AOL

“Steve Case approached him before Time Warner about an AOL Disney combination.”

“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 billion dollars on in the US from Italy.”

“At one point, TCI was going to buy a third of Prodigy. It was The biggest online provider at the time, and it was terrible... And AOL had just gone public and was worth a hundred and ten million. Prodigy, this deal was to pay four hundred million for a third o…”

“Sunil was the only Internet product manager, the only internet employee at AOL.”

“OpenAI wants to be the place you do everything. They want to be like the aggregator. I think a critic would say people compare them to Netscape. I think the better analogy if you're an OpenAI skeptic would be AOL, where they want to be sort of like the interfa…”

“Jerry Yang and Yahoo were chasing Rupert to essentially acquire News Corporation, you know, following the footsteps of, you know, what AOL did.”

“AOL is actually, I believe, a top five, the fifth most used email inbox in the Western world.”

“Google will then share back 85 cents on the dollar to AOL for all of that revenue. AOL wants two things in exchange for turning over their entire business in the search advertising world to Google. One is, we want warrant coverage, so what they end up getting …”

“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.”

“This made Google a major player in the paid listings market almost overnight, and they weren't at all before. Overture dominated this market before.”

“Pay massive revenue share to your distribution partners. In some cases, up to a hundred percent of the revenues generated. We'll talk about who the distribution partners are in a second. But even earlier, we heard with that, ah, AOL deal, they were willing to …”

“I'll just live out of here. And so that's what I ended up doing for maybe like four or five months. I was like living out of this headquarters over on a page mill and El Camino in Palo Alto.”

“Yahoo and AOL. Early on. Those were the entry points. AOL didn't know how to do a search. Yahoo didn't think search was important.”

“If I remember correctly, the, we paid AOL more money than we made. This was like a hundred plus percent ref share.”

“When we first started only three percent of people were online, and those three percent were online an average of one hour a week.”

“In the early days when we got started, and AOL was started, as you mentioned, in 1985, it was really, can you raise the money to get launched? And not that many people could. It was, there was only a handful of maybe less than a dozen venture capitalists back …”

“When we went to unlimited use, yeah, there were some people using it all the time, and we lost money on them, and some people using it infrequently, and we made money on them, so it ends up being a law of the averages”

“Yeah, so it was a couple engineers that just went off and built this, almost against the wishes of management. It was not originally intended to really be for social use or for kids at all. It was more like the idea they had was it was going to be kind of like…”

“They start negotiating. They're talking about a, call it, two million dollar license deal. And all of a sudden, AOL comes in and buys the whole company of Booklink for thirty million dollars.”

“And had we signed that deal, we definitely would have been out of business.”

“He's going to sell the company to Time Warner for eight billion dollars. And then a few years later, Time Warner is going to merge with AOL. Ted Turner stock goes up to a value of ten billion dollars, and then he winds up losing over the next 30 months, eight …”

“The Motley Fool had a partnership with AOL in the nineties and into the 2000 where for those of, for those people who don't remember AOL, it was basically, you know, you dialed up, you get, you got to this, they called it a portal, which was essentially a webs…”

“When it comes to reaching out to whales for this sort of stuff, you actually don't want to reach out to them when they're, you don't want them to be whales initially. You want them to be like when I'm sure when the Motley Fool reached out to AOL, like the AOL …”

“I mean, every social communicator, every, whether it's Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, everything becomes chat in the end.”

“Notice that Zucknet actually beat AOL to market.”

“Google gave more than a hundred percent to AOL and close to a hundred percent to Yahoo in its early years.”

“Half of the traffic of the internet came through AOL in the US.”

“And when I sold weblogs to AOL, people were like, oh my God, these people are idiots. They gave thirty million dollars to, you know, for weblogs Inc. They've only got 200 K in revenue.”

“This company is also AOL. So we also own AOL, which is still very profitable and does a lot of free cash flow.”

“It had been mismanaged, I think under Yahoo and AWOL and Verizon, and we felt like we could turn it around.”

“And in Silicon Valley at the time, you know, it really, there is a very monocultural aspect of, you know, folks from a few schools, you know, folks having worked at a few companies and I had neither, you know, I worked, I went to Waterloo, which is in Canada, …”

“Adapt TV also raised money. I think it totally raised forty eight million dollars and that was acquired by AOL for about 400 and something million dollars.”

“Ted did the right thing and gave us two million over two years to spin out the Mozilla project.”

“We actually released that on AOL's servers without them knowing. It took them a few hours to figure this out. They called us. We shut the whole thing down. But in those few hours, it was downloaded about five or 6000 times all this open source code that we put…”

“And if Yahoo or AOL had been in a different place, maybe the portal model would have worked. You know, maybe that horizontal model would have worked better with a completely different kind of management.”

“So in 1995, when we started, all of us were given AOL accounts and things were still in the AOL world. And in 1996, in our second year we ended up switching to school accounts for the first time.”

“We got our seed financing by 1.6 million. I think it was their largest investment at that time, too, in any content partners.”

“We had aliases. Like, mine was Anya, and I would sit in this chat room waiting for people to show up, and most people tend to just lurk. They wanted to hear and want, read other people's conversations, and you had to try to figure out a way to get people engag…”

“You know, 20 years ago, the Tribune invested in AOL, and that funded, you know, 20 years of innovation for the Tribune company until that money ran out. And they caved.”

“We started only three percent of people were online, and those three percent were online an hour a week on average, so it was pretty early, and I spent the next 15 or so years building that company, and then when we merged AOL with Time Warner, I stepped down …”

“We were the first internet company to go public in the 1992. We raised ten million dollars in our IPO. The market value that day was seventy million dollars. And seven, eight years later, when we were negotiating the merger with Time Warner, it had gone from s…”

“Half the traffic on the internet went through AOL.”

“The same thing happened by the way with the internet versus AOL. AOL had a, it was a much slicker interface and more performant in the beginning. The internet was clunky and weird. And slower and all these other things, but you had all the developers building …”

“If you look at the history of, The internet, the web, and mobile, a lot of bundling was occurring in the early days where it wasn't completely user generated. It wasn't Geocities super early on. It was a lot of, it was AOL. It was kind of bundled news before e…”

“If you go a lot bigger than AOL, or, you know, at some point, like, this is probably the biggest company you can buy and not have major regulatory oversight”

“For many people who are connected in Myanmar, it's still a small percentage of the population, but Facebook is the internet. It's almost like AOL in the late nineties here in the States.”

“We had at one point over 90%, you know, market share for all people on the internet using our browser, and it turned out there were fifty million people on the internet. Like, fifty million people around the world were on the internet. By the way, twenty-five …”

“So when we spun it out of AOL, we had the thesis that we could create a next gen B to B database. So think of next gen Dan and Bradstreet with a much more efficient and organic data acquisition model. So think of LinkedIn, but for companies instead of for peop…”

“So it was a long process. It took us, I think, nine months.”

“More than one third of the use case for Crunchbase, the lookup use case, original Crunchbase use case, We're not investors. We're salespeople. They were using Crunchbase for prospecting, and that's what got us excited. One-third was HR-related, people in the r…”

“Over the last couple of years, we rebuilt everything to make it scalable, because it was a great asset when it comes to data, not necessarily a great asset when it comes to software architecture, and also when it comes to business model.”

“So we invested seven million dollars.”

“There's no IAB. There are no banners. It was, you know, all basically a subscription business.”

“We got our seed financing by 1.6 million. I think it was their largest investment at that time, too, in any content partners.”

“You know, we have the former COO of AOL is, is one of our investors.”

“We had actually received a verbal acquisition offer in early stages discussions for a buyout by AOL at the time, which is, you know, AOL at that time was massive, but we ended up turning it down and just focused, you know, we thought we were going to do much b…”

“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 said, five hundred million. Now, first, what was that based on? Nothing. It was just, I said it with conviction. I remember, I looked…”

“Essentially, management started with zero of the company, and the investors with a hundred percent.”

“We always believed that the killer app of the internet was people. Some thought it would be content, particularly the media companies. Some thought it would be commerce, particularly the retail companies. We thought content and commerce would be important, but…”

“But when we went public, took AOL public in 1992, it was the first internet company to go public, and we had less than 200,000 customers.”