I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million.

There are lots of cycles to markets - boom and bust - and also in perceptions of people. The conventional wisdom of Steve Case as genius or fool was highly cyclical. The truth was always in the middle.

I think the more you have a generalist perspective, I think sometimes the more you can kind of see through the forest and the trees. And when it gets a little bit cloudy, you know, have some sense of, "Well, maybe this might happen or maybe that might happen." So I really am a big believer in liberal arts education. I think it's better - particularly in these kind of uncertain times - to know a little bit about a lot of things as opposed to being expert in one thing.

I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii

But the idea that some day people would want to be able to interact and get stock quotes and talk with other people or all these different things, I just believed that was going to happen

If you can build a company and make money, great. But eventually, my intention is to give all my money away. I told my kids that. [Wealth] is not particularly helpful to kids. It's almost a burden. It's better to allow them to do their own thing and have their own successes.

Steve Jobs always believed that you didn't want to do focus groups or research and ask people what they wanted. You wanted to create products that they didn't know they wanted yet and they would fall in love with. And I think that was part of the magic of his design philosophy.