At Aol, We Thought The Killer App

We Lose Money On Signing Up The Customers Where There's Some Marketing Costs Associated With Giving Them A Free Month. It Doesn't Much Matter Whether You Make A Little Bit Or Lose A Little Bit.. As You Well Know, Because You Lose A Ton On Every Copy Of The Washington Post (newspaper).

I Think The Support Of The Other Team At Aol And Everybody's Really Shared Passion And Belief About This And - Saying That Some Day Everybody Was Going To Be On Line.

We Need That Same Mentality In Philanthropy, Trying Things, Taking Risks, Recognizing The First Try, Maybe The Second Try, Maybe The Third Try Won't Work. But If You Stay At It And You're Learning, You're Talking To Others, And You're Learning Together, Eventually You'll Break Through And See The Kind Of Impact You Were Hoping For.

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.

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.