AOL

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• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  Oh my God, I sold Weblogs Inc to AOL and it was wonderful. And then all years later, they shut down half the blogs, then another 30% of them. And all that's left is Engadget and Autoblog. This is really heartbreaking for me. They did a great job in the beginning and totally screwed the whole thing up.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  there's a virtual bloodbath going on at AOL as we speak. Yes, a lot of people are losing jobs, and I'm a bit concerned, although my editor tells me that our team is safe.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  aol bought engadget autoblog joystick and other blogs and they had also bought tech crunch and a couple of other brands and they were keeping it together then when jim bankoff left to start verge uh they started consolidating everything and doing this exact thing

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  It was 1992, so 30 years ago, the first internet company go public, we raised $10 million in our IPO and the value of the company that day was $70 million.

• bullish fact_claim Steve Case

  We saw that with AOL in this area, which is why even though it wasn't very tech friendly, very startup friendly when we started AOL here three decades ago, it's where Amazon chose to have its second headquarters. That would have been inconceivable when we were getting, you know, started.

• mixed assessment David Friedberg

  If you think about these subscription businesses and AOL subscription, ostensibly people were paying the subscription to hear the modem squeal and connect. But if you were to ask them why they were doing that, it was to get content and community on the other side. And that really has become why people subscribe to, you know, all these other services. So they just sometimes being early is an asset, I guess, and sometimes being early makes it impossible.

• bearish criticism Steve Case

  There is an arc to these things and you have to keep kind of leaning in the future. And we did that well for a while, but then kind of lost our way. And that created the opening for others to fill that vacuum.

• neutral endorsement Steve Case

  I think that's fair. And some, yeah, so it was a different teams, different, you know, different cultures.

• mixed assessment David Friedberg

  I think the problem was you, you had this incredibly innovative team at AOL who moved quickly, and then you had a media business that just wasn't ready to move quick. They were two different paces. You had people jogging and then you had sprinters and sprinters cannot, you know, hang with a bunch of people who are just jogging around a track at a leisurely pace.

• bearish criticism Steve Case

  The idea of those coming together, leading internet company at the time, we had half all the internet traffic in the United States, Time Warner was the leading cable company with broadband, had all these brands like HBO and CNN and Warner Brothers and Warner Music and Time Magazine and so forth. You know, it, it should have been the perfect company to lead into the, in the future of this digital convergence that was starting to happen, but just couldn't get the right people focused on the right

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  Total slog. It was there a few times we had to go through layoffs and really hard to raise money. Our first round of venture capital, we raised $1 million. It was, you know, hard to get people to believe in the idea of the internet. It's really hard to get people to believe in our team and that we'd actually have a shot. So, it was like many entrepreneurial journeys, a struggle and also a little bit more of a struggle because we were starting AOL in Northern Virginia, kind of outside of Washingt

• neutral assessment Steve Case

  I think our focus, in terms of your question, was we wanted to make it really easy to use, really useful, really fun, and really affordable. And that was sort of the North Star that guided all our efforts around software design, subscription pricing, our marketing efforts. How do we make the internet available to everybody?

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  This was unprecedented in the world for 30 million people. And the company was throwing off billions of dollars, quarter in revenue, but more importantly, just making a massive cultural impact in getting people online and introducing them to the modern web and the internet.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I sold one of them to AOL

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  I sold the company for $30 million to AOL 18 months after starting. It was called Weblogs Inc.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I also heard that Randy hadn't met the founders until the day it was closed.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  according to my sources, the next highest bidder was $300 million, or $250.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  ultimately, it wound up with one of the most disastrous acquisitions in the history of technology, Bebo, for $650 million.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I don't think it was being put in place because the market looked at it as the right decision, or even at the internal staff looked at it as the right decision.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I think in AOL's case, there's kind of, there's, I think, three ways you can look at the senior leadership there. There's people being placed in for, at that point, for Time Warner's desires. Right? There's people being placed in for the public's need. And there's people being placed in for the employee's need. Right? I think at that point, Time Warner had some very specific things they wanted to do with that asset class. And they looked at Ron and Randy as ways to do that, whether they were suc

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  And the guy, Randy Falco, was known for not using email.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I think they had made a lot of controversial decisions that boiled people's blood a little bit.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  These guys, Ron and Randy, were hated inside of AOL.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  weblogs specifically redefined AOL's overall content strategy that held on past John's time there.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  in terms of multiples, some of the biggest multiples paid. That's right. Very small companies, but it worked out pretty well for AOL, it seems.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  weblogs, they use your play, and these are all 30, 40 million dollar acquisitions, according to sources. And these were small companies, five, 10,000 companies.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  just like you and I both saw at that point within AOL kind of redefining their strategy, they're paying a lot for kind of strategy redefining companies that would come in and help invigorate what AOL was at that point.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  But what they would do is they would obviously fire the people that were getting paid the most, which roughly equated to the people that were the oldest. And doing the least. And what was left over were all these young people, and we would just get increasing responsibility because they just didn't have an alternative.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  the best thing that happened to me was AOL was in a period of deep decline, and they were firing everybody in sight.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  You took a gig at – you took the gig of running AIM Instant Messenger and ICQ when they were at their peak. And you rode them in your tenure into the ground, losing – literally losing millions of users a month.

• mixed assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  While Winamp was great, I ended up at AOL for a long time, which was okay, not that great.

VentureSignalScore 0/100 for aol, composed from 1 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage