—
no predictions resolved yet
0 pending · 0 expired
8
companies · 48 data points
You've seen the benefit of that in Seattle with Microsoft more recently.
it's where Amazon chose to have its second headquarters.
It was 1992, so 30 years ago, the first internet company go public, we raised $10 million in our IPO and the value of the company that day was $70 million.
We saw that with AOL in this area, which is why even though it wasn't very tech friendly, very startup friendly when we started AOL here three decades ago, it's where Amazon chose to have its second headquarters. That would have been inconceivable when we were getting, you know, started.
There is an arc to these things and you have to keep kind of leaning in the future. And we did that well for a while, but then kind of lost our way. And that created the opening for others to fill that vacuum.
I think that's fair. And some, yeah, so it was a different teams, different, you know, different cultures.
The idea of those coming together, leading internet company at the time, we had half all the internet traffic in the United States, Time Warner was the leading cable company with broadband, had all these brands like HBO and CNN and Warner Brothers and Warner Music and Time Magazine and so forth. You know, it, it should have been the perfect company to lead into the, in the future of this digital convergence that was starting to happen, but just couldn't get the right people focused on the right
Total slog. It was there a few times we had to go through layoffs and really hard to raise money. Our first round of venture capital, we raised $1 million. It was, you know, hard to get people to believe in the idea of the internet. It's really hard to get people to believe in our team and that we'd actually have a shot. So, it was like many entrepreneurial journeys, a struggle and also a little bit more of a struggle because we were starting AOL in Northern Virginia, kind of outside of Washingt
I think our focus, in terms of your question, was we wanted to make it really easy to use, really useful, really fun, and really affordable. And that was sort of the North Star that guided all our efforts around software design, subscription pricing, our marketing efforts. How do we make the internet available to everybody?
and even with Uber they' they've learned this because when they started I think they really thought they were an app they thought they were a marketplace now in our building in Washington DC they have two floors they've hired dozens maybe even hundreds of people who are dealing with with policy and in some countries like Germany and South Korea they're out of business yeah the countries have have basically not allowed them so in this country they were able to win because it was lots of local bat
the first wave obviously was building the infrastructure of the internet which I think you put AOL and Cisco Cisco but basically taking what was an idea and turning into reality
they had far better broader distribution that then drove their their use and their algorithm improving and so forth
we actually when we did a deal with them early on we we bought 5% of Google and then uh after the merge with Time Warner we talked about some potential Acquisitions Google was one apple was actually another
they likely would have been successful anyway but it certainly accelerated the the the the rise of of Google
the reinvention of Apple in the last decade and the and the the iPhone and the App Store and all that has really basically been around the internet
ultimately led to Apple saying we don't want to do this anymore we want to tear up the contract
Apple didn't like that idea they didn't like the idea of basically giving away software because their business model was selling software
they regretted having licensed their brand name I don't think they ever licensed the Apple name to anybody else ever since
most PC manufacturers including Apple uh viewed the online service world that we now think as the internet world is sort of something that was nichy and more for computer hobbyists that wasn't going to be important
we knew AB a partnership with apple would be a big deal pretty important at the time
it's Apple pulled the plug on us and decided they didn't want us to use the Apple brand name anymore there was conflict about how we were we wanted to give voice offer for free they wanted to sell it through Apple Stores things like that
we partner with Commodore and their Commodore 64 computer creat something called qink we partner with Radio Shack to create something called PC link partner with IBM to create promod we part partner with apple to create Apple link personal Edition
it took us I think it was four years to finally convince IBM to build a modem into a PC back then they thought it was a peripheral that only a few people would would want so why put a modem in every PC because that would add a cost of goods for every PC $300 to put a ventle or Haze modem into these things and they said you know most people don't care so we're not going to do that but finally when IBM was relaunching their their consumer PC effort they decided to build a a modem and and once IBM
Prodigy were backed by IBM and sear
we couldn't have entered the market without the partners without having IBM and apple and Comm selling our services
I think it was a good idea it was certainly good for our shareholders it would have been good for Time Warner shareholders as well if we' been able to execute against that
I when I proposed the merger I offered to step aside as CEO because I believed that it would be hard enough to get this deal done
there was a real risk that AOL would kind of hit the wall as the transition to broadband happened
Vision with execution is hallucination right that sort of summarizes the merger for me
we needed a path to broadband they own the largest Cable Systems they needed a path to the digital future
we wanted to invest in the next generation of content companies and own some equity
the greenhouse program which was inv basically in investing in dozens of companies that really we thought had great potential
the first decade almost was a struggle the second decade was when we got the benefits of it
why a went from in sort of an unknown IP when we went public to being the best performing stock of the decade because of the success of figuring out ways to drive up the audience and figure out ways to unlock new revenue streams
if you were able to get that deal with AOL that basically said kind of a partnership deal that they you can you can now break through and you'll reach a significant audience so it derisked it from an investor standpoint even though they were giving us large amounts of money to get that commitment
AOL was the leader of the PEC about half of the internet traffic in the US went through AOL
went from 184,000 I think it was 30 million and from a 70 million value to $160 billion
had 184,000 customers and $30 million of Revenue in the market value of the company was $7 million
we went public in 19 92 as the first internet company to go public it was still you know a lot of Skeptics you know that road show was tough people saying well why is this ever going to amount to anything
we would not have succeeded without those those Partnerships
we in those early days we couldn't have entered the market without the partners without having IBM and apple and com selling our services we didn't have the money to do it on our own
I remember talking to Evan when he was launching Twitter which was an SMS service he said it's sort of like aim you know an aim there that drop down where you can set your status you can be like a smiley face or this emo cons you guys were the first to have like I think otoc cons there people would do coland Dash My you know parentheses to get it but same thing as the mot but that was Twitter which was hey when people could look at their instant message list and see the status of the person righ
if you trace back a lot of these great you know decacorns hundred million dollar companies the the AOL fingerprints are all over them
AOL went from nothing to the leader and then in the first way was the dominant you know company and in the second way lost them altitude a new innovators kind of taking a fresh look
we always believed that the killer app was people right we called it Community now people call it social networking or social apps but we always Focus on things like people connection instant messaging by list we thought that was really the core really the soulle of the the medium was was people interaction
I don't think I ever owned more than 3% of AOL but when it you know got to be worth a lot of money that 3% was a was was a good a good amount
we raised a million bucks for the company from Kleiner a mix of a mix of investors it was you Kleiner was was the one of them all state was another in Canada was was another city group was it was a group of of people initial round I think was about a million dollar
we negotiated a settlement of a few million dollars for got million bucks out of go away and then we use that money to relaunch Apple link personal Edition as America Online