Success Quote by Steve Case

There is a distinctly late-90s corporate faith baked into Steve Case's phrasing: not that alliances might help, but that they were "critical" - a word that turns a choice into a necessity and reframes risk as responsibility. Case is talking like a builder of ecosystems, not a seller of products. In the AOL era, growth wasn't just about having a better service; it was about being the default doorway to the internet, and that meant distribution deals, content tie-ins, and handshake treaties with companies that might otherwise cut you off at the knees.

The quiet intent here is to normalize partnership as a form of strategy rather than a concession. "So we believed" sounds collaborative and almost modest, but it also signals managerial consensus: the decision is presented as rational, inevitable, and shared. That matters in business memoir-speak, where outcomes get retrofitted into narratives of foresight. The subtext: scale is political. You don't "win" the market; you negotiate your way into it, one strategic relationship at a time.

"and we did that for five years" is the tell. It implies discipline and patience, but also the grind of maintaining alliances long after the novelty fades. Partnerships are celebrated in PowerPoints; they're lived in contract terms, brand compromises, and dependency. Case's line hints at the central tension of that period: the internet promised decentralization, yet the companies that prospered treated access as a cartel problem. Alliances weren't just collaboration; they were infrastructure for dominance.