Read The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future for Free Online

had played to get us going, but the team increasingly looked to me for guidance. In January 1991, the board voted to make me the CEO. I was thirty-two.
    My key focus was expanding our customer base. We knew tough competition was coming, so I pushed the team to go faster and grow faster. “It will never be easier or cheaper to gain market share” became my mantra. We slammed on the accelerator, dramatically increasing our marketing spending.
    To raise money to fuel this rapid expansion, in late 1991 we decided we needed to take our company public. The board concurred, but there was a catch. America Online would be the first Internet company to go public. The market size was unclear, and the competitive risks significant. So the board quietly huddled and decided to reverse the CEO decision. They concluded that I was too young to be accepted by institutional investors who were used to much older CEOs.
    Jim took me to lunch to break the news. “Everybody thinks you’re doing a great job,” he assured me, “but you’re young and untested, and most companies going public have much older CEOs who have long track records. So I need to step back in as CEO. You need to go back to being executive vice president.
    “Don’t worry,” Jim told me, “it’s only temporary.”
    I was devastated. Furious. I felt like I’d been robbed. I wasn’t an accidental CEO. I had earned the job painstakingly over time. And to be sidelined, not because of my skills, but because of a theoretical fear that investors would be skittish about my age—itall seemed totally preposterous to me. I thought about quitting. And when others on the team learned of the board’s decision, many offered to resign in protest. I was heartened by the support, but I knew that I couldn’t leave the company, and couldn’t let anybody else leave, either. I’d invested too much of myself into it—and so had they. So I let my dissatisfaction be known but ultimately chose to suck it up and stay.
GOING PUBLIC
    In March 1992 we went public. At the time, we had fewer than 200 employees and a mere 184,000 subscribers. We had $30 million in revenue and had raised a total of $10 million over the previous seven years. We raised an additional $10 million in the initial public offering, at a $70 million valuation. Most institutional investors weren’t particularly interested in us, seeing us as a small player in a niche market. The Wall Street Journal didn’t even call AOL an “Internet company” or a “tech company”; in describing our IPO, they called us a “computer-based provider of consumer services.”
    But the ride was just beginning. The IPO gave us not only capital to expand but also public visibility and a currency (stock value) that we could use for acquisitions. It also gave individual investors—ordinary citizens—the chance to be part of a fast-growing company, something that is all too rare today.
    Our first post-IPO acquisition came to our attention through my brother. Ted Leonsis, the thirty-five-year-oldCEO of Redgate Communications, had hired Dan’s firm to represent him in a transaction. The two got to talking and Dan suggested he introduce us. “You guys should really meet,” Dan said, “because you’re talking about the exact same stuff.” When my brother called me to set up the meeting, I told him that I’d already heard of Ted.
    Ted was at the forefront of a lot of early digital innovation. He had been as taken as I was by the possibilities that the Internet offered. Ted once told the New York Times that “in ’84 and ’85, no matter what meeting I was in, I felt something cataclysmic was happening.” I could relate.
    At Redgate, Ted produced some of the first multimedia CD-ROMs, as well as a pioneering shopping service (we didn’t yet call it ecommerce) that used graphics stored on disks to create a compelling visual buying experience (keep in mind, at the time most online services were text-centric). He had written three books