Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: AOL Co-Founder Steve Case

I recently interviewed Steve Case on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today was the leader of one of the most influential internet companies of all time. Steve Case was the co-founder and CEO of AOL and is the Chairman and CEO of the venture capital firm Revolution. Steve is also the author of multiple best-selling books, including his most recent book, The Rise of the Rest. Steve, thank you for joining us.

Steve: Great to be with you, Adam.

Adam: Great to have you here. You grew up in Hawaii. Aloha. And you went to college at Williams in Massachusetts before kicking off your career in the Midwest, working in marketing, at Procter and Gamble. And then for Pizza Hut. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons were most instrumental to shaping your worldview and to shaping the trajectory of your success?

Steve: Wow, it was like Maddie, you gotta have a little bit of a twists and turns. When I was a kid growing up in Hawaii, it was a wonderful place to grow up. I got interested in business and didn't really know what entrepreneurship was, but knew I liked starting things and knew I liked selling things. And you know, I like doing new things. And so I was involved in a number of different very small businesses most more particularly successful. But I learned a lot from that, including the importance of sales and door-to-door selling and things like cable television in the early days. And so those were some of the lessons there. Then I got in the music business for a little bit that contract promotions and understood some different dynamics. But then when I was in college, you mentioned being in college and in Massachusetts in the late ‘70s, I really became smitten mesmerized with the idea of what we now think of as the internet. I've read a number of books about it and looked at some of the test markets that were happening in different parts of the world around interactive services. And I thought that made a lot of sense and kind of wanted to be part of it. But when I graduated in 1980, there weren't really any internet companies to go to back then. And venture capitalists weren't backing 21-year-old kids with crazy ideas back then. And that's why I ended up working for some larger companies. So as you mentioned, Procter and Gamble in Ohio, and then Pizza Hut in Kansas, which at the time was a division of PepsiCo, and learned a lot from those companies. In terms of Procter Gamble, is particularly great around consumer marketing and research, testing, and really trying to understand what consumers want. And Pizza Hut was kind of interesting because it really was a franchise operation. So there were, I think it was 5000 Pizza Huts at the time, really owned and operated by independent entrepreneurs who were franchisees. And that was a nice dynamic to witness and be part of given that Procter and Gamble was a little bit more of a larger command and control kind of company. And Pizza Hut was much more distributed. A lot of the innovation happened at the periphery kind of company.

Adam: And as you're describing, this was a very different time in place, there was no concept of venture capitalists throwing essentially blank checks at entrepreneurs with crazy ideas about how to take ideas around technology and turn them into businesses. How did the idea for AOL emerge? And how did you ultimately turn it into what it became?

Steve: Well, it was after 1983. So what, 40 years ago? I moved to the Washington D.C. area to join a startup that was doing something I thought was kind of interesting. And the early days of some of this interactive services company actually failed. But two of the people I met there, Jim Kimsey, and Mark Serriffe, and I decided to start a new company, which became AOL in 1985. And at the time, only 3% of people were online, and that 3% were online for an average of one hour a week. So it's pretty early days, venture capitalists were pretty skeptical. It took us a while. But eventually, we were able to raise $1 million to get the company launched. And our idea was really to try to make the Internet accessible to everybody. How do you make it easy to use and useful and fun and affordable? And we did that largely by focusing on software and services that kind of humanize the technology, but also a lot in terms of partnerships reform, particularly with the personal computer manufacturers that gave us the marketing leverage that we couldn't really have on our own given we had a limited marketing budget. So that was the idea. Really, how do you get going in terms of making it easy for people to connect? How do you create some of the on ramps that allow people to connect How do you create the products and services that give people reasons to want to connect? That's really what's driving our success in that first phase.

Adam: What were the keys to growth? Growing and scaling AOL. And what do you learn from the experience of building AOL that anyone listening to this conversation can apply to growing and scaling their business?

Steve: Well, some of them are the basics, which obviously, you've covered on a lot of your podcasts, which is, ultimately it comes down to people. Ultimately, it comes down to teams, and idea is important. But the execution of the idea is more important. And you can't do that on your own. So the teams you assemble, are really critical that put that idea in motion. So that's a lesson I learned early on and continue to learn as we're backing companies that revolutions were traveling the country trying to find entrepreneurs, different parts of the country ultimately come down to the people aspect of it. Another it was really important, it goes back to what I was saying earlier about our limited budgets, that partnerships were important and that we couldn't do this on our own. I think we had 300 partnerships at AOL. In terms of communications companies, technology companies, and media companies, a lot of people needed to work together to really make the Internet a part of everyday life. And so sometimes we were playing the role of leading the orchestra, trying to get people working together in a collaborative way to make things possible. I think that's true with a lot of big innovations. And I also learned in those early days, more understanding, even respect for the role of government, government, sometimes people look down at particularly entrepreneurs who want to move quickly and have a sense that government regulations, things like that will slow things down. And often that is the case, in my case that the Internet would not have been possible. Without the government, the government has actually funded a defense research project called DARPA. In the ‘60s, they really built the internet. And even when we started our company, well, in 1985, that internet was still restricted to government agencies and educational institutions. So consumers and businesses couldn't actually connect to the internet when we got started. And so that led to an effort to really commercialize the internet. Congress passed legislation to essentially allow the world to connect to the internet. So both seeing how government played a role in birthing the internet. And then seeing how Congress played a role in unleashing the internet also gave me a respect for that, as I think some of those dynamics around people and partnerships and policy are going to become even more important in this next era, this next wave of innovation.

Adam: We're definitely going to talk more about people and teams. I want to dive a little bit deeper into that last point, you brought up the importance of understanding the role that government can play in making or breaking your business. What advice do you have for anyone listening on how to better understand what role government can play in their particular business, and how to best capitalize on it?

Steve: Well, it kind of depends on what people decide to do, what company they decide to start, what battle they decide to fight. And there are some areas where there could be innovation, which really wouldn't have a lot to do with the government. There are other areas where it is more central take healthcare, for example. It's a pretty big industry 1/6 of the economy, pretty important people living healthy, long lives, but also pretty dysfunctional. And there's a lot of opportunity for innovation reimagination. And a lot entrepreneurs are focusing on that. But healthcare is a regulated industry. And some of that's because the government's a major payer of health care costs. But also government wants to make sure that drugs people take or medical devices, people use actually work as promised and are safe and are going to help people not hurt people. That's just the nature of health care. And so understanding if you want to innovate in that health care, you need to work in that environment work in that context, understand the role of government understand the role of regulations, I think is critically important. Also, just as we saw in those early days of the Internet, with DARPA, as I mentioned, the government can and has a long history of funding innovation, so to the basic technologies that unleash new industries create sort of the industries of the future. And that would happen was true a half a century ago, not just with the internet, but also with things like semiconductors, a lot of the research has done around cancer, other things is funded by the government. Some of those ideas, then turn into drugs and other things that can save people's lives. And quite recently, just this past year, Congress passed some legislation including the Chips and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and infrastructure legislation that really is a significant investment in infrastructure, significant investment in decarbonisation, and significant investment in reshoring. That's creating a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs all across the country. So it's partly just understanding why governments there and when how they set the rules of the road in terms of how businesses start and scale, but also in some instances, how does government actually be a catalyst that drives more innovation creates more opportunity for for entrepreneurs.

Adam: Steve, you obviously had incredible highs, building and leading AOL building one of the most successful Haswell companies in the history of this space, you drove one of the largest mergers in the history of business. When AOL acquired Time Warner, for $182 billion, you formed a $350 billion company. Now, the merger didn't exactly work out as planned. And there's been a lot written as to why. But I want to know, if you could share, given the time you've had to reflect on it, what you took away from that experience, and what lessons you've learned from what went on from the deal itself. And, in general, what your biggest takeaways are?

Steve: Well, so we talked about before, ultimately, while strategy is important vision, if you will, is important, it really comes down to execution. And that comes down to people getting the right people focused on the right priorities working together in the right way. And the vision for the Combine AOL and Time Warner I think was, you know, this goes back over 20 years, it was pretty compelling. And the things that we said we could do 20-plus years ago, were pretty compelling. And most of them now, video streaming, digital music, and so forth have come to the kind of central parts of our lives. But unfortunately, even though we had the sense of where things were going and set some of the priorities in terms of products and services that we thought were going to be important in the future, we didn't get a right in terms of getting the right people focus on the right priorities worked together in the right way. And some of that was the history of the Time Warner itself, which had been built through a series of acquisitions that were never really integrated, never really run as, as, as one company, some of that was the dynamics of AOL kind of coming out of nowhere. When we went public in 1992, the market value was $70,000,000.07, eight years later, it was $160 billion, you're gonna have something like 12,000% was the best performing stock of the decade. And that's when we decided to make the leap in terms of this merger. But soon after, really just a few months after we announced the merger, that whole .com phenomenon blew up and the stock valuations plummeted, and that also created some challenges, because suddenly, the value of everybody's stock, particularly in this case, the employees of the company had declined significantly. And that led to a lot of frustration, so somewhat related to timing. But more broadly than that, I think it just related to not getting people working together, really leaning into the future, understanding what was possible in the future. And people tended to be a little more defensive, protecting the way things were done protecting the existing business models protecting their existing position. So that to me was the key takeaway. There's actually a Thomas Edison quote that I think about when I think about that merger, which is, “Vision, without execution, is a hallucination”. I think we did have the vision right, we had the execution wrong. And ultimately, it was a big disappointment.

Adam: And that extends pretty broadly when you think about the number of entrepreneurs who have big ideas, ideas that sound like they could be billion-dollar businesses, but it ultimately comes down to execution. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if no one's executing it, it's just an idea. And I've done interviews with so many of the most successful entrepreneurs in America. And something that I've heard from many has been that my idea wasn't particularly special. I did an interview with Mike Evans, the founder of GrubHub, he said that the idea for GrubHub was around long before he started GrubHub. But it's all about the execution. It's all about taking whatever idea you have, and making it happen, making it a reality.

Steve: No, it's totally true. It's totally true. And in fact, if it's a good idea, likely other people will be doing it. And so it really it's more of a battle of who executes right, who gets the product, right? Who gets the service, right? Who gets the support, right? Who gets the team, right? Who gets the partnerships, right? Who gets the investment strategy in terms of capital deployment, right? There are a number of decisions that are part of that execution that are critically important. That's what's fun about backing the new generation of entrepreneurs that we do with revolution is really trying to understand what their ideas what their vision is, what the mountain, they're climbing, the battle they're fighting, but also how they are assembling a team to really capitalize on that opportunity and how they plan to execute in terms of partnerships or other key aspects to it to really take the idea and make it real and build a significant durable company.

Adam: And to provide a little bit more context to listeners. You run a highly successful venture capital firm revolution, and you invest in companies at every stage of the entrepreneurial lifecycle. And you have a different approach to investing. It's a unique philosophy and it's a philosophy that you dive into in your most recent book, The Rise of the Rest. What do you look for in the companies you invest in? And in the people you invest in?

Steve: Well, some of it is what any investor would be looking for, which is somebody with a great idea that has what we think is the skill set and the team that can execute against that idea. But what makes what we do at Revolution different is most venture capitalists are focusing on backing entrepreneurs in just a few places over the last decade. But 75% of venture capital hasn't been invested in just three states, California, New York, and Massachusetts and Maine. 47 other states are fighting over the remaining 25%. In some big states like Texas, and Florida and Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, you can go down the list to get much, much less venture capital than the big tech hubs like Silicon Valley in California. So because everybody else is focusing on backing the entrepreneurs in places like Silicon Valley, we're focused on backing the entrepreneur everywhere else. And so we spent more than a decade now traveling around the country, we now have over 200 investments in 100 different cities, 37 different states. So we're really canvassing the country and building networks all across the country to identify promising entrepreneurs and compelling investment opportunities. And it started with some bus tour they started doing a decade ago visiting different cities trying to do what we could to create stronger startup communities in those cities. And then it accelerated with the launch of a venture fund specifically focused on this early stage seed stage investing. And then it accelerated. Again, when we decided to write this book and really tell the stories of the entrepreneurs we've met all across the country, there really are reimagining some really big industries, creating some really successful companies, but doing it in places like Columbus, and Chattanooga and Detroit, and Minneapolis, and Denver, and Nashville, and Richmond, and many, many other cities, not just in places like San Francisco, New York, Boston, which historically have been viewed as the major tech hubs. And I think over the next decade, we're gonna see a real dispersion of talent, more people moving to other places. And you saw some of that during the pandemic, I think you'll see more of it in the next decade. And you also see a dispersion of that venture capital, that less capital will be invested in the historical tech hubs like Silicon Valley, and more in dozens of other cities around the country. And that's why I wrote the book, we're gonna get really as a fascinating and I think, kind of uplifting story of this next chapter of America, where entrepreneurs everywhere really will have the opportunity to build companies everywhere in the process, innovate and key sectors, key aspects of our lives, and also really pursue the American dream that has been not something that a lot of people a lot of places have felt was possible in the past.

Adam: You've deployed so much capital to so many different entrepreneurs across so many different types of businesses. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs trying to raise money? And what advice do you have for investors trying to understand who to invest in?

Steve: Well, I think for the entrepreneurs, it's always gonna be not easy to raise capital. It probably shouldn't be easy to raise capital, maybe two, or three years ago was a little too easy to raise capital, particularly if you're one of these tech hubs like Silicon Valley. It's a challenge to raise capital. It is a challenge to get people to believe in your idea and believe in you and your team. I certainly love this, as we talked about earlier, and in the early days of the Internet, most people didn't believe in AOL, didn't really believe in us as a team, and didn't really even believe in the idea of the Internet. There was a lot of skepticism that the Internet would ever be mainstream, it seems crazy now. But that was a conventional view of the 1980s being more of a hobbyist kind of thing. So it's hard to raise capital, it's hard to get people to believe and when you find somebody who's at least willing to listen, you really need to do a great job of in a really compact, concise kind of way, explaining why you really have a theory of the case, why you can be successful and figure out ways to de-risk it for the investors. And that's where things like partnerships can be helpful. On the investor side, it's really recognizing that we are in an era where essentially every company is a tech company where the internet is becoming this platform where it's allowing innovation across every aspect of our lives across every sector of the economy. But in order to be successful in many of these new opportunities, going for the next 10 or 20 years, it's going to be helpful to have some expertise about that sector and have some credibility in that sector. If going back to health care we talked about before, if you want to innovate in healthcare, you're not going to get very far unless you get doctors and nurses to use what you're trying to bring to market hospitals to integrate it. Health plans to pay for it and government regulators allow it. So you really need to have that skill set. So investors increasingly, are looking not just for entrepreneurs with new ideas, but entrepreneurs that have an understanding of the dynamics of a particular industry and have built a team that has credibility in that particular industry and can forge partnerships that can really accelerate growth in that particular industry. So that's one aspect and the other which obviously, part of the reason I wrote the book, it wasn't just to inspire entrepreneurs to start scale companies no matter where they are in the country, it was also to encourage venture capitalists sitting on the coast in places like Silicon Valley to hit the road and meet entrepreneurs all across the country and find entrepreneurs all across the country that are building really significant companies that could generate significant investment returns for them. And so I'm hoping that will help level the playing field that will make it in the next 10 or 20 years easier for people in these rising cities to start and scale their companies.

Adam: Steve, you've mentioned a couple of times now, the power of building successful partnerships, how critical was that for you when you were running AOL? How important that is for you when you look for entrepreneurs to invest in? What are the keys to building winning relationships and to building successful partnerships?

Steve: I think you have to be a good listener and you have to have a certain empathy trying to understand what is going on on their side of the table. What problems are they dealing with? What opportunities are they trying to pursue and what challenges they may be having internally, particularly for larger companies you might want to partner with there's often some dynamics that they need to deal with. And if you have some sense of what some of those dynamics are, that can inform how you position yourself to them what proposal you make to them. So some of it is not just focusing on what you've got, but focusing on where they stand and how they're likely thinking about you. And more broadly, the market opportunity, and making a proposal that's customized, if you will, that's reflective of what you can do for them, but also what they can do for you and recognizes some of the inherent challenges that they might be dealing with day to day. So that's a critical part to get it started. And then it's even more critical to figure out ways to sustain it. So it's not just about signing the agreement, it's really about making it work. And that's where delivering on the commitments you made really executing well is important and really building a relationship where there's a high level of trust because there's always going to be bumps in the road, things that are going to happen, you're likely to get a more sustainable relationship if you really built the trust that gets you through some of those tough times.

Adam: What are the keys to building trust?

Steve: Some of that is just being authentic and trying to understand what's on their mind and figuring out ways to connect with them in ways that are deeper than just the transactional relationship. But also doing what you say and just executing more time goes from a little bit skeptical, are you really going to deliver to overtime? Building confidence and trust about the fact that you really are going to the commitments you make the promises you make, you're going to deliver on, and when you do have bumps in the road, you're going to understand their side, not just your side and together figure out some path forward that works for everybody

Adam: I cannot agree with you more. And as listeners of this podcast have heard me say, at nauseam, great leaders are great listeners. Listening is essential to building successful relationships, in life, in business, and in anything you do. The power of authenticity is critical to great leadership. Steve, what do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Steve: It varies depending on what you're focused on. And I've learned the nature of leadership, the requirements of leadership kind of depend on the context in which you're operating. It's a little different if you have a team of five people than if you're running a company with 50,000 people. It's a little different depending on what specifically you're trying to achieve over the next year or two, what the next lap in the marathon looks like if you will. But if you take a step back at some of the broader themes, I think it requires really having the courage to take on difficult challenges, not run from the battle, but run to the battle, whether it be pursuing an opportunity that other people might think is unrealistic, but you really believe in it. And also figuring out ways to bring a team along really inspiring them to be part of your journey to join you on that mission. You also have to be pretty adaptable, pretty flexible, pretty nimble, pretty agile, because there are always going to be bumps in the road. The military says they do a lot of battle planning, but no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy suddenly, all that planning goes out the window or at least partially goes out the window because you have to adjust to what's real, you're seeing on the field and make adjustments every day based on that reality. You also have to be a good communicator. It's not just about listening and digesting what's happening within the company, what's happening around the company, what's happening more broadly in the industry, but figuring out ways to then communicate that to get other people, whether it be people in the company or other allies you have that are partnering with a company to really be confident that you're on the right trajectory. It also that in terms of the team dynamic, we talked about this a bit earlier. It's partly assembling the dream team of people with the right skills that can really help you do things that you couldn't do on your own. But then really making sure they are working well as a team, which ties into some of the things you've talked about in the past around culture and other things that really do you get the alignment, you need to really achieve great things. So there are a lot of different lessons I've learned over the years, sometimes by doing some things right often by doing some things wrong, and then trying to take a step back and do better be better next time. But there's those are some of the takeaways from my journey.

Adam: Steve, I love it. And something that you shared, which struck me, I'm going to bring a quote here from Mike Tyson, who said, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit for the first time”. Good leaders need to be flexible, leaders need to be adaptable. You brought up a few times to the importance of having the right people on your team. 

Steve: Building the right culture is one thing I should add. I remember this was one of the key things I focused on, particularly in the hyper-growth days of AOL in the late ‘90s. Because I also recognize as the leader as the CEO, I need to be kind of a shock absorber, that sometimes things were going really, really well and the stock was moving up really, really fast. And we were highlighted on featured on the covers of magazines as the next great thing. And that can lead to overconfidence kind of hubris. And so sometimes when things were going really well, I had to remind people about some of the challenges some of the risks, and I've had people get so focused on the successes and unaware of some of the risks. But the converse, there are also many times where it was a negative dynamic that people were saying that the internet wasn't going to be a fad or AOL was gonna fail or the stock was going to crash or his partnership was going to leave. And then people would tend to be more worried and concerned about their futures and the company's future. At that point, I felt like I had to bring them up and remind them why this was, in fact, a battle worth fighting. Why this was a company that was well positioned to be successful. So kind of eating out some of those highs and lows, I think, is another takeaway in terms of some of my leadership experience. And the other thing I'd add, there is the communication aspect to it that you really need to constantly remind people about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and why it's important. And you constantly need to continue to inspire and rally your troops, maybe even extend your partnerships, your alliances, you're always communicating and always, in some cases selling. And that's just part of the nature of being an entrepreneur, you start with an idea, you see some problem in your life, you say, I'm going to go do something about it, and you start a company to do something about it. Then you need to figure out how to get other people to join you on that journey or the founding team, then you need to figure out some way to raise some initial capital to be able to fund whatever you're trying to accomplish. And you need to figure out some way to get your initial customers. And there's just a lot of things that you need to do when he starts as an idea. And this is some of what I tried to cover in the Rise of the Rest book because these are some of the lessons they've learned not just from my career, but now by backing lots of other entrepreneurs. And at the core, entrepreneurs really are just looking for a problem or sometimes stumbling into a problem. And instead of just complaining about it, they do something about it well, stories I love in the book is the entrepreneur Eric Love knows his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer because it was seven or eight years ago now. They talked to a bunch of different doctors and got different advice in terms of what they should do. And he just concluded this with a data problem that there wasn't really precision in terms of understanding exactly what was going on in his particular wife's case. So he started this company Tempus that we invested in to do something about it. That company now is scaled significantly. It's a very valuable company. It's saving lots of lives by basically providing a more precise diagnosis, which leads to a more precise therapy. Another company we backed was started by three college kids in Washington, D.C. that didn't like the fact that all the food they were eating was junk food, they wanted healthier, more sustainable food and started to at one point, just one small salad shop called Sweet Green that's now scaled around the country as a significant business now a public company with more than a billion dollar valuation, they just saw that problem and decided to do something about it.

Adam: What are the keys to engender engendering and fostering innovation and how can leaders create cultures that fuel innovation? 

Steve: You can look at this to the level, some of it's what's happening within a company specifically, but also is what's happened within different communities in different regions around the country and also different countries. This is one of the things we've learned traveling around the country there are some places that really celebrate risk-taking and admire entrepreneurs that are willing to go for it. And Silicon Valley is a great example that they encourage swinging for the fences. And if something fails, they don't say the founder, the entrepreneur was a failure. They said that idea didn't work. But hopefully, that person learned something and maybe their next company will be more successful. That spirit of possibility is not something that exists in a lot of other parts of the country. And that's something we're trying to change. With Rhys address, we're trying to do what we can to create other thriving startup communities in dozens of cities all across the country that do foster more of that innovative spirit, more of that risk-taking spirit. And one of the things we've learned is in each of these cities, even though there are a lot of benefits to digital technologies, and we saw this certainly during the pandemic, where the world kind of moved to zoom, there's also value to being together. And in most startup cities, there's a certain place, almost innovation districts, innovation neighborhoods, where entrepreneurs tend to gather and that network density of bringing people together also helps facilitate innovation, people bump into each other. And sometimes they join a team or they bump into ideas and iterate on other people's ideas. So that's another aspect that's important. Mega really starts with the idea that risk-taking needs to be celebrated. It's something that's helped make America when we started the country, 250 years ago. America itself was a startup, was just an idea. But there was a pioneering spirit, a willingness to take the risk in this new country, most people around the world were skeptical, and didn't think America would work just as most people looking at startups don't think they're going to work. But somehow America survived in that early phase, even though it was a struggle. And since then, has thrived. And America kind of led the way in the Agricultural Revolution then led the way and the Industrial Revolution, more recently led the way in the Technology Revolution, the Digital Revolution. We went from this fledgling startup nation to now the leader of the pack, the leader of the free world, with the leading economy, because entrepreneurs were willing to take risks, and not just build companies, but build industries. And that's a spirit that I hope we can continue to have as a country. And I hope that we can spread that all across the country, and not have people in certain parts of the country feeling like they're left out and left behind. And unless they move to a place like Silicon Valley, they'll continue to be left out and left behind, we really need to have that spirit everywhere.

Adam: It's really about leaders embracing the fact that in order to accomplish anything, of any kind of significance, it's going to start with taking risks. You're never going to be able to achieve anything great if you don't take that chance.

Steve: Yeah, and I remember in my early days, I was always inspired by some of the stories like in baseball, Babe Ruth was the homerun king. He had more home runs than anybody else. But he also was the strikeout king, he had more strikeouts than anybody else, which is just a reminder if you're going to step up to the plate and swing for the fences, sometimes you'll get a homerun. More often than not, you will not but unless you're really trying to get the homerun, you'll never get one. And so that's sort of the spirit that entrepreneurs bring.

Adam: Great point. And there are plenty of examples of players in today's game just like that, just like Dave, earlier on in the conversation. We talked a little bit about lessons that you learned around the AOL-Time Warner merger, and that was as big a negotiation as one could ever possibly engage in, you let it what are your best tips on the topic of negotiations?

Steve: Well, I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier in terms of partnership, which is not just focusing on what you want, but focusing on what the other side needs, and trying to understand how they are likely thinking about it. In the case of AOL and Time Warner, our view was we needed to combine with a larger company because we wanted to have a larger, more stable overall business. But we also needed a path to broadband. We were the leader. This goes back over 20 years in the late ‘90s. We're the leader in what's been called dial-up narrowband. We didn't have a path of broadband that was controlled by the cable company. So we needed that path. And Time Warner was the largest owner of cable systems as well as a big operator of some of the big cable networks, HBO and CNN and so forth. So that's what we needed. But what we also spend a lot of time on is, what do they need? And what Time Warner needs is a great company with a storied history. A lot of major acquisitions that really built it to the largest media company across music and movies and television magazines, lots of different things timing and Turner Broadcasting and Warner Music and Warner Brothers studio and you go down the list, but what they needed was a path to the digital future. They were strong in the current model but didn't really have a clear path to a future model. And so that's how we focused the conversation that we said that each of these companies is interesting on a standalone basis. But together, they can do things that they otherwise couldn't do alone. So it was a classic case of that African proverb, “If you want to go quickly and go alone if you want to go far, you must go together”. We said, let's go far, let's go together by combining. And so that was really the driver of that negotiation. So in any negotiation, it's really trying to understand again, not just what you want, but what they want, or what they need, putting yourself in their shoes, understanding their strategic imperatives, what the likely priorities are going to be in terms of any negotiation. And usually, it's only a few points that really matter if people focus on lots of things. But for most negotiations, a few things are particularly critical, and really trying to help them solve that problem is likely to result in them being more open-minded about doing what you want them to do.

Adam: Steve, a couple of really important takeaways, first and foremost, the importance of seeing things through the lens of others. Important period, no matter what you're doing, whether you're negotiating a multibillion-dollar merger, whether you're trying to develop a friendship, whether you're trying to build a personal relationship, a professional relationship, critical no matter what. Something else you shared, which I think is really important as well, focuses on the key points. All too often we get caught up in the minutia. And there could be 100 different deal points. But at the end of the day, what are the points that really matter? What do both parties really care about here and solve those problems, at the end of the day, that's what's going to drive things home.

Steve: Absolutely. And some of those dynamics also are contributing to some of the challenges we now have as a country, including the hyper-partisanship we have and the difficulty of finding common ground on many issues in Congress. People are not spending on both sides, and that's been enough time thinking about what the other side wants. They're just focusing on trying to push through what they want. And there's not a level of listening and understanding and empathy that likely could lead to a solution. And often things do get complicated. And sometimes when things do finally get done, it's because the negotiation is simplified down to the few things that really matter. Most, I think they, as you say, they apply to every aspect of our lives, friends, family, certainly business, but also some of the broader things in terms of our communities in terms of how governments function, come down to some of these same principles.

Adam: Steve, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Steve: I think a lot of it is listening, learning, reading, and watching. You'll learn a lot from just paying attention and showing up again. Through the entrepreneurial lens is more likely to enable you to bump into a particular idea or particular problem that you might want to focus on and more likely to bump into people that might be part of your tribe, part of your journey that want to join you on that effort. And also just expose you to some ideas that of where the puck is going, not where the puck is. And so just paying attention to what's happening is, I think, really critical, and recognizing that things are moving quickly. And so even if you thought you had a good sense of where things were things are changing, and you have to keep adjusting the way you're thinking about things, learning new things, always being curious about what's happening, and always focus more on what's going to happen next, not spending a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror what's already happening. Those are some of the ways to make sure if particularly if you're thinking about it from a lens of entrepreneurship, making sure that you continue to be leaning in the future and being exposed to interesting people and ideas and through that interesting opportunities.

Adam: Steve, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Steve: Thank you, Adam. I enjoyed it.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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