Success Quote by Steve Case

Early tech mythology loves to paint the 1990s as an inevitable rocket ship; Steve Case is reminding you it started as a scavenger hunt. The line lands because it reframes “innovation” as something much less cinematic: not a race to build the future, but a grind to locate the tiny pocket of people who could even participate in it. In the first decade of consumer internet businesses like AOL, the obstacle wasn’t just engineering or competition. It was market reality. If households didn’t own PCs, you weren’t “disrupting” anything; you were selling a product to a population that mostly lacked the doorway.

The subtext is a quiet critique of hindsight. We talk about network effects as if they’re natural laws, but Case is pointing at the precondition: networks don’t scale until the hardware base exists. His emphasis on “identify them” also exposes how analog the early digital economy was. Before targeted ads, social graphs, and app stores, growth meant direct mail, retail bundles, magazine inserts, and dialing-for-dollars marketing. Finding customers was literally a logistics problem.

It’s also a strategic confession. AOL’s early success wasn’t only about software; it was about distribution, partnerships, and making the on-ramp idiot-proof for the few who had the machine. Case’s intent reads like a lesson for today’s founders: the hardest part of building a “new category” is often not the product, but the missing infrastructure - and the humility to admit your addressable market is smaller than your ambition.