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Growing up in Hawaii, Steve Case and his older brother, Dan, were entrepreneurs. They sold newspapers, greeting cards, and lemonade. For the lemonade business they thought they’d hit on a winning formula – they took the ingredients from their mother’s kitchen, so all revenue was pure profit.
“The second time, Mother decided to charge us,” Case recalls, “and it wasn’t as much fun.”
When Case came east to Williams College, he went into business as a band member and concert promoter. But his entrepreneurial spirit didn’t impress business schools. He was rejected by every MBA program he applied to. So he went to work in marketing for Proctor & Gamble and Pizza Hut.
In 1983, he went to a consumer-electronics show in Las Vegas, where he met Bill Von Meister, an inventor who had started a company to sell video-game software electronically. A self-described gadget geek, Case already had bought a Kaypro personal computer. He then subscribed to the Source, invented by Von Meister as the first online service for consumers.
The two men hit it off. Case moved to Virginia as a marketing consultant for Von Meister’s company. A few months later, the video-game market collapsed, Von Meister was ousted, and the company’s backers brought in a new CEO, Jim Kimsey. The company, renamed Quantum Computer Services, launched an online service for Commodore computer users. That service would become AOL.
In the beginning, AOL was David in a field full of Goliaths: everyone from Reader’s Digest to General Electric was building an online service. How did AOL succeed?
“We knew we had to have a better product,” Case says. “We created a sense of community. It wasn’t about technology; it was about connecting members to interact with people they knew and people they would get to know. Our members became fanatics.”
It took nine years to get 1 million members. Nine years later, there were 30 million. One strategy AOL used was to mass-mail free software and promise one month of free service. Once newcomers were on AOL, they were hooked.
Steve Case was named CEO of AOL in 1991. He was 33. A year later, he relinquished the title to Jim Kimsey; the company was about to go public, and the board felt a gray head would reassure investors. A year later, Case had his title back. Eight years after that, Case engineered the merger with Time Warner, creating a huge media company with Case as chairman.
Since leaving AOL Time Warner in 2003, Case has focused on his foundation, which supports efforts to help nonprofits become self-sustaining and connect kids with technology, education, and healthcare.
The history of the AOL Time Warner merger is still being written, but the importance of the online service Case helped create is not in question.
“The dream we had that the Internet would be a part of everyday life has now happened,” he says.
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