Steve Case and America Online: A Perfect Combination

Steve Case is an American entrepreneur more popularly known for co-founding America Online (AOL). He was AOL’s former CEO and chairman until his retirement in 2003. Since then, Case has been into several business ventures through Revolution, his investment company. He also chairs the Case Foundation.

In 2011, Case worked for President Barack Obama’s government as Chairman of the Startup America Partnership. He was also a part of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. He was a guest at CNBC program Squawk Box where he was seen sharing his initiatives for job creation and entrepreneurship growth in American on behalf of the government agencies he represented.

Case was born as Stephen McConnell Case on August 21, 1958 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He finished his political science degree in 1980 at Williams College in Massachusetts. His first job was with Procter & Gamble as assistant brands manager. After two years with P&G, Case moved to Pizza Hut Inc. as new pizza marketing manager.

Case’s brother Dan introduced him to Bill von Meister in January 1983. At that time, von Meister was the CEO of Control Video Corporation. Control Video was doing a marketing drive for the video game console of Atari 2600 called GameLine. Case became the marketing consultant of Control Video after the meeting.

Some remnants of the ailing Control Video established Quantum Computer Services. Case became its Executive Vice President. In 1991, Case became Quantum’s CEO. While at the company, Case was responsible for the online service Quantum Link (Q-Link). Later, Quantum also developed AppleLink (for Apple PCs) and PC-Link (for IBM PCs). In 1991, Quantum was changed to America Online. The services of Apple and PC were merged and subscribers hit the 1 million mark in 1994.

AOL became the pioneer of the social media concept. Since day one, AOL featured chatrooms, forums and instant messaging. Case believed that the killer app is the community of people where there is interaction with each other. This became AOL’s main driver. In the years that followed, AOL’s user based increased in leaps and bounds and reached its peak in 2002 with 25.7 million subscribers.

Case resigned as AOL’s chairman in January 2003 following the failed merger of AOL and Time Warner. The failed merger became the subject of the book entitled Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner written by Nina Munk.