AOL

“Well, at the time it was more like 50%.”

“I always believe, still believe, the idea of the merger made sense. I think it really was the execution, particularly around people and culture, where things got rocky, and I was very frustrated that the company wasn't able to achieve the kind of vision that I…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“So it came down to a close vote, but eventually the board decided not to sell to Microsoft.”

“We went from our company when we did the merge, I think it was five billion of revenue, about one billion of profit. The combined company had forty billion of revenue, ten billion of profit.”

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

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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”