Steve Case

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.

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.

I think the support of the other team at AOL and everybody's really shared passion and belief about this and - saying that some day everybody was going to be on line.

From a relatively early age I got interested in business.

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.

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.

When I first got started in the late '70s, early '80s, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly.

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.

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.

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

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.

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