The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future (21 page)
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Authors: Steve Case
Yes, the future is uncertain—and that’s what makes it so exciting. And yes, it will be hard—which is why it’s important to remember what Teddy Roosevelt said a century ago:
It is not the critic who counts. . . . The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;
who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
So put down this book. Pick up your smartphone, your notepad—your blowtorch, if you’re feeling ambitious. Take action. Be fearless. You may stumble, but get back up. Keep going. Keep tinkering, perhaps late at night, after the children are in bed. Build something that makes you proud—but not satisfied enough to stop dreaming about what comes next. Enter the arena. Topple an empire and build your own from the ground up.
The world is waiting. Are you?
I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. On my first birthday, Hawaii became the 50th state.
Case Family
My family in Honolulu in 1967: from left, me, my older brother Danny, my father Dan, my mother Carol, my older sister Carin, and my younger brother Jeff.
Suburban Press
When I was attending Williams College in the late 1970s I was the lead singer in a band—but I didn’t sing very well. I decided to switch to the business side.
My first TV interview, on PBS’s
Computer Chronicles
in 1986. I was 28 years old at the time—and really nervous.
Computer Chronicles, Stewart Cheifet Productions
Our first brand, QuantumLink, launched in 1985 as “the online service that’s easy-to-use, inexpensive, useful and fun.” At the time just 3% of Americans were online, for—on average—only one hour per week.
AOL, Inc.
At what became AOL, our Friday beer blasts were a good way to get a sense of what was on our team’s mind. Here I am with co-founder (and CTO) Marc Seriff, early employee Keith Barron, and co-founder (and founding CEO) Jim Kimsey in 1989.
Amy Arnold
America Online screen, circa 1999. At its peak, AOL handled nearly half of all consumer Internet traffic in the U.S. It was “the Internet and a whole lot more” for most Americans. AOL was, for its time, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram combined.
AOL, Inc.
On Wall Street the day AOL was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. AOL was the first Internet company to go public, raising $11 million at a $70 million valuation in 1992. Eight years later, AOL was worth $160 billion, making it the best performing stock of the decade.
AOL, Inc.
Those AOL disks became an American icon. We distributed hundreds of millions of them in the 1990s to encourage people to try our service. It worked: we grew from 200,000 customers in 1992 to 25 million a decade later.
AOL, Inc.
The first of many magazine covers: AOL was going from being unknown and irrelevant, to central and much talked about. I used to joke that AOL was a “10 years in the making overnight success.”
From the pages of TIME © 1997 Time Inc. All rights reserved. TIME and the TIME logo are registered trademarks of Time Inc. used under license.
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