Steve Case

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

“And we started this effort a decade ago when we launched Rise of the Rest, started doing, you know, bus tours around the country, then launched investment fund, which made now 200 investments in a hundred different, different cities in what we call Rise of the…”

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

“And the early days was, can you build it? Now it's really much more, can you commercialize it? Can you break through. And for a growing number of companies, also, can you navigate some of the policy challenges, some of the regulatory issues in areas like healt…”

“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 …”

“You can't really sell to the students, because they don't have much money, and they prioritize beer. You have to sell to the parents who are missing their kids, love their kids, and maybe feeling a little guilty about, you know, things”

“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”

“When Quora first started, there was this moment when you'd have, like, really important, influential people chatting on it all the time. So you'd have, like, Steve Case telling stories about shipping DVDs and CDs for AOL in the nineties. And then, but then as …”

“So I don't really look at the market cycles, particularly when we're looking at making new investments.”

“Far more often, it's a slog, and it's a decade before you kind of really break through, and through that experience, I now realize that, you know, a revolution sometimes happens in more evolutionary ways.”

“I always recognized, particularly as a leader, particularly as the CEO, that I had to be A little bit of a shock absorber for the company, and when everybody was talking about how great they were, remind them that super competitive market, and remind them that…”

“Vision without execution is hallucination. And so it's a reminder that vision is important, but execution is more important. And that comes down to people and priorities and creating that team dynamic.”

“We created something called Q-Link for Commodore. We created something called PC-Link for RadioShack. We created something called Promenade for IBM. We created something called Apple-Link for Apple.”

“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…”

“It was, I think, the first time Apple licensed their brand to another company, and indeed, not long after, within the first year of launching the Apple Inc. Service, Apple basically decided they didn't like the idea of, you know, they wish they hadn't licensed…”

“We just raised a bunch of money, about five million dollars, which for us was a lot of money, on the idea of expanding this Apple deal.”

“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.”

“When we decided in the United States to go public, the board decided I was too young to be CEO.”

“A woman there basically said, well, my husband does voiceover kind of thing, so he'd be happy to tape some messages, and so I, you know, got my little pen down, little post-it note, and wrote a bunch of different things, like, you've got mail, and that guy, El…”

“I think the year was 1996, and we had moved to unlimited pricing, and we had system problems, or our system actually was down for 23 hours, nobody could log in, and it was a national news story. It led the network TV news, was the lead article in most newspape…”