Steve Case encyclopedia topics

Biography

Stephen McConnell Case grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, showing an early entrepreneurial bent. He graduated from the prestigious Punahou School (Class of 1976) and attended 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. For the next two years he worked as an assistant brands manager 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, Case helped found Quantum Computer Services, an online services company, from the remnants of Control Video. 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 quick 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.

The failure of the AOL-Time Warner merger is the subject of a book by Nina Munk entitled Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner (2005). A photo of Case and Time Warner's Jerry Levin embracing at the announcement of the merger appears on the cover.

In 2005, Case wrote in the The Washington Post that "It's now my view that it would be best to 'undo' the merger by splitting Time Warner into several independent companies and allowing AOL to set off on its own path.

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.

Investments

Revolution holds majority stakes in several healthcare (RevolutionHealth.com) Revolution Health Group, and resort firms. In August 2005 it purchased a controlling interest in Flexcar.

In 2007 Case along with Ted Leonsis on February 27, 2007 joined in a $5.5-million investment in widget syndication specialist Clearspring Technologies.

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

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. 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 from previous marriages reside in McLean, Virginia, in a mansion that was the childhood home of Jacqueline Bouvier.