Success Quote by Steve Case

Speed is the point, but so is the flex. Steve Case is not just reminiscing about AOL's growth curve; he's offering a tidy parable about how technological adoption suddenly stops being a niche hobby and becomes infrastructure. The first million is the hard part because you're building trust, teaching behavior, and convincing people they need something they don't yet have language for. Then the switch flips: distribution channels mature, prices drop, and the product stops feeling like a novelty and starts feeling like a necessity. "Nine years" functions like a drumbeat here, a before-and-after that makes the acceleration feel inevitable rather than engineered.

The subtext is classic Silicon Valley evangelism with an early-Internet twist: progress compounds, and if you're positioned at the inflection point, scale looks like destiny. Case is implicitly defending a business model and an era. AOL, famously, didn't just "grow"; it carpet-bombed America with free trial CDs, aggressively simplified the web, and acted as a gatekeeper for novices. The line quietly frames that as organic momentum rather than a highly strategic campaign.

Context matters because AOL's trajectory maps onto a broader cultural transition: the 1990s move from dial-up curiosity to household utility. By packaging the story as a clean exponential, Case is also teaching a lesson to future builders and investors: don't confuse slow early adoption with failure. In the long arc of tech, patience is a competitive advantage - right up until the moment it isn't.