Steve Case Thinking Quotations

I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world

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.

So my degree was in political science, which I think was - the closest I could come to marketing is politics.

I enjoyed high school and college, and I think I learned a lot, but that was not really my focus. My focus was on trying to figure out what businesses to start

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.

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.

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.

The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.

The attackers are the people with bold, innovative ideas, who are trying to disrupt the status quo, and usher in a better way. We need to think out of the box, and be curious, and be willing to take risks.

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.

I do think actually in this case the government does get credit for funding some of the basic research.

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 .

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.

Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.

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.

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.

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.

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.