YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Case

lines on the record: 74
first: 2016-04-18
most recent: 2016-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Big companies have lots of different priorities and they were focused more on protecting what was there as opposed to reaching into the future, leaning into the future and trying to create something out of this combined company. So it was a tough lesson for me, both on people and strategy and the need to make sure you align people around the vision. And so you actually can execute against the other vision”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those cable guys weren't going to help you To me, that was the biggest For Time War And time where we're This triple play. And the music? The music. I was just with a lot of people who were involved in your music service, which was very early, and it got killed because of.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still maintain that it's the right. Well, both for financial reasons and strategic reasons because when we went public in 1992, the market value was $70 million. Eight years later, when we did the merger, it was $160 billion, the best performing stock of the decade. And we did think diversifying our mix of businesses and revenues and profits would be healthy. And that, I think, was the right call. And we also believe that we knew broadband was the future. We were the leader in narrowband. We didn't have a path to broadband. In time where I had the largest broadband system. I thought they would.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Job of building relationships with more of the executive better job of articulating where I thought the world was going and why this company was uniquely positioned and brought them along. Maybe it would have worked out better.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I stepped aside as CEO to have the merger and I thought the right thing to do was to kind of get out of the way. So I mostly worked out of DC, not out of New York, which was where their headquarters were, because I didn't think, not just with Jerry Levin as the CEO, but also other people, Dick Parsons and Bob Pittman and Ted Turner. There are a lot of people in the room and a lot of big personalities. So I thought the healthy thing would be a step aside and not create any confusion. So focus mostly on kind of managing the board and even AOL. I stopped going to AOL because I was no longer reporting to me. In retrospect, I think I stepped back too far and I was perceived as being arrogant and kind of, you know, didn't really care about the company or his money. It was a mistake. I did care about the company and I concluded that the best way to make sure it can move forward was to provide clarity regarding leadership so I should be less involved, but that ended up backfiring and people were mad and frustrated. I'd done better.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“16 years ago The one thing that happened that didn't work was people in culture. The idea of the merger was sensible then and sensible now about convergence of technology, some of the things that have happened on the cable engineers like Skype and the iPod and Netflix and Facebook and Twitter. There's no mobile at the time and so forth. Those were the things we were talking about doing and there's no company that was better positioned to lead the way in digital music than company that owned AOL and own time Warner Cable, largest cable system owned Warner Music, the largest music system. So the ideas were there, the potential was there, but we just weren't able to get people aligned around the right priorities and work together in a collaborative way. And so I referenced the book this Thomas Edison quote, which for me really summarized the merger, which is vision without execution is hallucination. Right. The idea of the merger made sense. The execution of the merger didn't. And that really was related to people.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do They love you so much, they hate you, right? Well, Newspaper is surprised. I remember So, one of the things that's important is AOL was really a pioneer in lots of areas. I am and communications and community. But, you know, there's an expression that planes are covered with the bodies of pioneers. You would call AOL Facebook of its day in a lot of ways. I mean, if you think about it, there was a lot of that going on. What happened? And then I'm going to get into the book, The Second Wave and the Third Wave, you think, is coming. But right now, looking back, how long's it been since that merger happened to 15? 16 years ago. And then it fell apart, essentially. What was the one thing you think, I know you've been asked this a lot, if you reflect right now that happened there that occurred?”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't remember that. I do. So that side was really, really disappointing, frustrating. We absolutely let people down. On the positive side, it was remarkable that just a few short years before nobody knew what we were doing. They love you so much. They hate you, right? Well, if we had been down for 23 days, 10 years earlier, nobody would have cared. Nobody would have known. And I'd gone from something nobody knew about or cared about to something they couldn't live without. And it was, as you remember, the lead story most of the newspapers. You were surprised. Yeah, it was sort of like, wow, I guess internet has arrived, AOL has arrived, but it also reminded us that we had to hold ourselves to a high bar because the expectations were high as people started truly integrating this in their lives and really counting on it.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“19 hours or something like that? 23 hours. And I think it's got a good news, bad news, I say in the book. The bad news is we really let people down. We told people this is an important medium and they should trust AOL and they should do their email on it. And a lot of people were conducting their business on it. And we were down and they couldn't do connected, couldn't get their business going.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well quilt. Yeah, well, I think it was reflective of the core focus we always had, which was we believe the killer app of the internet was people. And we used to call it community. We thought content was important. Commerce was important. Connectivity was important. We called the seas. But the most important was community. So our focus was always on whether it be people, connection chat rooms, or instant messaging and buddy lists and things like that. How do we connect people, both people who already know each other and want to stay close as well as people who don't know each other but have a shared interest and would benefit of being connected? So that was always for us sort of the focus, sort of the soul of the medium, the core of AOL. And I think people did feel connected. It's also a way to make the service, the idea of the internet more accessible to more people I want to know. It wasn't scary. It was friendly. It was inviting. It was fun.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a lot of partner conferences with different folks because, again, this was the early days of the medium. We weren't just building a company, we were building the medium. And so there was a lot of education required even, as you know, I used to write these monthly letters. Yes, people love that. I felt a little bit like the mayor of the community, not just the CEO of the company. We're trying to make sure our members, our customers were part of this and felt like pioneers. People did have a relationship with you.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's fair. I think we were intending to be arrogant, but I think we probably were perceived as being difficult to work with. And I think one of the lessons I talk about in the book for big companies, particularly successful companies, is how do you figure out a way to reach out beyond your walls and figure out a way to connect with and hopefully partner with innovators around the edges and make it easy for entrepreneurs to work with you, not hard.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's tough, and I don't think we did it particularly well, but it was also, I think, when we went public in 1992, the first internet company to go public, we had less than 200 employees. And eight years later, we merged with the time where I think it was 5,000 employees. So it went from dozens to hundreds and then quickly to many thousands. It was just the nature of our growth rate and trying to go from public head. I remember the number 184,000 customers and then seven, eight years later was 20, 25 million customers. So by definition, we are going to add a lot of people and needed to expand the array of services we're offering and brands we had and so forth. But one of the takeaways, and certainly it's true with the merge with Time Warner as well, is the importance of people and culture.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, obviously, in 15 years, we did a lot of things. We liked a lot of things we didn't like. The thing that was probably most important was figuring out this exact point about ease of use and then figuring out a way to make it easy to try it, the whole idea of the free trial disc, the things that would, I would say, I would regret, particularly in a later stage.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I thought we were. Idea that Well, we pushed the ease of use. I used to joke that we needed to make it easy enough for my mom to use and how to make it mainstream. She didn't particularly like that. She said, why don't you pick on your dad? I know more about this stuff than he does, which is true. But the point was we wanted to be something for everybody. We were trying to democratize access to information. We're trying to level the playing field. We wanted the world to get online. So it required a lot of things to make sure it was something that was kind of something that really would strike a chord with everybody.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could argue AOL really was the company. I mean, a lot of there have been a lot of attempts that Coffer was Confucierve and Prodigy. And I think it was a prodigy which was Sears and IBM, and I used to call it everything Sears knew about computing and everything IBM knew about retail. It was just a disaster. But, you know, AOL was the first one to break through, and I still have the foam finger that you gave out that said, It's so easy to use, no wonder it's number one. Which I thought was kind of brilliant, the idea that it's easy to use was the pushing point of that.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just building the internet, building awareness. It started kind of mid 80s as something nobody knew about or cared about by the end of that first wave around 2000. Everybody was online and it had become an important part of their lives. You could argue that.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's challenging. If you really want to kind of, in our case, really want to get the world online. There was a lot of things you had to do to make it easier to use and more useful and more fun and affordable. It just takes time if you want to change how kids learn in classes. It's going to take time. If you want to change how hospitals, which you have been trying to do, you've done a lot of projects.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially controlled video, and then as you know, the first five years or so of that company was really private label services. We worked with Commodore and worked with Apple and Tandy and IBM. And it wasn't until 1990 that we really kind of launched, relaunched as America Online, which pay me a well. So it really was a decade from the time I read that Tuffler book to the time we really got going with AOL. And so one of the lessons even I talk about in the book is the importance of perseverance. I think revolutions happen in evolutionary ways. And sometimes you'll get lucky and I'll be an overnight success and you saw some of those in the second wave. I think they'll be rare in the third wave.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In 1980, I had. I started 1981, 82, kind of toying around, got a computer, figure out a way to connect this peripheral device called a modem to the computer so it actually could connect. That dial-up size I still love gives me. It does. I have that be my alarm in the morning. That's true. I just wanted to experiment and finally, as you know, moved out to the DC area in 1983 to join a startup that promptly failed. But two years later, Jim Kimsey and Mark Serif and I became AOL. So it took me nearly five years.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grew up in Hawaii. Grew up in Hawaii. It was not, particularly actually the one computer class I took at college. I almost flunked. I hated it because it was still that era where you worked with punch cards. We're dating ourselves. And I know I'm dating myself. So I just wasn't that interested in that side of it, but I was interested in figuring out how to do what I could to create this medium, this electronic...”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was calling Electronic Cottage initially in the 80s, it was called Online Services. And when we launched America Online, our competitors were CompuServe and Saurus and Prodigy, things like that. That was called Online Service. It wasn't until 1991 that was even legal to connect consumers or businesses to the internet. So the 80s were more of that experimentation phase. But just reading that Tafa book really kind of set me on the path of trying to figure out how to get the world online because I thought I was a powerful idea and just wanted to be part of it.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think it should happen because that will fuel the rise of the rest, the fleeing of people from Silicon Valley that move to other parts of the country. I see. All right. We're moving along. I could play offense. All right.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was in college. I was a senior in college 1980 and read this book by Toffler called The Third Wave. And I was just mesmerized by it. He was talking about this notion of electronic cottage, new ways to get information, communicate with people. And this was before the internet really was a concept that people were aware of. But I was sure he was right. And so I wanted to move in that direction.”
2016-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Case’s “Third Wave” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT