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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.

-Steve Case

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You Can Be Entrepreneurial

Steve Case

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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.

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Today, National Geographic Has A Membership Side With A Magazine And Some Television Side, And They Generate About A Billion Dollars In Revenue, And They're Profitable. And So At The End Of The Year They Have Some Bottom Line Profit Which They Can Then Reinvest, Because They're Running It As A Not-for-profit In Charitable Endeavors.

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The Pace Of Change And The Threat Of Disruption Creates Tremendous Opportunities.

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One Of The Biggest Challenges We Had In The First Decade Was Not That Many People Had Personal Computers. There Weren't That Many People To Sell To, And It Was Hard To Identify Them.

There Are Lots Of Cycles To Markets - Boom And Bust - And Also In Perceptions Of People. The Conventional Wisdom Of Steve Case As Genius Or Fool Was Highly Cyclical. The Truth Was Always In The Middle.

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.

What I Have Figured Out Is That I Can Predict The Future. I Just Can't Predict When.

I Do Think Actually In This Case The Government Does Get Credit For Funding Some Of The Basic Research.

In The Entrepreneurial World, When You Launch A Company, You Have A Particular Idea, A Particular Product, A Particular Service, Almost Always You Pivot, You Shift. The Market Reacts To Your Initial Idea. You Make Some Adjustments. It's Only After Making A Few Adjustments That You See The Success.

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For Better Or Worse, That Is True With Any New Innovation, Certainly Any New Technological Innovation. There's Many Good Things That Come Out Of It, But Also Some Bad Things. All You Can Do Is Try To Maximize The Good Stuff And Minimize The Bad Stuff.

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.

My Father Still Is A Lawyer, And My Mom Was A Teacher And Then Later A Career Counselor

I Do Think That A General Liberal Arts Education Is Very Important, Particularly In An Uncertain Changing World

So My Degree Was In Political Science, Which I Think Was - The Closest I Could Come To Marketing Is Politics.

I Do Think That People Have An Obligation To Give Back But That Doesn't Necessarily Mean That You Give Back Just The Traditional Way. Maybe There's New Ways To Give Back And Make A Contribution. I'm Looking Forward To Some Mix Of Philanthropy - Maybe Through A Somewhat Different Prism - As Well As Helping Entrepreneurs Build Some Significant New Businesses.

I Think The More You Have A Generalist Perspective, I Think Sometimes The More You Can Kind Of See Through The Forest And The Trees. And When It Gets A Little Bit Cloudy, You Know, Have Some Sense Of, "well, Maybe This Might Happen Or Maybe That Might Happen." So I Really Am A Big Believer In Liberal Arts Education. I Think It's Better - Particularly In These Kind Of Uncertain Times - To Know A Little Bit About A Lot Of Things As Opposed To Being Expert In One Thing.

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.

So We Believed That Strategic Alliances And Partnerships Were Critical, And We Did That For Five Years.

I Had An Older Brother Who Passed Away Recently, An Older Sister And A Younger Brother.

Nobody Should Have To Be A Systems Integrator To Make A Convergence Network Work In Their Home

And So The Idea Was, Well Maybe You Can Take An Atari Video Game Machine, Where People Plug In A Game Cartridge, And Plug In A Modem, And Tie That Into A Telephone, And Essentially Turn That Game In The Machine Into An Interactive Terminal.

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.

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When I First Got Started In The Late '70s, Early '80s, And First Was Thinking About The Interactive World, I Believed So Fervently That It Was The Next Big Thing, I Thought It Would Happen Quickly.

Most Of The People Who Had Pcs Did Not Have Modems And Could Not Use Those Pcs As Communicating Devices. They Really Were Using Them For Spreadsheets Or Word Processing Or Storing Recipes Or Playing Games Or What Have You.

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.

Nowadays People Seem To Switch Schools, Either Because They Have To, And Certain Schools Only Serve Certain Grades, Or Because They Move To A Different Place Or Have Some Particular Interest, But I Was In The Same School For 13 Years

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.

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Swinging For The Fences

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The End Of The Day

You're Not Just Trying To Do Something Marginally, Incrementally Better. You're Doing Something That Is A Fundamental Paradigm Shift, That Will Have Exponential Impact. That Means It's Harder To Do, But Ultimately, If It's Successful, The Impact It Has Is Far Greater.

In The End, A Vision Without The Ability To Execute It Is Probably A Hallucination.

Bill Sees And Understands The Possibilities Of A Connected World And Has The Expertise And The Experience To Help Make It A Reality, ... As More And More Consumers Want To Take Their Connectivity With Them Beyond The Desktop, Bill's Vision Will Be Critical In Charting The Company's Future Course And Delivering On The Promise Of Aol Anywhere.

It's Actually A Relatively Small Number Of People That Really Are Those Risk Takers, And A Relatively Small Number Of People That End Up Really Having An Impact On The World, And It Doesn't Take A Lot Of People. We Said, 'well, Rather Than Just Sit By And Wait, Or Fold Our Tent And Go Do Something Else, Let's Keep At It. Maybe We Can Be The Ones Who Can Figure This Out,' And Eventually We Were.

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.

Frankly, I Like New Things. I Feel Like I Made A Contribution To Building A More Interactive World. And I'm Proud Of That.

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).

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.

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.

There Are No Road Signs To Help Navigate. And, In Fact, No One Has Yet Determined Which Side Of The Road We're Supposed To Be On.

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.

Disruption Is About Risk-taking. But Then You Become A Fortune 500 Company, Which Is About Risk Mitigation

I Think The Support Of The Other Team At Aol And Everybody's Really Shared Passion And Belief About This And - Saying That Some Day Everybody Was Going To Be On Line.

And What We Did With This New Company In 1985 Is We Did Start Focusing On Pcs Instead Of Video Game Machines, Because We Learned The Hard Lesson About Bringing A Product To Market In A Consumer World Where It's Very Expensive To Build A Brand And Get Distribution And So Forth.

I Was Born And Raised In Honolulu, Hawaii

I'm Not Sure I Knew What An Entrepreneur Was When I Was Ten, But I Knew That Starting Little Businesses And Trying To Sell Greeting Cards Or Newspapers Door-to-door Or Just Vending Machine Kind Of Thing Is.. There's Just Something Very Intriguing To Me About That.

Five Or Ten Years Ago, When It Was Clear The Internet Was Becoming A Mainstream Phenomenon, It Was Equally Clear That A Lot Of People Were Being Left Out And Could Be Left Behind

[on Swinging For The Fences] Ultimately, You Have The Potential To Build A Significant Business With The Potential To Have A Positive Impact On Millions Of People's Lives.

Swinging For The Fences

Think About This: It Was Illegal For Most People To Connect To The Internet Before 1992.

The Attackers Are The People With Bold, Innovative Ideas Who Are Trying To Disrupt The Status Quo And Usher In A Better Way. The Defenders Are The Incumbents Who Try To Defend What They Have. We Need To Bring An Attacker Mindset To Whatever We Choose To Do.

I Want To Find People Who Have Had To Work Hard And Who Have Learned From Their Failures. Perseverance Is No Guarantee You’ll Succeed, But Without It, It’s Almost Guaranteed You Won’t.

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