Steve Case
Steve Case
Stephen McConnell "Steve" Caseis an American entrepreneur, investor, and businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online. Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to invest in early and growth-stage startups through his Washington, D.C. based venture capital firm Revolution LLC...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth21 August 1958
CityHonolulu, HI
CountryUnited States of America
If you don't have both of them working together in a complementary, cohesive way, you're not going to be successful.
It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have
The pace of change and the threat of disruption creates tremendous opportunities...
What I have figured out is that I can predict the future. I just can't predict when.
The only way to continue to have a robust economy is to out-innovate other nations.
Because I do think - not just in building AOL - but just the world in which we live is a very confusing, rapidly changing world where technology has accelerated.
My father and his brothers were all lawyers, so I think that the expectation was probably for me to grow up to be an attorney, but it never really fascinated me that much. I was more interested in building things.
Keep your eye on the prize and focus on your mission. Remember what you’re trying to do, what your value is, why it’s important, and at the same time, change course and direction. If the market’s telling you different things how are you going to adjust to that?
I was not an outstanding student. I did a reasonable amount of work. I got generally good - pretty good grades, but I was not that passionate about getting straight A's.
I'm probably never going to be satisfied with anything we do. I think there's always the possibility of doing better. And I'd say we're doing better than we were a year ago, in terms of delivery and quality of service, but nowhere near what we should be doing .
You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.
We lose money on signing up the customers where there's some marketing costs associated with giving them a free month. It doesn't much matter whether you make a little bit or lose a little bit.. as you well know, because you lose a ton on every copy of The Washington Post (newspaper).
We need that same mentality in philanthropy, trying things, taking risks, recognizing the first try, maybe the second try, maybe the third try won't work. But if you stay at it and you're learning, you're talking to others, and you're learning together, eventually you'll break through and see the kind of impact you were hoping for.
When I was trying to popularize the concept of the Internet - ten or 15 years ago - I came up with this concept of "the 5 Cs." Services needed to have content, context, community, commerce, and connectivity. After that, when I was trying to think of what the key management principles were to build into the culture, I started talking about the Ps. The P's were things like passion, perseverance, perspective and people. I think the people aspect is really the most important one.