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 can build a company and make money, great. But eventually, my intention is to give all my money away. I told my kids that. [Wealth] is not particularly helpful to kids. It's almost a burden. It's better to allow them to do their own thing and have their own successes.
I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world
And I'd say one of the great lessons I've learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.
I think what people love about the Steve Jobs story is not just the track record at Apple, but that comeback story, that he was thrown out of Apple, came back and built the company even greater. And that perseverance is so important in terms of entrepreneurship. And nobody is a better role model for that, for all entrepreneurs all over the world than Steve Jobs.
It's silly for me to raise expectations too much, but I think I'm right on the basic trend, which is shifting power to consumers.
I like ... what I characterize as more built-to-last ideas rather than built-to-flip ideas.
It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have if they have the right passion, perspective and are able to align the interest of a great team.
If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.
It's not about how to get started; it's about how to get noticed.
You can be entrepreneurial even if you don’t want to be in business. You can be a social entrepreneur focused on the not-for-profit sector. You can be an agriculture entrepreneur if you want to change how people think about farming. You can be a policy entrepreneur if you want to go into government. The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.
I was a better builder than a manager. I'd rather focus on maximizing the opportunities swinging for the fences than minimizing the risk with bunts and singles.
All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.
You shouldn't focus on why you can't do something, which is what most people do. You should focus on why perhaps you can, and be one of the exceptions.
It's still a problem, and there's always going to be some divide when there's some economic disparity or technological disparity.