Stephen McConnell Case (born August 21, 1958) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist best known as the former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). Case joined AOL's predecessor company, Quantum Computer Services, as a marketing vice-president in 1985. In 1991, he became CEO of the company (renamed AOL). Later, at the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, Case orchestrated with Gerald M. Levin the merger that created AOL Time Warner, described as "the biggest train wreck in the history of corporate America."
Since resigning as chairman of the company in 2003, he has launched a venture-capital firm, Revolution LLC, based in Washington, D.C., and authored The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future, which in 2016 became a New York Times bestselling book. In 2022, he published his second book, The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places Are Building the New American Dream.
Steve Case was born and grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, the son of Carol and Daniel Case. He graduated from the private Punahou School in 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 brand manager at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1982 he joined Pizza Hut Inc. in Wichita, Kansas, 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, brought in his friend Jim Kimsey 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 21 of that year.
AOL pioneered the concept of social media for home users, 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 a 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), AOL priced its service at $19.95 per month for unlimited use of basic tier services beginning in 1996. Within three years, AOL's userbase grew to 10 million, ultimately reaching 26.7 million users at its peak in 2002.
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 in 2001, creating one of the world's largest media, entertainment and communications companies. The $164 billion acquisition 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 he 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 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 D.C.-based investment firm he founded in April 2005.
He is also chairman of the Case Foundation, which he and his wife Jean Case created in 1997. In 2011, Steve and Jean Case were honored as Citizens of the Year by the National Conference on Citizenship and interviewed by Stephanie Strom of The New York Times about their record of service and philanthropic endeavors. The Case Foundation also created the Impact Investing Network Map, to track transactions between investors and startups that are socially-conscious.
In 1999, Case received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. His award was presented by Awards Council member Jim Kimsey. Case was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 2009. In 2011, he was appointed as a Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and became Chair of the Regents in 2020. Case was a co-chair of the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. In May 2014, Case received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Georgetown University.
Following his departure from AOL, Case founded Revolution LLC in 2005. Early investments include Revolution Money, HelloWallet, AddThis, Zipcar, Living Social, and luxury travel club Exclusive Resorts. These last three were considered early bets on the new Web economy, and were early examples of what is now referred to as the 'sharing economy.' Zipcar went public in April 2011, earning a market valuation of more than $1 billion before being acquired by Avis Budget Group in January 2013.
Case also believed he could change the healthcare system in the US and founded Revolution Health Group in April 2005. After a number of acquisitions but disappointing results, the company merged with Waterfront Media in October 2008.