The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Case: AOL Time Warner Merger Made Sense but Failed on Execution
“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…”
Steve Case: The internet would not exist without government intervention
“The internet wouldn't exist without the government. You know, it was the government 50 years ago that funded DARPA that created the internet. It was the government Through the judicial system that broke up the phone company, you know, Ma Bell, which unleashed …”
Case: Tech success has shifted from product building to navigating regulation
“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…”
Case: In 1985, fewer than a dozen VC firms backed startups
“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 …”
Case: College services must sell to guilty parents, not cash-poor students
“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”
Case: AOL Management Started with 0% Equity in 1985 Restart
“Essentially, management started with zero of the company, and the investors with a hundred percent.”
Steve Case: The killer app of the internet was always community
“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…”
Case: AOL Carried About 50% of Internet Traffic at Its Peak
“Well, at the time it was more like 50%.”
Case: Rise of the Rest Has Invested in 200 Companies Across 100 Cities
“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…”
Case: When AOL started, just 3% of people were online
“When we first started only three percent of people were online, and those three percent were online an average of one hour a week.”
Case: How AOL made unlimited pricing work through the law of averages
“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”
Case: Control Video Corporation laid off 70-80% after 1983 failure
“When they launched the product in the fall of 1983, it basically failed, and so suddenly this company was in free fall. So this was my first experience, you know, a few months after I was there, I was Kind of on teetering on bankruptcy. Had to lay off 70, 80% …”
Case: IBM, Sears, and CBS Committed $1B to Prodigy
“There was one in particular called Prodigy that IBM and Sears and for a while, CBS, committed about a billion dollars to launch Prodigy.”
Case: Only 3% of Americans Were Online in Mid-1980s
“About three percent of America was online an average of one hour a week.”
Case: Apple paid millions to buy out brand license, prompting AOL rebrand
“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…”
Steve Case: AOL Was the First Internet Company to IPO
“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.”
Case: AOL board removed him as CEO for being too young
“When we decided in the United States to go public, the board decided I was too young to be CEO.”
Steve Case: 'You've Got Mail' was recorded overnight on a cassette tape
“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…”
Steve Case: AOL 1996 23-Hour Outage Became Major National News
“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…”
Case: AOL board narrowly voted against selling to Microsoft
“So it came down to a close vote, but eventually the board decided not to sell to Microsoft.”
Case: Merged AOL Time Warner Reached $40B Revenue and $10B Profit
“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.”
Steve Case: Early online access cost about $10 per hour
“It was kind of expensive to get online, about 10 dollars an hour.”
Case: Control Video's GameLine was like Netflix for Atari games
“The company was called Control Video Corporation. They had a product called GameLine, which at the time was almost like Netflix for video games. Back then, most people didn't have PCs, but a lot of people had Atari game machines. And so GameLine allowed you to…”