After Gmail, if you have AOL, people are like, 'Are you still with this?' What does it matter what e-mail you have?
After 'Punk'd,' my company Katalyst did a deal with AOL to produce short-form content for the Web. At that time it was a different game. If you got front-page coverage on any popular website, you could probably get a push.
I've always said AOL is great opportunity for somebody.
To be candid, I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake to work at AOL when I did. I think I had rose-colored glasses about the opportunity to reinvent AOL.
There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.
AOL Instant Messenger was a big thing back in the day, where girls would get on it and make fun of me. There was a certain girl, and she wanted to make me feel bad.
I take my laptop with me on the road. When I come home, I log onto AOL, go to the Web site, and answer questions.
I really do love social media. I've always been crazy about - even like, remember AOL chat rooms? I always loved message boards, and I was always interacting on the computer.
In business, when you can meet an unmet need that is this primal, even meeting it in a superficial way can create a multi-billion-dollar business - e.g., the chat rooms in AOL when it first came out, or the lounges in Starbucks, or the billion people who are on Facebook - even though these are hardly the most intimate of life experiences.
Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.
