Steve Case

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Steve Case bigraphy, stories - American businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist best known as the former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL) and AOL Time Warner

Steve Case : biography

August 21, 1958 –

Stephen McConnell "Steve" Case (born August 21, 1958) is an American businessman best known as the former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to build a variety of new businesses through his investment company Revolution. In addition, he serves as chair of the Case Foundation run by his wife Jean Case. In early 2011, he was selected by President Barack Obama to serve as Chairman of the Startup America Partnership and named to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Steve Case is also a frequent guest on CNBC’s Squawk Box and appeared on August 24, 2011 to discuss his initiatives to spur high growth entrepreneurship and job creation on behalf of the Startup America Partnership and the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Family

His father, Daniel H. Case, is the founding partner of the Hawaiian law firm of Case Lombardi & Pettit. His mother Carol was an elementary school teacher. His parents had three other children: Carin, Dan and Jeff. His brother Dan died from brain cancer at the age of 44 in June 2002.

Steve Case is a cousin of Ed Case, who served as a Hawaii congressman from 2002 through 2007.

In 1985, Case married Joanne Barker whom he had met while attending Williams College. The couple had three children and divorced in 1996. Also available at . Two years later, in 1998, he married former AOL executive Jean Villanueva in a ceremony officiated by the Rev. Billy Graham. They and their four daughters and one son from previous marriages reside in McLean, Virginia, in a mansion that was the childhood home of Jacqueline Bouvier.

Case donated $10 million to Punahou School for a new junior high school building named after his parents.

Life and career

Case was born and grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he graduated from the private Punahou School (Class of 1976) and attended Central Union Church.

Case graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1980 with a degree in political science. For the next two years he worked as an assistant brands manager at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1982 he joined Pizza Hut Inc. in Wichita, Kansas, serving as manager of new pizza marketing.

In January 1983, his older brother Dan, an investment banker, introduced him to Bill von Meister, CEO of Control Video Corporation. The company was marketing a service called GameLine for the Atari 2600 video game console that allowed users to download games via a phone line and modem. After that meeting, von Meister hired Case as a marketing consultant. Later that year, the company nearly went bankrupt and one of its investors, Frank Caufield, had his friend Jim Kimsey brought in as a manufacturing consultant. Case later joined the company as a full-time marketing employee.

In 1985 Quantum Computer Services, an online services company was founded by Jim Kimsey from the remnants of Control Video. Kimsey became CEO of the newly renamed Quantum Computer Services and hired Case as vice president of marketing. In 1987 he 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.

AOL pioneered the concept of social media, as its focus from day one was on communication features such as chatrooms, instant messaging and forums. Case believed that the "killer app" was community — people interacting with each other — and that was the driver of much of AOL’s early success. By contrast, competitive services of the time such as Prodigy funded by IBM and Sears, focused on shopping and CompuServe focused on being an information utility. AOL’s strategy was to make online services available and accessible to the mass market by making them affordable, easy to use, useful and fun. At at time when competing services like CompuServe were charging for each minute of access (which varied based on modem speeds and added extra charges for premium services), beginning in 1996, AOL priced its service at $19.95 per month of unlimited use of basic tier services. Within three years, AOL’s userbase grew to 10 million, ultimately reaching 26.7 million subscribers at its peak in 2002.