Top 60 Steve Case Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The pace of change and the threat of disruption creates tremendous opportunities...”

— Steve Case

2. “You shouldn’t focus on why you can’t do something, which is what most people do. You should focus on why perhaps you can, and be one of the exceptions.”

— Steve Case

3. “In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.”

— Steve Case

4. “At the end of the day, the team you build is the company you build.”

— Steve Case

5. “You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.”

— Steve Case

6. “Keep your eye on the prize and focus on your mission. Remember what you’re trying to do, what your value is, why it’s important, and at the same time, change course and direction. If the market’s telling you different things how are you going to adjust to that?”

— Steve Case

7. “Having a great idea is important. But having a great team is also important.”

— Steve Case

8. “All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.”

— Steve Case

9. “If you really got the right people, and you’ve got them working together as a team, whether it’s in business, whether it’s in science, whether it’s in politics, you can make a big difference.”

— Steve Case

10. “I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii.”

— Steve Case

11. “It’s not about how to get started; it’s about how to get noticed.”

— Steve Case

12. “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone. It ended because we invented something better.”

— Steve Case

13. “I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world.”

— Steve Case

14. “If you’re doing something new you’ve got to have a vision. You’ve got to have a perspective. You’ve got to have some north star you’re aiming for, and you just believe somehow you’ll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.”

— Steve Case

15. “It’s stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have.”

— Steve Case

16. “If you believe that some day it’s going to happen, some day it probably will happen. You just have to make sure you’re there when it’s happening, and ideally you’re at the front of the parade, and the principle beneficiary of when it happens.”

— Steve Case

17. “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.”

— Steve Case

18. “My father still is a lawyer, and my mom was a teacher and then later a career counselor.”

— Steve Case

19. “The attackers are the people with bold, innovative ideas, who are trying to disrupt the status quo, and usher in a better way. We need to think out of the box, and be curious, and be willing to take risks.”

— Steve Case

20. “In the entrepreneurial world, when you launch a company, you have a particular idea, a particular product, a particular service, almost always you pivot, you shift. The market reacts to your initial idea. You make some adjustments. It’s only after making a few adjustments that you see the success.”

— Steve Case

21. “Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home.”

— Steve Case

22. “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.”

— Steve Case

23. “If you don’t have both of them working together in a complementary, cohesive way, you’re not going to be successful.”

— Steve Case

24. “I enjoyed high school and college, and I think I learned a lot, but that was not really my focus. My focus was on trying to figure out what businesses to start.”

— Steve Case

25. “The idea that maybe you don’t have to own a car if you only need one occasionally may catch on, just like time-sharing caught on in real estate.”

— Steve Case

26. “You really need to believe that you are on to something important.”

— Steve Case

27. “I had an older brother who passed away recently, an older sister and a younger brother.”

— Steve Case

28. “So we believed that strategic alliances and partnerships were critical, and we did that for five years.”

— Steve Case

29. “You’re not just trying to do something marginally, incrementally better. You’re doing something that is a fundamental paradigm shift, that will have exponential impact. That means it’s harder to do, but ultimately, if it’s successful, the impact it has is far greater.”

— Steve Case

30. “So my degree was in political science, which I think was – the closest I could come to marketing is politics.”

— Steve Case

31. “What I have figured out is that I can predict the future. I just can’t predict when.”

— Steve Case

32. “There are no road signs to help navigate. And, in fact, no one has yet determined which side of the road we’re supposed to be on.”

— Steve Case

33. “At AOL, we thought the killer app was people.”

— Steve Case

34. “And I’d say one of the great lessons I’ve learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.”

— Steve Case

35. “Nowadays people seem to switch schools, either because they have to, and certain schools only serve certain grades, or because they move to a different place or have some particular interest, but I was in the same school for 13 years.”

— Steve Case

36. “It’s stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have if they have the right passion, perspective and are able to align the interest of a great team.”

— Steve Case

37. “The Internet will make every enterprise a publisher.”

— Steve Case

38. “So you have to force yourself out of a comfort zone and really try to figure out what are the key ingredients, the key skill sets, the key perspectives that are necessary, and then figure out a way to attract the very best people to fill those particular roles.”

— Steve Case

39. “I was not an outstanding student. I did a reasonable amount of work. I got generally good – pretty good grades, but I was not that passionate about getting straight A’s.”

— Steve Case

40. “The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.”

— Steve Case

41. “I’m probably never going to be satisfied with anything we do. I think there’s always the possibility of doing better. And I’d say we’re doing better than we were a year ago, in terms of delivery and quality of service, but nowhere near what we should be doing .”

— Steve Case

42. “I was a better builder than a manager. I’d rather focus on maximizing the opportunities swinging for the fences than minimizing the risk with bunts and singles.”

— Steve Case

43. “For better or worse, that is true with any new innovation, certainly any new technological innovation. There’s many good things that come out of it, but also some bad things. All you can do is try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff.”

— Steve Case

44. “From a relatively early age I got interested in business.”

— Steve Case

45. “I continue to have a special pride and passion for AOL, and I strongly believe that AOL – once the leading Internet company in the world – can return to its past greatness.”

— Steve Case

46. “I do think actually in this case the government does get credit for funding some of the basic research.”

— Steve Case

47. “My father and his brothers were all lawyers, so I think that the expectation was probably for me to grow up to be an attorney, but it never really fascinated me that much. I was more interested in building things.”

— Steve Case

48. “The only way to continue to have a robust economy is to out-innovate other nations.”

— Steve Case

49. “And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal.”

— Steve Case

50. “Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.”

— Steve Case