The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future - Couverture rigide

Case, Steve

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 150113258X ISBN 13 : 9781501132582

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2016

A propos du livre

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The Third Wave ONE

A WINDING PATH

MY BROTHER Dan was just thirteen months older than me, and a year ahead in school. We shared a room growing up and, like most brothers, were fairly competitive. We hated to lose. That was especially hard for me, since Dan seemed to be good at just about everything he tried. He was the more natural athlete, and always at the top of his class. When I realized I couldn’t compete with him head-to-head, I tried to find interests apart from his. If he was going to play tennis, I decided, I was going to play basketball. But there was one interest we both shared that never felt like a competition. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I was sure of it, before I even really knew what that meant. And Dan genuinely wanted to help. I got immense satisfaction from coming up with an idea, and he would revel in trying to help me turn it into something real.

We started our first business when I was ten years old. Dan was eleven, and brought to bear all of the wisdom of that extra year in our operation. We called ourselves Case Enterprises, and hoped that no one would notice that neither of us was old enough to drive. We billed ourselves as an international mail-order company. At one point we became the exclusive distributor in Hawaii for a Swiss watchmaker, though I can’t recall actually selling any watches. Most of our efforts involved knocking on doors trying to sell greeting cards to our neighbors. Most of our customers were buying what we were selling just to be nice. But Dan didn’t care. He called it our comparative advantage. Said it was part of our brand. We actually talked like this; our parents, a lawyer and a teacher, had no idea where we got it from. They used to joke that when I went to my room, I was going to my office.

Our early ventures may not have provided much in the way of cash, but they did provide a wealth of experience. And the process of coming up with new business ideas, or new ways to sell, left a deep impression on me. When I left Hawaii to attend Williams College in Massachusetts in 1976, I kept looking for new business opportunities. I started six little businesses while at school, including delivering fruit baskets to students during exam week (paid for by parents, of course). I had a growing interest in the music business, and spent a lot of time in New York clubs like CBGB, trying to find new talent to bring to college campuses.

I was diligent about going to class and doing my homework, but these side businesses were my real passion. That didn’t go over so well at Williams. At one point my advisor pulled me aside and suggested I was spending too much time on my entrepreneurial efforts, and would regret it. “Look at all the educational opportunities in front of you,” I remember him saying. “You should immerse yourself in them. Your business pursuits are distracting, and, frankly, they are ill-suited for campus life.” He wasn’t alone in thinking that. I remember one of my fellow students attacking me in a school newspaper editorial. “I swore I would never go to a Steve Case party or buy a Steve Case record album,” the article began. “It’s nothing personal, it’s just that I despise rampant laissez-faire capitalism on the college campus.”

·  ·  ·

In my final year at Williams, I took an introductory computer class. I hated it—and almost flunked it. This was still the era of punch cards, where you had to write a program and then take your cards to someone to run them. Several hours later, you’d get the results—which usually (at least for me) meant finding a mistake and starting the process all over again. The tedium, and the resulting low grade, almost prevented me from graduating. And yet the experience stuck with me. The punch cards were a nuisance, but if used the right way, they could be powerful. We were building very basic computational programs, rudimentary by contemporary standards. And yet even then, the potential was obvious. Computers were solving problems in seconds that would otherwise take days, even weeks. Frustrating as it was, in retrospect, I think it was formative. It was the first time I really began to grasp the potential of computers. Still, if I hadn’t stumbled upon Toffler’s book that year, I’m not sure I ever would have pursued the path I did.

With graduation approaching in the spring of 1980, all I could think about was breaking into the fledgling digital industry. I applied for a lot of jobs, always including, with my résumé, a cover letter breathlessly predicting the dawn of a digital age.

There were few takers. Most of my letters went unanswered. On a few occasions I did get interviews, but I rarely got past the first one. People seemed put off by my musings, worried that they were getting a nutty young kid who’d never be satisfied in a normal job. As the rejections piled up, I realized that my future would require my keeping my mouth shut—at least for a time. There was not much of a startup culture then, and of course no Internet, either. If I was going to get a job and learn any useful skills, I concluded, I’d have to join a big company. I eventually accepted a job at Procter & Gamble in the brand management department. It was a great place to land, all things considered. I could learn useful skills during the day while continuing to dream about the digital world at night.

If Procter & Gamble knew one thing, it was how to make a product understandable to everyday people. When radio serials were first introduced to the public, P&G saw an opportunity to advertise its home cleaning products to its key audience. So they began sponsoring programs, starting with Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins back in 1933. They were known as soap operas. When the public jumped from radio to television in the 1950s, so did P&G.

The people I worked with were experts in understanding consumer preferences, doggedly pursuing R&D, and seeking breakthroughs that could give their products an edge against the competition. And they were world-class marketers, often ahead of their time. P&G was also responsible for pioneering the concept of giving away free samples to encourage trial use. (I later borrowed that idea when we launched AOL’s trial program and blanketed the nation with free trial discs.)

·  ·  ·

After a couple years of working at P&G in Cincinnati, I moved to Kansas to join Pizza Hut as Director of New Pizza Development. To this day, I’ve never had a better title.

My motivation was twofold: First, I was offered a healthy increase in salary and responsibility, and second, I thought it would be helpful to understand how a more entrepreneurial company worked. Pizza Hut was founded in 1958 by two brothers, Dan and Frank Carney, while they were still students at Wichita State University. It had grown from a single location at the corner of Kellogg and Bluff to become the nation’s largest pizza chain, which it accomplished largely by enabling franchisees to innovate. This bottom-up approach to innovation differed from P&G’s top-down style, and I wanted to understand it.

Originally, the job involved my working in the test kitchens in Wichita. But I advocated that we hit the road to find out what was happening throughout the country. My view was that, though innovation was possible within our walls, most of the innovation was happening beyond them. I created and led an advance team, and we started roaming the U.S., looking for a great idea to incorporate into the new menu. The company would send me to places like Washington, DC, put me up in the Four Seasons in Georgetown, and then task me with eating the city’s best pizza. There are worse ways to live. I did learn rather quickly how difficult it was to take something out of a test kitchen and then execute it across five thousand restaurants where the chefs were teenagers with limited skills. A lot of our ideas that made sense in theory flopped in practice.

At the time, one of the concepts we were testing was home delivery. This was 1982, and though pizza was popular, delivery wasn’t yet universal. We were also working on ways to make pizza more convenient and more portable. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out if calzones or pocket pizzas could work as a carry-out option for people on the run. It’s funny to think, looking back on that year, that the things we were focused on—convenience and portability—would become such crucial parts of the company I would later help build. So would our desire to keep things simple and focus on the basics.

I only lasted at Pizza Hut for a year. My obsession with Toffler hadn’t subsided; it had intensified. I wanted to be part of his vision. I needed to find a way in.
MY FIRST STARTUP

I found my opportunity in 1982 when my brother told me about a startup called Control Video Corporation (CVC), which was trying to take the growing electronic gaming industry online. By now, Dan had moved on from CEO of Case Enterprises to up-and-coming investment banker in the Silicon Valley. Neither of us had lost that passion we first explored in childhood. I was still the ideas guy. He was still the one trying to figure out how to make it all work. When the firm he worked for, Hambrecht & Quist, was considering making an investment in CVC, Dan asked me to review the business plan and give him my impressions. I was impressed, I told him. And interested in being a part of it. H&Q did end up investing, and within months, I became a part-time consultant at CVC’s headquarters in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

It was there that I met Marc Seriff, a straight-talking Texan and a brilliant engineer. He had been part of the early team that helped create the Internet in the 1970s, and he was a real visionary with incredible technical skills. Later that decade, he connected with an idea-a-minute entrepreneur, Bill von Meister, and they worked together on building a couple of companies. Von Meister had been a telecommunications pioneer, having founded one of the first online services, The Source. Along with Seriff, von Meister conceived of a business called Home Music Store. Nearly two decades before Napster (and nearly three decades before Spotify), the two were trying to offer digital music to the masses. The idea got a lot of attention in the music industry when it was announced, but they struggled to secure the rights they needed to launch. And some early supporters, like Warner Music, ended up backing out of an agreement to license music for the venture. “Delivering music directly into people’s homes via satellite and cable,” the Warner Music executive argued in 1981, “would completely shut out music retailers, literally choking off their money supply.”

“Retailers are threatening to throw our records in the street!” he exclaimed.

It was clear that there was no budging Warner Music. But they did have a deal with Home Music Store, and they wanted to find an amicable solution. Warner Music suggested that Marc and Bill focus on using their technology to deliver video games instead. “Talk to Atari,” the executive advised. “They’re a division of our same parent company—Warner Communications.”

So the fast-moving von Meister pivoted, and turned his attention toward building an online gaming service called GameLine. The idea was to make a game cartridge, much like Atari’s, but with a cord to connect it to a phone line so you could download and play games for a monthly fee (a primitive Netflix for games).

By January 1983, Marc and Bill were fully in the video game business, and ready to announce their new service. They did so at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, tethering a massive hot-air balloon to the roof of the Tropicana, emblazoned with the GameLine logo. I joined the company full-time nine months later, just as the product was coming to market.

It was an utter disaster.

Atari video games turned out to be a fad. After a few go-go growth years, interest in Atari products plummeted. Retailers canceled their GameLine orders. Inventory piled up. (One weekend, we quietly disposed of the tens of thousands of unsold GameLine modems in a dumpster behind our office.) GameLine’s revenues were 95 percent below forecasts, so the CVC board decided to slash costs. Most of the staff lost their jobs. I went from being the youngest person on a seven-person marketing team to being the only one left in the department—mostly, I suspect, because I had the lowest salary. My parents were pretty worried. I’d had three jobs in three years, and now it looked like I would soon need another.

The experience was an early lesson in market timing and managing costs, and a valuable first experience with failure. But while GameLine’s demise was agonizing and shocking, I wasn’t discouraged. My hopes for GameLine had deflated, but my conviction about the digital future remained. I was confident, perhaps naïvely so, that we would figure something out.

To stave off bankruptcy, we sought partners. As an accidental senior leader in the company, I wound up with the job of striking deals wherever I could to keep the company afloat. After dozens of fruitless conversations, we finally made a deal with BellSouth, which had just recently divested from “Ma Bell” (the AT&T Corporation) after an antitrust ruling broke up the phone company. BellSouth provided some funding that kept CVC going for another year, but it became increasingly clear that our strategy of using a customized modem technology had been a mistake.

By the time we entered the market, our technology was outdated. What we’d engineered was a modem technology that was, in essence, download-only. We could send games to consumers, but consumers couldn’t send much data back to us—or to one another. The modems that people were starting to purchase could do both. What we thought was CVC’s core asset—a lower-cost modem technology—turned into one of its greatest liabilities. We offered a proprietary system that few wanted to adopt.
THE (FIRST) REBOOT

So we decided to abandon it and support industry-standard modem technology and the emerging personal computer market instead. We embraced the irony—a modem company with a worthless modem—and we reminded ourselves that we’d never intended to be a hardware company at all. The modem was a means to the real end: becoming a consumer online service company. So we returned to our original mission and exited the hardware business altogether. Instead, we put all of our efforts into what we were good at: crafting easy-to-use software and services that could demystify the online world.

We also decided to rethink our marketing and distribution strategy. Rather than selling services directly to consumers, which was both costly and risky, we decided to partner with personal computer manufacturers to create private-label online services, which they in turn could sell to their customers. We’d build the software and services, they’d package and market them, and we’d share in the revenue.

In theory, it made great sense, and we were excited to get started. But as soon as we began reaching out to potential partners, we realized we had a problem. We kept getting brushed off. Some thought the appeal of getting online would be limited. And those who sensed the potential were unwilling to take the risk of partnering with a young company, particularly one that had a failed product and angry creditors and investors.

We finally found a willing ear at Commodore, at the time one of the leading home computer companies. Commodore’s founder had departed in a huff, and the remaining management team was struggling to figure out a ...

Revue de presse :

“In the Third Wave, Steve Case has drafted a compelling roadmap for the future – one that can help us make sense of the technological changes reshaping our economy and the world. A fascinating read.”
—Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and founder of LeanIn.Org

“I've been waiting to read Steve's story and I wasn't disappointed. His business career is straight out of Horatio Alger and carries important lessons for all entrepreneurs.”
—Warren Buffett, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

“We are at the beginning of the next industrial revolution where the combination of software and industrial machines is building the foundation for a new wave of innovation. With clarity and passion, Steve provides a manifesto for the future of innovation and entrepreneurship. It's a must read from a visionary leader for entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and anyone trying to succeed during the Third Wave."
—Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE

“The Third Wave is essential reading for leaders in business and government, as well as for anybody trying to make sense of our rapidly changing world. I’ve worked with Steve for two decades, and I've always been impressed with his intellect and captivated by his insights. If you read this book, you will be, too.”
—General Colin Powell, former Secretary of State (and former AOL board member)

“Steve Case made history when he created America Online and introduced the Internet to the world. Steve's startup story is captivating, and chock full of important insights and lessons. But this is not a book about the past; it’s a bold and compelling vision for what’s coming next. The Third Wave is required reading for every entrepreneur.”
—Brad Feld, co-founder, TechStars and Foundry Group, author of Startup Life

“A true visionary, Steve Case understood years ago the tectonic shifts that were to occur in society, fueled by technology and acted with purpose and passion. Case’s book, The Third Wave, clarifies for leaders the decisions necessary to thrive in a future increasingly disrupted by accelerating knowledge-creation and sharing.”
– Alvin and Heidi Toffler, authors of the original ‘The Third Wave’

"The Third Wave is an indispensable book for understanding the history of the Internet and preparing for what's next. Entrepreneurs looking to build truly transformational businesses should listen closely to Steve Case's insightful advice."
– Brian Chesky, Co-founder and CEO, Airbnb

“An extraordinarily frank and incisive book from an extraordinary business leader. All budding entrepreneurs, and all who care about the future, should read The Third Wave and heed the lessons as well as the insights.”
—David Rubenstein, Co-founderand Co-CEO, The Carlyle Group

“What’s new and noteworthy here is Case’s effort to draw a connection between his own history and an impending era of change. Moreover, he’s particularly thoughtful on the subject of how digital innovation and existing regulatory regimes will need to work together in the coming decades. . . . There’s little doubt that Case’s insights have value.”
—Jon Gertner, The Washington Post

“Case believes the third wave, which is only just beginning, will have far more impact as the internet transforms real world sectors such as healthcare, education, transport and energy. He shows how existing technologies can be deployed far more smartly rather than assuming that we will see further heroic breakthroughs.”—Financial Times

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 150113258X
• ISBN 13: 9781501132582
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 240