Steve Case Quotes
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Steve Jobs always believed that you didn't want to do focus groups or research and ask people what they wanted. You wanted to create products that they didn't know they wanted yet and they would fall in love with. And I think that was part of the magic of his design philosophy.
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The real magic in National Geographic isn't how much money they have left at the end of the year. It's the fact that through their overall focus they are reaching hundreds of millions of people and educating people about the world. It just happens to be done in a business-oriented kind of way that is more sustainable.
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The resources you happen to accumulate, what do you do with them? You can spend the money and buy some houses or whatever, and people do some of that and that's fine. You can give the money to other people, your family, but usually when you do that you screw them up and it ends up counterproductive. Or, you take those resources and reinvest them in things that you believe in, and that could be reinvesting in a philanthropic cause.
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[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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world
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Keep your eye on the prize and focus on your mission. Remember what you’re trying to do, what your value is, why it’s important, and at the same time, change course and direction. If the market’s telling you different things how are you going to adjust to that?
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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.
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At Revolution Health Group we will put consumers back at the center of the system by giving them more choice, control and convenience.. while building the first comprehensive, consumer-driven health care company.
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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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I'm probably never going to be satisfied with anything we do. I think there's always the possibility of doing better. And I'd say we're doing better than we were a year ago, in terms of delivery and quality of service, but nowhere near what we should be doing .
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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.
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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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At AOL, we thought the killer app was people
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I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million.
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One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible
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You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.
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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.
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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.
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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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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).
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I continue to have a special pride and passion for AOL, and I strongly believe that AOL - once the leading Internet company in the world - can return to its past greatness
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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.
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Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home
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The pace of change and the threat of disruption creates tremendous opportunities.
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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.
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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.
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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
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