Steve Case Quotes

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

Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home

I had an older brother who passed away recently, an older sister and a younger brother.

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.

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.

In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.

I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii

I was not an outstanding student. I did a reasonable amount of work. I got generally good - pretty good grades, but I was not that passionate about getting straight A's.

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.

All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

So we believed that strategic alliances and partnerships were critical, and we did that for five years.

It's not about how to get started; it's about how to get noticed.

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.

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 stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have

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.

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

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.

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.

I like ... what I characterize as more built-to-last ideas rather than built-to-flip ideas.

The only way to continue to have a robust economy is to out-innovate other nations.

My father still is a lawyer, and my mom was a teacher and then later a career counselor

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

Anything is possible if you put your mind to it and you really work hard.

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

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.

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.

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

The idea that maybe you don't have to own a car if you only need one occasionally may catch on, just like time-sharing caught on in real estate

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.

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.

If you believe that some day it's going to happen, some day it probably will happen. You just have to make sure you're there when it's happening, and ideally you're at the front of the parade, and the principle beneficiary of when it happens.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

So you have to force yourself out of a comfort zone and really try to figure out what are the key ingredients, the key skill sets, the key perspectives that are necessary, and then figure out a way to attract the very best people to fill those particular roles.

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.

Having a great idea is important. But having a great team is also important.

If you really got the right people, and you've got them working together as a team, whether it's in business, whether it's in science, whether it's in politics, you can make a big difference.

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

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.

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.

At AOL, we thought the killer app was people