The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 104

As usual, von Meister was soon mismanaging the company and squandering money, causing him to be ousted after a year by his principal funder, who said, “Billy von Meister is a terrific entrepreneur but he didn’t know how to stop entrepreneuring.” The Source was eventually sold to Reader’s Digest, which later sold it to CompuServe. But despite being short-lived, it pioneered the online era by showing that consumers wanted not just information piped to them but also the chance to connect with friends and generate their own content to be shared.

Von Meister’s next idea, also slightly ahead of its time, was a home music store that would sell streaming music through cable TV networks. Record stores and recording companies ganged up to block his access to songs, so the idea-a-minute von Meister switched his focus to video games. It was an even riper target; at the time, there were 14 million Atari home game consoles. Thus was born Control Video Corporation (CVC). Von Meister’s new service allowed users to download games for purchase or rent. He dubbed the service GameLine, and he began to bundle with it some of the information services that had been in The Source. “We’re going to turn the videogame jockey into an information junkie,” he proclaimed.¹⁴

GameLine and CVC set up shop in a strip mall on the way to Washington’s Dulles Airport. Von Meister selected a board of directors that symbolized the official passing of the torch to a new breed of Internet pioneers. Among its members were Larry Roberts and Len Kleinrock, architects of the original ARPANET. Another was the pathbreaking venture capitalist Frank Caufield of what had become Silicon Valley’s most influential financial firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Representing the investment bank Hambrecht & Quist was Dan Case, a smooth and energetic young Rhodes Scholar from Hawaii and Princeton.

Dan Case joined von Meister in Las Vegas for the January 1983 Consumer Electronics Show, where CVC’s GameLine was hoping to make a splash. Von Meister, ever the showman, paid for a hot air balloon shaped like a joystick and emblazoned with the name GameLine to float above the town, and he rented a sprawling suite at the Tropicana Hotel, which he festooned with hired showgirls.¹⁵ Case relished the scene. Hovering in the corner was his younger brother, Steve, who was more reticent and, with his enigmatic smile and equable face, harder to read.

Born in 1958 and raised in Hawaii, with a placid temperament that made it seem as if he had been nurtured by dolphins, Steve Case had a pacific facade. Called by some “the Wall” because his face rarely flickered with emotion, he was shy but not insecure. To some people who didn’t really know him, that made him appear aloof or arrogant, which he wasn’t. As he grew up, he taught himself to joke and trade friendly insults in a flat and nasal tone, like a newbie at a fraternity. But beneath the banter he was deeply thoughtful and earnest.

In high school, Dan and Steve turned their bedrooms into offices from which they ran a series of businesses that, among other things, sold greeting cards and distributed magazines. “The first lesson of Case entrepreneurship,” Steve recalled, “was I came up with the idea and he provided the funding and then owned half the company.”¹⁶

Steve went to Williams College, where the famed historian James MacGregor Burns drily noted, “He was among my median students.”¹⁷ He spent more time thinking about starting businesses than studying for class. “I remember a professor pulling me aside and suggesting I should defer my business interests and focus on my studies as college represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Case recalled. “Needless to say, I disagreed.” He took only one computer class and hated it “because this was the punch-card era and you’d write a program and then have to wait hours to get the results.”¹⁸ The lesson he learned was that computers needed to be made more accessible and interactive.

One aspect of computers he liked was the notion of using them to tap into networks. “The far-away connections seemed magical,” he told the journalist Kara Swisher. “It struck me as the most completely obvious use for them, and the rest was just for computer wonks.”¹⁹ After reading The Third Wave by the futurist Alvin Toffler, he became riveted by the concept of “the electronic frontier,” in which technology would connect people to each other and all of the world’s information.²⁰

In early 1980 he applied for a job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. “I firmly believe that technological advances in communications are on the verge of significantly altering our way of life,” he wrote in his application letter. “Innovations in telecommunications (especially two-way cable systems) will result in our television sets (big-screen, of course!) becoming an information line, newspaper, school, computer, referendum machine, and catalog.”²¹ He didn’t get the job, and he was also initially turned down by Proctor & Gamble. But he talked his way into having a second interview at P&G, traveling to Cincinnati at his own expense, and ended up as a junior brand manager in a group that handled a soon-defunct hair conditioner towelette called Abound. There Case learned the trick of giving away free samples in order to launch a new product. “That was in part the inspiration behind AOL’s free disk trial strategy a decade later,” he said.²² After two years he left to work at PepsiCo’s Pizza Hut division. “The reason I did that was because it was highly entrepreneurial. It was a company run by the franchisees, almost the opposite of Procter & Gamble, which is more of a top-down, process-oriented company where all the key decisions were made in Cincinnati.”²³

As a young bachelor based in Wichita, Kansas, where there was not a whole lot to do in the evenings, he became a fan of The Source. It was a perfect refuge for someone with his mix of shyness and desire for connection. He learned two lessons: that people like to be part of communities and that technology needs to be simple if it is going to appeal to the masses. When he first tried to log on to The Source, he had trouble getting his Kaypro portable computer configured. “It was like climbing Mount Everest, and my first thought was to figure out why it had to be so hard,” he recalled. “But when I finally logged in and found myself linked to all over the country from this sorry little apartment in Wichita, it was exhilarating.”²⁴

On the side, Case formed his own small marketing company. He was at heart an entrepreneur in an era when most other college kids sought jobs at big companies. He rented a maildrop with an upscale address in San Francisco, got it printed on stationery, and had his business correspondence forwarded to his little apartment in Wichita. His passion was to help companies that wanted to pioneer the electronic frontier, so when his brother Dan joined Hambrecht & Quist in 1981, he began sending Steve business plans for interesting companies. One of them was for von Meister’s Control Video Corporation. During a Colorado ski vacation in December 1982, they discussed whether Dan should invest, and they also decided to go together to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the following month.²⁵

The irrepressible von Meister and the repressible Steve spent a long dinner in Las Vegas talking about ways to market GameLine. Perhaps because they had shared interests but different personalities, they hit it off. During a drunken conversation in the bathroom halfway through the dinner, von Meister asked Dan whether it would be all right for him to hire young Steve. Dan allowed that it would be just fine. Steve started at CVC as a part-time consultant, then was hired full-time in September 1983 and moved to Washington, DC. “I thought the GameLine idea had real promise,” Case said. “But I also felt that even if it failed, the lessons I’d learn by working alongside Bill would be a valuable education. And that certainly proved to be accurate.”²⁶