Steve Case

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Steve Case (born August 21, 1958) is a businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). He reached his highest profile when he played an instrumental role in AOL's merger with Time Warner in 2000.

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[edit] Biography

Case grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, showing an early entrepreneurial bent. He graduated from the prestigious Punahou School (the Theatrical Class of 1976) and was a pillar of Central Union Church. His first significant innovations were with Froggies Used Books and Records in Waikiki, where he developed and applied innovative marketing techniques to greatly grow the company sales. He graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1980 with a degree in political science, and began working as a marketer at Procter & Gamble soon after. In 1983 he became a marketing consultant at Control Video, a small company that distributed games for the Atari 2600 game console using a phone line and modem.

In 1983 Control Video nearly went bankrupt, and investor Frank Caufield had a friend of his, Jim Kimsey, brought in as a manufacturing consultant. Kimsey hired Case as a part-time consultant, and he later joined the company as a full-time marketing employee. In 1985 Kimsey became CEO of the newly renamed Quantum Computer Services and promoted Case to vice president of marketing, and in 1987 promoted him again to executive vice president. Kimsey groomed Case to become chairman and CEO when Kimsey retired, and the transition formally took place in 1991 (CEO) and 1995 (chairman).

As part of the changes that gave birth to Quantum, Case changed the company's strategy, creating an online service called Quantum Link (Q-Link for short) for the Commodore 64 in 1985 with programmer (and AOL co-founder) Marc Seriff. In 1988, Quantum began offering the AppleLink online service for Apple and PC-Link for IBM compatible computers. In 1991 he changed the company name to America Online and merged the Apple and PC services under the AOL name; the new service reached 1 million subscribers by 1994, and Q-Link was terminated October 31 of that year.

Among many initiatives in the early years of AOL, Case personally championed many innovative online interactive titles and games, including graphical chat environments Habitat (1986) and Club Caribe (1989), the first online interactive fiction series QuantumLink Serial by Tracy Reed (1988), Quantum Space, the first fully automated Play by email game (1989), and the original Dungeons & Dragons title Neverwinter Nights, the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) to depict the adventure with graphics instead of text (1991).

After a decade of hyper-growth, AOL merged with media giant Time Warner. The $106 billion merger was completed in January 2001 but quickly ran into trouble as part of the dot-com recession, compounded by accounting scandals. Case announced his resignation as chairman in January 2003, although remained on the company's board of directors for almost three more years.

Case resigned from the Time-Warner board of directors in October 2005, to spend more time working on Revolution LLC, a holding company he founded in April 2005. He remains (as of December 2005) one of Time-Warner's largest individual shareholders. He is also chairman of the Case Foundation, which he and his wife Jean Case created in 1997.

[edit] Investments

Revolution holds majority stakes in several healthcare and resort firms, and in August 2005 purchased a controlling interest in Flexcar.

Case owns nearly half of Hawaii-based Maui Land and Pineapple Co.. He also controls tens of thousands of acres of land in Hawaii. [1]

Case is the cousin of Hawaii congressman Ed Case. [2] His late brother Daniel Case was an investment banker noted for both his great skill and high ethics. His father was the founding partner of one of Hawaii's pre-eminent law firms.

[edit] Trivia

  • An illustration in the artwork for the 2001 album Amnesiac by the band Radiohead seems to depict the famous embrace between Case and Time Warner's Jerry Levin. The men's hug upon the announcement of the merger of their two companies, particularly Case's appearance smothered behind Levin, and his ecstatic facial espression, has been seen as an iconic image of millennial corporate hubris. It has taken on a more ironic light since the 2001 dot-com bust and loss in AOL's value that followed.[3]
  • An original photo of the event forms the cover for Nina Munk's 2005 book Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner.
  • As an undergraduate at Williams College, Case began a bus service to transport students between campus and several nearby cities (including Albany, Boston, and New York) during academic breaks. The service, now known as Williams Transport, now managed by Chris Upjohn and Andy Jang, is still running today.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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