely not a teenager, um, and shouldn't have been in there.
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