AOL

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• bearish assessment Unattributed

  Now there are some exceptions to that rule, usually with a paradigm shift, AOL, and then dial up went to broadband and they didn't make the change.

• neutral fact_claim Brian Alvey

  between you know the the Netscape launch yeah the TMZ Kimsey getting a 40 75 million pages a day I mean ridiculous loads of traffic and we got that we got that down so it they know what they're spending on these things right now

• neutral prediction Jason Calacanis

  my prediction is news corp either buys yahoo or some assets from yahoo horse has some Yahoo deal going with Microsoft or they have some AOL deal

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  I'll try with aim pages and stuff like that didn't quite work and they wound up buying Bebo

• bearish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  the thing that Yahoo did amazingly from back in the day you know even better than much better than AOL and this is pre Google days

• neutral fact_claim Atif Rafiq

  back in the day when AOL was charging like 25 million dollars to be the exclusive X sponsored exclusive be sponsor of like a channel right that's right that's right I mean we were we were mailing out this all across America we were an online subscription service we were paying for content the model was totally different right and it all transformed within the course of a couple years

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  congratulations to AOL they've been great to the brands that I sold them and I think it's a great company

• bearish criticism Seth Godin

  were the king when there weren't a lot of other choices about how you were going to get this thing we called the internet but once the whole universe opened up the mistake AOL made five or 10 years ago was saying well people will stick with us because we try hard instead of saying you know what we could do we could just Embrace this whole open Universe we could become eBay and Groupon and Google and all the others but instead they just sort of closed their eyes to a new world and demanded that t

• neutral fact_claim Peter Shankman

  I was hired as one of the founding editors of AOL news I helped launch The Newsroom at AOL and uh this was back when AOL when everyone thought AOL was the internet

• bullish assessment Mo Koyfman

  it was the right thing for them at the time. Seems like a big part of AOL strategy. Yeah it it is and I think not just strategy but I think it's a big part of their management team right now because those guys are fantastic. I think Ron and crew are are going to be overseeing a good amount of their video efforts.

• neutral fact_claim Michael Yavonditte

  AOL was famous for these deals and they were they pioneered them

• mixed assessment Tony Conrad

  I think I think it's a huge job and I think the only way that it works is he's got to start with great people ... so I think you know I think there's a legitimate shot you know that this company will you know continue to kind of evolve BRS do make the transition from dial to content

• neutral fact_claim Tony Conrad

  I work for AOL ... we're back part of the acquisition really ... what is your job at AOL now well I have one job I focus on and that is waking up and trying to make about. me a household name

• neutral fact_claim Tony Conrad

  the $25 million exit uh the $30 million exit which I would characterize R three exits at AOL probably in that range reportedly yeah um those are very profitable exits if you've only got 15% of your stock owned by other investors Bingo and I like 85% of $30 million a lot of money

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  uh you were on the board of odd poost that got sold to Yahoo uh and um you and Tim young just did about me and four days after you sold it for $800 million to AOL exceeding the bibo exactly

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  so bio was the target

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  and um you and Tim young just did about me and four days after that you sold it for $800 million to AOL

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  you found it fear I did sold it to AOL I did

• neutral fact_claim Ian Rogers

  did wamp got sold to AOL correct and did Nutella come after that yeah so you guys released a massive piracy at the time at when you're working for Ted Leones at a well and Steve case yeah and when they were trying to merge with Time Warner it was a very unpopular thing to do

• bearish criticism Ian Rogers

  we couldn't get the resources out of AOL actually build the web based version

• neutral assessment Brian Kennish

  I I think they've learned from the AOL model

• bearish criticism Om Malik

  Tim Armstrong is the CEO of a well who's a fantastic guy he's a very smart guy he knows what he's doing except he is on sales so his background is sales

• bearish criticism William Quigley

  you have AOL buying bio in a disaster with untrained management not thinking about it but saying hey 50 on a social network when Facebook's worth 10 billion seems like a steal

• mixed assessment Ian Rogers

  Yahoo had decided to go from being a tech portal to being a media company. They brought in Terry Seml and then Lloyd Braun and Lloyd Braun and they hired a lot of people and it was all going to be about music and video and LA and in a way that's where the internet is arriving now. So I sort of feel like some of their vision wasn't terrible. It wasn't terrible, but I think it was along the way.

• neutral assessment Ian Rogers

  Yahoo was still a very powerful company um and still somewhat on the ascendancy definitely

• bullish fact_claim Ian Rogers

  we sold in December 2003 to Yahoo uh for you know a decent return about a seven and a halfx you know not bad for the for the time

• neutral assessment Ian Rogers

  I did about a year there. Um and it was a great experience for me. I had no say your first corporate experience. Yeah, I had worked very briefly at Sony online entertainment but that was really only a few months. So, it was my first experience where it actually seemed like I had a future in a big company, you know what I mean?

• neutral fact_claim Ian Rogers

  AOL in May of 99 for 100 million in AOL stock at the same time that AOL bought um Spinner which is Josh Felzer's company.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  Arrington actually doesn't come out looking that bad in this I think he's been able to use his blog as a way to uh make people who already love fear respect whatever him who just find him as an interesting character yeah to to paint this picture of himself as a victim of you know AOL screwing him over after they bought him I think a lot of people will believe that story I think if he gets fired he'll probably get all the money that he would have had to work for otherwise I don't think he ends up

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  poor Ariana Huffington as well is trying to run a serious organization and this is really the problem

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I don't see Huffington Post as a news organization I don't see any organization that they're connected with as having legitimacy they're trying to uh uh come across as more they're trying to come across as a real uh news organization and this takes away from that

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  it just makes it so unnecessary for them to have this risk factor which is why they're trying to get closure on it

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  AOL is trying to say we're going to be the next New York time we replace the New York Times we're hiring New York Times writers and then you have this other like little you know insignificant property in terms of Revenue in the bottom line but very significance in terms of influence

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  AOL is making a billion and it's got all these other bigger problems to deal with

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  it makes it look like Amateur hour and Tim can't come out and publicly address this stuff because then it looks even worse

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Tim Armstrong lost the inaga crew because of that Mike Arrington situation in large part that's a real ramification to lose that many talented people in one of your number one properties

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  the real issue here is um for Tim Armstrong this is making him look really bad because he's I mean as Caris swier pointed out it's a public company and this is Shenanigans and public companies have Shenanigans uh the board and the shareholders they get um upset nervous and they get nervous like what if Tim can't control this blogger yeah that's going to be the perception then why would I own the stock a and people are not going to buy AOL stock or they're going to sell AOL stock and AOL stock is

• neutral assessment Marshall Kirkpatrick

  well I I'm not not real big into any of these uh these kinds of issues to be honest but if a company that that offers both technology and media and advertising can do better in terms of advertising then hopefully they'll have more money to spend on the technology in the media and those of us who who come to consume that will get to to enjoy the fruits of their you inovation and labor so I I hope it works

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  I I actually think it's not as much Banning against Google as it is Banning against the ad Networks that are fighting all these scraps and just sort of consolidating the consolidating down so that when you go to somebody on Wall Street uh Wall Street Madison EV you rather you could say hey we have 150 million 75 million people in this category so if AOL Autos has 15 million people and Yahoo autos has 20 million and you know whatever Microsoft Autos has 6 million none of them have a 50 million or

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  AOL did the same thing trying to spread their marketing costs like when they were sending all those uh CDs all over the place and they did have lifetime value of their customers

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  nobody's got a big enough footprint that once the business is going it's going to make

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  having this similar experience that he does which is a big social media footprint it does not alone guarantee you success what it guarantees you is that 10,000 people will look at it

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  he's got such a following from his past companies he's one of the few guys that I think can actually pull off bu the first 10,000 users are free for him

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I like what I like about Kevin's Vision here is it's not just for for dishes it's for everything it's everything right but dishes may be the one that people use well to your point

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  I said to the AOL guys you guys should go home tonight and get down on your knees and thank God that Yahoo is so stupid because they just destroyed the company

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  I think AOL might have something to say about them being the premier uh digital content company right

• neutral assessment Peter Horan

  AOL came out with additions which was surprisingly good and I think that there's an art in these companies of letting product teams build stuff and getting out of their way and I think Yahoo is trying to figure that out certainly AOL has started to figure it out with a couple of good product launches

• bearish criticism Keith Richman

  I really question why you would go to AOL in the first place and run product

• neutral fact_claim Keith Richman

  Brad garlinghouse former yaho EXA was brought in back in 2009 to help revive the AOL AOL brand he's been serving as the applications and commerce head so basically the head product guy uh and he is now leaving

• neutral assessment Yaron Galai

  I see here a really interesting use of the product patch uh aol's local site uh speaking of AOL is uh promoting themselves here in the related links with not an image but a big logo of the patch logo clearly they're doing this in order to uh build the brand of patch so maybe they're not less concerned about the clickthrough rate they're sort of in a way getting a low CPM uh display ad correct

• neutral fact_claim Yaron Galai

  I also had the opportunity to acquire a company out of AOL uh last year and it's pretty much uh no followup on quo so yeah and so when you went to buy the asset out of there did you have to introduce yourself and say by the way check with business development because I sold you a company a couple years ago yeah yeah absolutely well it's it's a new regime too we sold it to the to the previous one but absolutely it was uh we had to reintroduce ourselves

• neutral fact_claim Yaron Galai

  AOL eventually bought it because they were going to be the massive ad destination they bought advertising.com they had a bunch of uh technology what happened to the asset now it's you know whatever number of years later four years later is it still operating inside of AOL yeah yeah it's absolutely operating it's of our crop of AD based companies which were four or five the Takota it's the only one that actually survived it's still being operated uh as A's sponsored listings uh Tim Armstrong just

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  we couldn't figure out how the model worked it's not going to work

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  they've got to figure out how to make money on patch or Tim will be in trouble

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  I think Ariana survives Tim leaves

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  people are going to say they're not capable of keeping journalists

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  I think the whole thing's gonna come apart

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  you can't keep losing x million per quarter

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  it doesn't scale and you're gonna need to in order to win a community like that you're gonna need to spend a half million dollars a year you're going to need five people at least to win a community it just doesn't work

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  patch is never going to work that's a bad idea

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  I think that Tim Armstrong is not going to last at AOL

• bearish criticism Liz Gannes

  I don't think it speaks very very well of their plans to to to make those Acquisitions work

• neutral fact_claim Peter Horan

  so AOL said let me leak it for 400 million and see if people or fall over it

• neutral fact_claim Peter Horan

  actually I can confirm that AOL was the second one because they actually have confirmed it in the Press

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I mean if you try to if you take a really hard task and then you times it by a thousand that doesn't make it easier right right like it's hard enough to make a gadget or all things D it's hard enough to make one blog work it takes two three years of incredibly hard work by a dedicated team of four or five journalists to make Mashable read write web all things the in gadget Tech crunch Auto blog joystick any of those Brands a core group of people to work really hard and then build off of revenues

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  I looked at met blogs I looked at Gothamist we were going to start this exact model inside of we were going to start this model inside of web blogs Inc and we bought blogging New York blogging new YK we bought $3,000 domains around it then when I was at AOL John Miller and I and the team there Jim bankof we modeled it and we were going to build patch before Tim Armstrong was two CEOs away we couldn't figure out how the model worked it's not going to work

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  with AOL there a much more fundamental issue which is they've got to figure out how to make money on patch or Tim will be in trouble because you can't keep losing x million per quarter yeah patch is never going to work that's a bad idea

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think that Tim Armstrong is not going to last at AOL I think that Tim because that I think Ariana survives Tim leaves and I think it's because I think people are going to say they're not capable of keeping journalists I think the whole thing is going to come apart sadly it may take another year

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  So we did this deal and it was the most lopsided deal in favor of AOL and and basically you know within a few months like Parker wasn't there wasn't there and then I remember just getting a call from somebody else I think maybe it was maybe Owen or Dan saying hey you know I reviewed this with Zuck we need to unwind this thing

• bearish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  I think they lost a little bit of the swagger through the debacle of unwinding the AOL Time Warner merger.

• bullish endorsement David Travers

  wasn't this an incredibly Savvy move on aol's part to just get a billion dollar generation

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  he's done a great job on the sales front but what product are we all in love with from AOL in the last three four five years okay any exactly none

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  I think a product person would have done better with AOL rather than a salesperson

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  AOL shareholders didn't mind the uh the money

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Microsoft bought the billion dollars from AOL worth of patents right and Google bought the Motorola patents like is this really a good use of their funds and the cash is that what shareholders want them doing is spending billions of dollars instead of R&D on patents

• bullish assessment David Cohen

  surprisingly we we actually get a lot of AOL interactions so it's it's uh you know those few seem to be the ones that that really get in there and try to help

• bearish criticism Sarah Lacy

  I think, a world in which the people are leading that blog, it's, like, it's so divorced from what we've built. It's so... At some point, it's like... It's like a sports team, where you are rooting for the jersey. Because, like, it's not the same place, it's run by AOL, it has a totally different strategy, even on the business side.

• bearish criticism Sarah Lacy

  It just shows how much AOL doesn't give a f**k about that brand. They're letting these people self-destruct in public. And it's unseemly.

• neutral assessment Sarah Lacy

  TechCrunch declined so much, that it would've been more of a turnaround. Coming in also trying to put all the work to rebuild that, and do it for AOL, versus start from the scratch and build something from your vision. It just was no contest, which I would rather be doing.

• bearish criticism Chamath Palihapitiya

  25 million cards on file at the time, you know, 80 million users of a downloaded media player, another 50 or 60 million users of a music product, and try as we might, we could not figure out how to crack the bureaucracy. Amazing lesson learned for all the things what not to do.

• mixed assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  I mean like that is the place I I I tell people it was the best experience of my life in many ways because nothing worked and so you learned all the things what not to do in success.

• bearish criticism Chamath Palihapitiya

  we did see a lot of that brain [ __ ] going on as you're saying where people were intellectuals and they were smart.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I don't see AOL putting down another 20 million or whatever they did frankly

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think that fund was started in a different reality AOL started it because they wanted to leverage Tech crunch to build a sort of Investment Bank around startups where you're funding them you're writing research on them essentially you're helping take them out to the market that Paradigm doesn't exist anymore

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I don't see AOL putting down another 20 million or whatever they did frankly a lot of the the VCS who put money into it did it because it was part of you know Tech eem and they felt like they had to were it's a different reality

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  people like a and Yahoo are going and using scarcity the quality of the product the distribution as a way to get high cpms and they're getting cpms that absolutely trouts what YouTube gets

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  I believe that because Twitter and Facebook uh AOL Microsoft and these new competitors they will provide direct sales support and direct marketing support to the same creators who grew up on YouTube

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook or Netflix or AOL or Yahoo these people come out and say we'll give you 100% of revenue for the first year or two to try to get you to leave YouTube

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  having those kind of cliffhanger episodes is a great way for you to sell into the Microsoft Yahoo Facebooks and aols mobile apps

• neutral prediction Jason Calacanis

  you'll have other options and your other options people like Yahoo Facebook Microsoft AOL and other folks maybe even Netflix or Amazon dip down to this level

• neutral fact_claim Yossi Vardi

  nobody was able to crack it other than AOL who was in the space with a limited offering which was only to for the users

• bullish assessment Eric Hippeau

  I think they've done a great job. I, you know, it looks, if I look at Comscore, they're right on top, you know, they're number two to whoever, and they're doing extremely well.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  because it say people plus can continue to use the creative crisis creative common license material and crunch base improves its legal terms mobile app startup people plus and free technology industry database crunch base have settled their dispute over data collection under the creative commment license allowing both companies continue their work

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  here you go the eff actually had to step in and when the eff steps in you're basically super wrong I mean they don't pick up cases unless it's a really important principle thing and it shows just how exactly wrong AOL was in this case

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I'm feeling like Microsoft's going to surprise people

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  surface 3 made almost a billion dollars last quarter it's actually when you start hitting a billion dollars in Revenue it actually becomes something that needs to be paid attention to

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  this already the problem with Microsoft's band is that it just doesn't do very much

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  the band is interesting to me because um I think they're trying not to get iPhone and Android it in the wearable space

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think they've got some deep systemic issues

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  the other two would be sort of turnaround jobs or whatever but I could do as good a job or better than Marissa or Tim

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  in those things I would have to very deeply consider it because you do have the ability to impact a large number of people with products that people love

• neutral fact_claim Jason Shellen

  a couple years in I uh was slightly disenchanted with uh life at AOL I left and started an email app called boxer

• neutral fact_claim Jason Shellen

  we attracted the interest of AOL and they wanted to uh have us come in and remake aim uh using a lot of the technology we had and using uh some of the wonderful people we had on our team

• mixed assessment Steve Case

  I think it was a good idea it was certainly good for our shareholders it would have been good for Time Warner shareholders as well if we' been able to execute against that

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  I when I proposed the merger I offered to step aside as CEO because I believed that it would be hard enough to get this deal done

• bearish fact_claim Steve Case

  there was a real risk that AOL would kind of hit the wall as the transition to broadband happened

• bearish criticism Steve Case

  Vision with execution is hallucination right that sort of summarizes the merger for me

• bullish assessment Steve Case

  we needed a path to broadband they own the largest Cable Systems they needed a path to the digital future

• bullish assessment Steve Case

  we wanted to invest in the next generation of content companies and own some equity

• bullish assessment Steve Case

  the greenhouse program which was inv basically in investing in dozens of companies that really we thought had great potential

• neutral assessment Steve Case

  the first decade almost was a struggle the second decade was when we got the benefits of it

• bullish assessment Steve Case

  why a went from in sort of an unknown IP when we went public to being the best performing stock of the decade because of the success of figuring out ways to drive up the audience and figure out ways to unlock new revenue streams

• bullish assessment Steve Case

  if you were able to get that deal with AOL that basically said kind of a partnership deal that they you can you can now break through and you'll reach a significant audience so it derisked it from an investor standpoint even though they were giving us large amounts of money to get that commitment

• bullish fact_claim Steve Case

  AOL was the leader of the PEC about half of the internet traffic in the US went through AOL

• bullish fact_claim Steve Case

  went from 184,000 I think it was 30 million and from a 70 million value to $160 billion

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  had 184,000 customers and $30 million of Revenue in the market value of the company was $7 million

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  we went public in 19 92 as the first internet company to go public it was still you know a lot of Skeptics you know that road show was tough people saying well why is this ever going to amount to anything

• bullish assessment Steve Case

  we would not have succeeded without those those Partnerships

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  we in those early days we couldn't have entered the market without the partners without having IBM and apple and com selling our services we didn't have the money to do it on our own

• bullish fact_claim Steve Case

  I remember talking to Evan when he was launching Twitter which was an SMS service he said it's sort of like aim you know an aim there that drop down where you can set your status you can be like a smiley face or this emo cons you guys were the first to have like I think otoc cons there people would do coland Dash My you know parentheses to get it but same thing as the mot but that was Twitter which was hey when people could look at their instant message list and see the status of the person righ

• bullish assessment Steve Case

  if you trace back a lot of these great you know decacorns hundred million dollar companies the the AOL fingerprints are all over them

• mixed assessment Steve Case

  AOL went from nothing to the leader and then in the first way was the dominant you know company and in the second way lost them altitude a new innovators kind of taking a fresh look

• bullish assessment Steve Case

  we always believed that the killer app was people right we called it Community now people call it social networking or social apps but we always Focus on things like people connection instant messaging by list we thought that was really the core really the soulle of the the medium was was people interaction

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  the transition to uh unlimited because this created a huge National crisis and this is really when the whole online world came online was when AOL could not handle allowing everybody to go online instead of for three or four or $5 an hour but for 20 bucks an hour unlimited

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  I don't think I ever owned more than 3% of AOL but when it you know got to be worth a lot of money that 3% was a was was a good a good amount

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  we raised a million bucks for the company from Kleiner a mix of a mix of investors it was you Kleiner was was the one of them all state was another in Canada was was another city group was it was a group of of people initial round I think was about a million dollar

• neutral fact_claim Steve Case

  we negotiated a settlement of a few million dollars for got million bucks out of go away and then we use that money to relaunch Apple link personal Edition as America Online

• neutral fact_claim Douglas Rushkoff

  you look at a guy like Evan Williams who could have very easily built Twitter without all that investment and you looked at him you know he had $4.3 billion under his face the morning he got the you know IPO at on Twitter but you know but so sadly um here's a company that makes $2 billion a year that's being considered an object failure because their debt structure doesn't accommodate that right

• bearish prediction Douglas Rushkoff

  I write this oped saying it means the Boom is going to be the bust it means Steve case is cashing in his chips to buy something real the whole thing's over this is this is it

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  AOL was 30 bucks a month right 35 million memories you're talking they were getting printing a billion dollars a month it was a it was lots of she advertising I mean it was incredible and when you put something up on there they could literally have all 30 million people see it you know in the way that these new walled gardens Facebook and YouTube can do that same thing yes yeah at an even bigger scale

• neutral fact_claim Dave Samuel

  at that time AOL was worth 20 billion 30 billion you know I should know the answer that but I got his hands and billions yeah I mean I think it was even more than that because because they did

• neutral fact_claim Dave Samuel

  I think AOL needed a radio play and we were in the right place to make that happen

• neutral fact_claim Dave Samuel

  so we launched the first internet radio service back on April 1st 1996 and really the service was has many similarities to Pandora today and so we just had internet radio and in you jump forward to 99 and AOL was looking for a radio play we had launched Yahoo radio and when Corp dev was like wait we can buy this company and we can basically set Yahoo back hmm also because there's lots of kind of geostrategic things going on the stars align

• neutral fact_claim Dave Samuel

  we sold for three twenty three hundred twenty million dollars and incredible we were we were lucky that was one of the biggest acquisitions of that time ten times bigger than weblog sink which I sold that's fifteen times bigger than Flickr or delicious which I think we're in the 20 million or TechCrunch or any of these things that's sold in that sort of cohort

• neutral fact_claim Dave Samuel

  back then selling a business to AOL or Yahoo was considered for our generation of entrepreneurs we're like the Gen Xers to sell a company for twenty thirty forty million dollars was that was kind of a goal

• neutral fact_claim Brad Burnham

  you're one of the few people that remember centralized services on the internet like AOL and CompuServe

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I had literally bought this for $30,000 or $40,000 after I sold my second company, Weblogs, Inc., to AOL.

• 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.

1. 2028-03-21 I think AOL might have something to say about them being the premier uh digital content company right · Prediction · pending
2. 2028-03-20 I write this oped saying it means the Boom is going to be the bust it means Steve case is cashing in his chips to buy something real the whole thing's over this is this is it · Prediction · pending
3. 2028-03-20 I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook or Netflix or AOL or Yahoo these people come out and say we'll give you 100% of revenue for the first year or two to try to get you to leave YouTube · Prediction · pending
4. 2028-03-20 I believe that because Twitter and Facebook uh AOL Microsoft and these new competitors they will provide direct sales support and direct marketing support to the same creators who grew up on YouTube · Prediction · pending

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