NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER
One of America's most accomplished entrepreneurs--a pioneer who made
the internet part of everyday life and orchestrated the largest merger
in the history of business--shares a roadmap for how anyone can succeed
in a world of rapidly changing technology.
Steve Case's career began when he cofounded America Online (AOL) in
1985. At the time, only three percent of Americans were online. It took
a decade for AOL to achieve mainstream success, and there were many
near-death experiences and back-to-the-wall pivots. AOL became the top
performing company of the 1990s, and at its peak more than half of all
consumer internet traffic in the United States ran through the service.
After Case engineered AOL's merger with Time Warner and he became
Chairman of the combined business, Case oversaw the biggest media and
communications empire in the world.
In The Third Wave, which pays homage to the work of the futurist Alvin
Toffler (from whom Case has borrowed the title, and whose work inspired
him as a young man), Case takes us behind the scenes of some of the most
consequential and riveting business decisions of our time while offering
illuminating insights from decades of working as an entrepreneur, an
investor, a philanthropist, and an advocate for sensible bipartisan
policies.
We are entering, as Case explains, a new paradigm called the "Third
Wave" of the internet. The first wave saw AOL and other companies lay
the foundation for consumers to connect to the Internet. The second wave
saw companies like Google and Facebook build on top of the Internet to
create search and social networking capabilities, while apps like
Snapchat and Instagram leverage the smartphone revolution. Now, Case
argues, we're entering the Third Wave: a period in which entrepreneurs
will vastly transform major "real world" sectors like health, education,
transportation, energy, and food--and in the process change the way we
live our daily lives. But success in the Third Wave will require a
different skill set, and Case outlines the path forward.
The Third Wave is part memoir, part manifesto, and part playbook for
the future. With passion and clarity, Case explains the ways in which
newly emerging technology companies (a growing number of which, he
argues, will not be based in Silicon Valley) will have to rethink their
relationships with customers, with competitors, and with governments;
and offers advice for how entrepreneurs can make winning business
decisions and strategies--and how all of us can make sense of this
changing digital age.
