TIP126: THE THIRD WAVE

A REVIEW OF BILLIONAIRE STEVE CASE’S BOOK

19 February 2017

In this week’s episode, Preston and Stig discuss what they learned from reading Steve Case’s book, The Third Wave. Case is a famous Internet billionaire who co-founded America Online (AOL).  His current net worth is $1.3 billion dollars.  Although Case’s high net worth is primarily due to his time at AOL, he does run a venture capital firm in Washington DC, and he’s actively involved in numerous political interests.  One of his more recent investments that have done quite well is a company called ZipCar, which was recently sold to Avis for a billion dollars.

Case’s book, The Third Wave, suggests that we are entering the “Third Wave” of the Internet. The first wave was when new companies were providing service for people to connect for the first time.  This might be referred to as the wild-wild west phase of connectedness.  The second wave occurred with companies like AOL laid the foundation for consumers to connect to the Internet.  For example, companies like Amazon and Facebook built on top of the Internet backbone to create massive online stores and social networking sites, while apps like Instagram took to smartphones to capture market share. Case argues the Third Wave is what we are about to experience online.  This is going to be a period where entrepreneurs transform sectors like health, education, transportation, energy, and food through increased connectedness and sharing. If you would like to read our five-page executive summary of The Third Wave, be sure to follow this hyperlink.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

  • Why the story of AOL is really a story about the Internet.
  • How to negotiate with Microsoft when Bill Gates wants to crush you.
  • Why and how the Internet will be enabled on all devices in the future.
  • Why the biggest merger in the field of technology failed and what we can learn from it.

TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.

Stig Brodersen  0:00  

We Study Billionaires and this is Episode 126 of The Investor’s Podcast. 

Preston Pysh  0:05  

Today’s episode is brought to you by freshbooks.com. If there’s one thing that all small business owners can agree on, it’s the idea of spending less time on your accounting and more time doing the work you love. That’s exactly what FreshBooks delivers. Join the 10 million other small business owners that handle their accounting by going to freshbooks.com/TIP and sign up for your free 30 day trial today. No credit card is required and you can cancel anytime. That’s freshbooks.com/TIP 

Intro  0:35  

Broadcasting from Bel Air, Maryland, this is The Investor’s Podcast. They’ll read the books and summarize the lessons. They’ll test the waters and tell you when it’s cold. They’ll give you actionable investing strategies. Your hosts, Preston Pysh and Stig Brodersen!

Preston Pysh  0:59  

Hey, how’s everybody doing out there? This is Preston Pysh. I’m your host for The Investor’s Podcast. And as usual, I’m accompanied by my co-host Stig Brodersen out in Seoul, South Korea. 

Today we have a book for you and the name of this book is “The Third Wave” by Steve Case. If you don’t know who Steve Case is, he is the CEO, and basically the main guy behind America Online, which was huge back whenever I was a kid. Ever since that time, really Steve Case, as far as I’m concerned, really hasn’t gone on and done any major deals kind of like we were talking about Reid Hoffman and how he just had one major hit after another.

Steve Case, really, his big hit was America Online and ever since that, he really hasn’t been too aggressive on the business scene. But this was a book that we had recommended to us. So people were curious. Steve Case’s current net worth is around $1.3 billion dollars and he personally wrote this book, so we gave it a try. 

I thought the book was okay. I wouldn’t say that I loved it. I didn’t hate it, but it was an oka read. It was interesting. It talked a lot about his time at AOL and kind of going through that whole development phase. I found that interesting. What’s also kind of interesting is I don’t think that he really wanted to talk about that much. I think he actually wanted to talk about other things. Right, Stig? 

Stig Brodersen  2:19  

Yeah, it was more like a nostalgic lookback, as you said, Preston. Like, “Oh, you remember back then when everyone was using AOL? Yeah, that was a good time.” 

I think it was more like a book like that. It was not like one of those, “Oh, now I really understand what will happen with the internet in the future.” I think he wanted to put it out like that. But it didn’t give us any revelations, or at least not on my end, I want to say.

Preston Pysh  2:45  

I think his intent was to talk about this new wave and the internet that he kind of sees happening. But for me when I was reading it, I was kind of like, this isn’t anything that for me is groundbreaking or something that everyone doesn’t already know. That was my take at least. So I was much more interested in the thing that he didn’t want to talk about, which was his time at AOL, because I enjoy hearing his conversation on his thought process as he was going through different key decision points. For me, that’s much more entertaining and something that I feel like I can learn from. 

Alright, so what we’re going to do is we’re just going to go chapter by chapter. There are 12 chapters in this book, and we’ll just kind of breeze through each one of them to kind of give you an overview. 

So the first chapter is titled “Opportunity.” In this, he talks a little bit about his background. He talks about when he was in college, he read this book by a gentleman named Toffler, and he wrote a book called “The Third Wave,” which Steve Case had read. This book was all about what was to come in the future and this book really captured his interest and had a huge impact on the way that Steve Case thought about things. So it’s kind of neat for him to basically write his own book years later as a billionaire and he titled it “The Third Wave” as well. 

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What he was really trying to project in this book that Stig and I briefly mentioned earlier, is that the internet, when it first started was in this first phase, then his AOL time, until right about now, I would probably call the second phase. And then what he was trying to talk about in the book is what’s the common in this third phase? And like, where’s the internet going? So Stig is going to give you a little bit more details beyond that on each one of these phases.

Stig Brodersen  4:28  

Yeah, so the first way that he talks about and you should really be thinking about this in like the first wave of the internet. That’s basically what he’s saying and he’s talking about how the *growth that took place from 1985 to 2000. This was really defined by companies like AOL, Cisco, Microsoft, really creating the underlying infrastructure by bringing America and then the rest of the world online. 

Again, as we talked about before, this was really like a nostalgic look and a lot of fun facts too. For instance, one of the things he said was that up to 1992, it was actually illegal for commercial sites like AOL, even to link up to the internet. He remembers back on an interview he did with PBS back in 1995, where he actually got the question, “So why do we need the internet?” And this was actually a decade after AOL started. So I just found that to be a neat story of what has happened, like how fast things has really progressed with the internet. 

Then he goes on to talk about the second wave, and the easiest way to think about that is to think of companies like Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. So basically, we’re talking about companies that can grow really, really fast and grow with a marginal cost next to zero. At least, that was how he explained that. So really, scalability, that was the key for the second wave, and it was even more, if thinking about community than the first wave. So back then up to 2000, AOL was actually really on the frontier, in terms of community and in terms of communicating with each other. Even though they didn’t have Facebooks, we still have some way to communicate with each other like chatting, but it became much more visual in the second wave. 

Then he gives a brief introduction to the third wave, which is basically having internet integrated in all of our products. One way he explains this is that right now, we might say that, yes, this device has internet. But he says that will be completely superfluous in the future, it will be like this device uses electricity. You don’t say that today, either. It would just be the way that we use all devices in the new world. So that was the first, second, and third wave.

Preston Pysh  6:46  

You know, I heard a person, this was years ago talk about the future. The way he described what you were just talking about, Stig, was he said, “If you went back to you know, 100 years ago, and you walked into a room, there wasn’t necessarily this assumption that there should be a light switch in the room and that you could just flip the light switch and have light just automatically there. But now, as a person, who will walk into any room, anywhere in the world, as soon as they walk into that room, they immediately start feeling around for a light switch.” 

And the way that they were describing the Internet, and intelligence being networked into every single room in the world, five years ago, you would not walk into a room and just assume that there was WiFi. Now it’s a little bit more common, but you go 10 or 20 years into the future, to walk into a room and there not be some type of Wi Fi or some type of intelligent network that can automatically interact with you or whatever device you might have on you, is what I think Steve Case is really getting at. It’s just going to be something that’s automatic as electricity. That’s what he’s really getting at with this third wave.

Stig Brodersen  7:54  

Yeah, and it’s not just your smartphone or computer. It’s basically all the things that you use in your day to day life. So might also be your refrigerator or your oven. And the way to make that not only be connected to the internet, but to make it intelligent would to be that like, you wouldn’t be able to cook meat *inaudible. I mean, that was one way to have like intelligent oven. So that was how he explains it that it’s going to be a part of our daily life, and we won’t think about whether or not that would have internet because obviously it would.

Preston Pysh  8:23  

So let me give another example with which you were just talking about. So Brett, who made the Alexa app for our show, he was so kind whenever we told him we didn’t even have the Alexa device at our house. He mailed us one completely for free, both Stig and myself. So I got to play around with this thing and I set it up in the kitchen of our house. I was just trying different things out. And you know, I said, “Alexa, add a gallon of milk to my shopping list.” And the Alexa app responded back, “Added to your list.” So I pull out my smartphone and I go to the application for Alexa and sure enough, there’s a shopping list that’s automatically built into the app and there was the thing that I just said. It was just like magic, it was just there. 

I think that what you’re going to see is you’re going to see this interoperability between devices, whether it’s your phone, whether it’s this built in artificial intelligence that’s just automatically networked into the room that you’re at, and it’s going to know. It can maybe pick up your voice tones and basically differentiate you from your kids from your wife. All that kind of stuff, I think is really coming on the horizon, maybe a little bit faster than people realize. It’s really, really some fascinating space, and you see Google, Amazon and Apple, really coming at this very hard. I think that is exactly what Steve Case was getting at when he’s talking about this intelligence that just is automatically networked into any room that you would walk into. 

So pretty astounding stuff and miraculous stuff when you think about it. Let’s say you’d leave your house you go over a friend’s house. Your phone is basically giving off a signal as it would walk into that room, it would then be interoperable with the other person’s network. All this stuff is just amazing the direction that this could potentially go. And you know, he hits it some of the stuff in the book,which is pretty neat to hear some of the conversations that he’s having. 

So let’s go ahead and jump into the second chapter. Now, he goes into a little bit of his background, and how he got his start. He worked at Pizza Hut when he was really young before he got started. Then he was working for this company called CVC, which was an online gaming company way back before. I mean, really, you didn’t even have like a dial up internet service provider like America Online that was making this easy. So like the internet existed, but it was not easy to access another IP address from maybe the computer that you were on. I think that for our younger generation that’s listening to this, if you’re 25 years or under, that’d be might be really hard for you to understand. 

But I remember when I was a kid, and you wanted to get online, you had to use your phone line. So no one had a cell phone, you had a landline. And if you want to get on the internet, you’d have to use that landline in order to dial up onto the internet. It would take all this time and make all these weird noises, and then you’d be on the internet. I remember, during this period of time, you would call a friend like you were trying to get ahold of your buddy. And you’d call their house and the line would be busy because they were on the internet. Then you try to call back an hour later, and they would still be on the internet and the line was busy. This was what it was like early on with America Online. 

So the reason I’m telling all this, because when he was starting this company, this CVC online gaming company, this is before you even had a service like America Online where you could do the dial on internet. So he was way ahead of his time as to how the internet could be used. You know, I remember at that time where no one had a clue how it could be used. It was kind of like the normal person walking around. I had no idea how this was gonna be utilized in the future. But Steve Case was way ahead of the game, he could see where this was going. 

So this gaming company falls flat on its face because there’s no way to basically link one node to the other because there’s no interface that can facilitate that connection. So that does not go well. So the next thing that he tried to morph that company into was a music business where he would basically be able to sell like, online digital mp3s and like music. Basically your iTunes Store, but this is like 15 or 20 years before iTunes, you know. So again, he’s like, so far ahead of the game, kind of seeing where this is going. 

He actually worked a deal with Apple to they got a small contract with Apple to start doing some things but it just felt completely on its face. It never got off the ground and they actually ended up suing Apple because they terminated their contract. They made $3 million in their lawsuit with Apple. 

So then his company rebranded itself as America Online, which became a enormous success. What I really kind of found interesting about this, and we talked about it during the Reid Hoffman book is although he had these big aspirations and these big goals, he was pretty fluid and dynamic in how he was looking for new opportunities and adaptable to keep things going. He was always, I would say, a positive thinker is the way I kind of took it away in the book was. He was really determined that something was going to work, he was going to be able to land something. He wasn’t discouraged by all those initial setbacks even though he had brilliant ideas. So I think that that’s a key takeaway when we’re talking about this second chapter.

Stig Brodersen  13:54  

Yeah, and I do want to say that Steve Case definitely knew how to hustle. That’s for sure. Just an example. When they were talking within their own company about the deal with Apple, they kind of said that, “Are we really in a pickle here because Apple was really… Even though it’s a mining contract for Apple that was really the lifeline of the company.” And the investors would never forgive them if they didn’t get anything out of it. So even though that decided that they should rebrand the company, the only kind of funds that they can actually get that was from that settlement. So they actually made a huge bet on seeing how much money they could get out of Apple, and they ended up with 3 million and that actually completely financed AOL at the very beginning. So that was, that was a pretty honest story, I guess, that probably didn’t come up as nice as it probably should from Steve, but I think it was a very interesting story of how they got started.

It was really a big success, as Preston said, I mean, it was a big, big success. To really understand the magnitude of AOL. So back in 1996, the servers were down for 23 hours. And the other way, the Internet was actually down 24 hours because it well was handling 50% of all the internet back then. So it was definitely huge and just also to tell you about how big a thinker he was. He was only 32 at this point in time. His company was the first to IPO. It was the first internet company in history to do that. 

But it also tells you a clash about the old and the new world. He was actually forced to step down. The board was pretty sure that they couldn’t have someone as young as 32 to be leading the company. So ihe was actually forced to step down as an executive VP, even though he was still kind of running the company so they could look good to attract investors. So it was a very, very different world. I mean, if you try to IPO if you are 32 today, people always think you’re too old to be running the show. But it’s very different. 

So I don’t know like how much you learn about the third wave and especially these chapters, but a lot of funny stories, especially if you’re around… I’m 32 as well and Preston is about the same age. So if you’re from that age group, I guess there’s a lot of fun your story or if you’re just curious about, like, old people, I guess what we went through with the internet. There’s a lot of like funny stories of like, “Oh, so that was what happened back then.” So I guess what it’s worth, that was one of the good things about the book.

Preston Pysh  16:17  

Alright, so in the third chapter, this is titled “The Third Wave.” We talked, I think a little bit about what that all meant. So we’re not going to really dig into this one too far. The one highlight that I would add to this chapter is really two things. The first one is that Steve Case thinks that in order to be successful operating in “The Third Wave,” you’ve got to really be great at harnessing relationships between two different companies. These companies have to learn how to work together opposed to against each other in order to navigate “The Third Wave”  successfully. 

The other thing that he highlighted in this chapter is that he’s really interested in fixing healthcare in the United States. He thinks that “The Third Wave” is going to really help to add tremendous value into healthcare moving forward, if this is harnessed appropriately, to take advantage of the opportunities that it’s going to present. 

Alright, so chapter four, this is called “Start up, speed up” And there’s a really good story in this section about Paul Allen. So I’m gonna throw it over to Stig, and he’s gonna talk about that.

Stig Brodersen  17:23  

So it was really interesting because we read this book, “Idea Man” by Paul Allen. I think it was episode 112. So that was not long ago. In the book, Paul Allen talks about buying into AOL, and the way that he describes that in the book, and also the way he describes everything else is doing like, if anything, it seems like Paul Allen really comes up if not as a victim, but definitely as a very, very nice guy that sometimes people hurt. And the way that Steve Case talks about Paul Allen in this book, he talks about him almost like a predator, for lack of better words, where Paul Allen was trying to do an almost a hostile takeover of AOL. 

They learned pretty early in the process that Paul Allen is trying to accumulate stocks in AOL, and they started to be friendly with him, invited him on the board. He was not actually on the board. They talked about him being on the board and set that up to a 10% ownership, that would be okay. And I don’t know if *inaudible agreed to that. But he definitely kept accumulating stocks. So at least according Steve Case, he’s kind of had this idea that they have at least an agreement that you can only buy 10%. But Paul Allen wanted more. 

And what they did in AOL was that they said they wanted to do a poison pill. A poison pill is a way for the management to protect the company for a hostile takeover. So what could that be? Well, that could for instance, be that existing shareholders can buy stock at a discount, which would make it more expensive for the acquirer to take control of the company. Or it might be a very lucrative employee stock option plan that is only effectuated if it’s taken over. 

So whether or not a poison pill is a good idea, I think it lies in the eyes of the beholder. We also briefly talked about that when we were talking about Carl Icahn, like, this is a good idea that someone would try to go into that company. But in any case, Steve Case really didn’t like that. And they really did everything they could to allow him to stay out of this. 

So they actually succeeded or so he thought, because then Bill Gates called up Steve Case and said, “Why don’t you drop by for a meeting here in headquarters?” And Steve Case definitely knew something funky was going on because he knew that Gates have done this with other competitors at the time. He actually gave them a choice like either you will sell at a good price to us or we will crush you. That was not what he said. But that was what he said. And he did that. I mean, so Steve Case knew that that was probably the meeting that he would go to. 

And what happened? Bill Gates called him up and smiled while he said it, but it more or less set between the lines. If you don’t allow us to buy you, we will crush you. We will launch this new service and it’s going to be called MSN dial up. And we’ll be the biggest and we will crush you. It’s the way it is. We’re going to launch Windows 95. And we’re going to have that as a feature on the opening screen. So if you think you can take us up on that, go ahead, but we don’t think you can.

Preston Pysh  20:30  

And then Steve Case called his bluff. That was what I really liked about the story of Steve Case about how he basically heard this and said, “I’m not scared of you and continue to go on this path.” And then Bill Gates, who played his hand that he said he would play and he rolled it out. Then what was interesting is Microsoft came in and undercut the price that AOL was offering it. Steve Case rolled around literally within two days and matched the price that Microsoft that come out with, and then they went toe-to-toe on the price, which that was a really interesting discussion. I think that the if you’re going to buy the book, that’s probably one of the highlights for me to read that competitive marketplace dynamic where you have two really big heavy hitters from the 90s going toe-to-toe with each other and hear that conversation firsthand was pretty cool. 

Alright, so let’s move into chapter five, “The three Ps.” I’m going to go through this one real fast. He said that in order to be successful in “The Third Wave,” these companies that are going to be successful have to possess the three Ps. And those are policy, perseverance, and partnership. I already hit on the partnership piece there in the third chapter. The perseverance, I think really kind of goes pretty straightforward. I don’t see how that’s any different in “The Third Wave” than it is today. And then the policy he thinks that policies are becoming stricter and stricter and more difficult to navigate, and he thinks that a person that’s going to be successful in “The Third Wave” has to become a master at navigating all these policies. So, for me, this chapter was kind of, yeah, I guess that sounds right. But not anything that was really too worthwhile to share.

Stig Brodersen  22:12  

The highlight of this chapter was like this very brief story where he calls up Steve Jobs. And he offered to host Apple’s music on his platform. And Jobs was like, “Well, I’m not really sure I have something called iTunes.” And Case was like, “Oh, come on, like it only works on Macintosh. And that’s less than 2% market sales that’s never gonna be successful.” So that was kind of a neat story, I guess. But yeah, other than that, chapter five was not that great, I guess.

Preston Pysh  22:43  

Okay, so chapter six. This was titled “Pardon the disruption.” I’m gonna throw this one over to Stig.

Stig Brodersen  22:49  

So we have talked about disruption a few times before in the show. I think the first time we did that was in Clayton Christensen’s “The innovators’ dilemma.” So the concept disruption is basically that a new technology and a new way of doing things will alter the way that the industry works. And this is especially true in the tech industry, because that’s just where the changes are the fastest. He quotes both Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, in terms of really grasping the concept of this. And Jeff Bezos said, “I’m not concerned at all about disruption. I know it will happen.”

And another thing, that was the thing that Job said is that, “If I don’t cannibalize myself, someone else will.” So this is some of the mindset he’s saying that you need to have in “The Third Wave.” You can’t think about a sustainable competitive advantage per se, because you need to reinvent that all the time. Nothing is static. I think that was the thing I got out of chapter six. But basically, as I read chapter six, part of the disruption there was all about the reader having to wrap the head around the concept of disruptive technologies.

Preston Pysh  23:57  

Alright, so then in chapter seven, this one was titled “The rise of the rest.” This is a really basic premise. What he’s basically saying is that this isn’t going to be concentrated progress, economic progress for just a few geographic areas. If you look at what’s happened in the last 20 years, you see major hubs in the state of Washington, Seattle area, you see the Silicon Valley area, might see New York, and some of the major hubs in the US that basically get a majority of all the economic cash flow flowing through their cities. What he’s saying is in the future, that’s going to be much more distributed across not just the United States, but also the world. And that’s going to be something that I think is advantageous for the world itself. But for people that might not live in those economic hubs, it’s going to be a good thing.

Stig Brodersen  24:48  

The way that he argues about this is that it makes a lot of sense to have hubs, if it’s technology driven. He’s coming up with Silicon Valley as an example. And he said, there’s a lot of synergies if you have a new product that’s an app. But in “The Third Wave,” the product is not an app, an app might be what you need to support the system. But since internet will be built into everything, it is basically just the problem that you’re solving. That’s the key thing. And you can solve problems anywhere in the world. This technology is not an obstacle at all in this third wave. So that was why he said that we don’t need hubs the same way anymore.

Preston Pysh  25:22  

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Alright, so then in chapter eight, this one’s titled impact investing. And this is something that I’ll tell you is really, this mindset is sweeping most business schools across the United States. This idea of profits with purpose. And he believes that in “The Third Wave,” you’re going to see companies and investors that are doing and conducting what’s called impact investing, where it’s not just about the bottom line and producing profits for the shareholders, but it’s actually producing profits that have some type of social and altruistic benefits for society. And this is something that I know Stig and I are absolutely on board with. We think that this is super important and something that’s going to make the world a better place. So we’re on board. 

I don’t necessarily know that it’s because of “The Third Wave” that that’s happening. But I think that this mindset is something that is definitely being taught in schools around the United States right now. 

All right, so then chapter nine was titled “A matter of trust.” And this one was the one that I think most people probably wanted to read and this was all about the merger with Time Warner, from Steve Case’s perspective. 

Now, what I liked about this chapter in particular, compared to the book that we read on Ted Turner, was we got Ted Turner’s take on this deal, which was, you know, my impression after reading that book, and it’s been a little bit since since we read it. But Ted Turner really played the card that he knew nothing about it till the last minute and that he was totally duped into the deal was the way that I kind of remember his take on it. 

Though Steve Case’s take was much different than that. It was more like, “Hey, you know, everyone thought that this was going to be a great deal.” And that’s the way he kind of described in the book like, you know, “Time Warner was excited, we were excited. And then it just wasn’t a good deal after the internet bubble popped that caused, you know, major problems for us, which was out of our control.” 

But I think at the end of the day, you got to look at this from Steve Case’s vantage point. If you’re AOL, and you pretty much have no bottom line profit, but you have a stock price, it’s just shooting to the moon because everyone’s valuing these internet companies, because it’s new and it’s got everyone’s interest, and they’re paying insane prices for them. Steve Case, I mean, is the guy who owns that share of the equity. He made a fantastic deal when you think about what he pulled off. He took Time Warner, and he acquired a company that had a bottom line that was as fast as you could possibly get in that space that he’s operating relative to his own company, and the equity that he holds. And he conducted this deal. 

So this was like this was the deal of all deals from his vantage point. I think it’s really important that people understand that I’m talking about from Steve Case’s vantage point, not the shareholders of both companies and the employees of both companies because I think when you look at it from a big picture, all those layers and even down to the customer level, this deal was a disaster. This deal was just a total train wreck disaster. And so it was it was interesting to hear his vantage point and I think that he’s obviously still sticking to his guns that you know, if I was back at that point, again in history, I would have made the same decisions. And that’s how it came across in the book.

Stig Brodersen  29:54  

Yeah, once you definitely go back to episode 84, and then listen to Ted Turner’s side of the story. And then you can listen to this episode. It’s not the same story, that’s for sure. But it is true like Steve Case, he’s saying that he knew that the stock price was overvalued back then, *inaudible was 163 billion, and he said he knew it was just ridiculously overpriced. And with these acquisitions, he also bought Netscape for 4.2 billion. Netscape was the browser that was competing with Internet Explorer back then, before everyone starts using Chrome and Safari. But those of them that *inaudidble, but it was like his way of diversifying and yeah, basically put a four to one devaluation when the bubbe would pop. At least that is how he describes it. I don’t know if he was actually surprised with how much it was popping, but he definitely knew that the stock was overpriced. 

And he talked about why they decided to team up with Time Warner because they actually had a lot of other options. They were even talking to Disney about this. But he said that Time Warner was the best match because they had access to cables. It was still at the time you had  a modem and everyone knew that the future was cables. So that was why they teamed up with Time Warner. 

Now, as it happened, they’d never even got to the point where they actually got access to the cables even after they acquired the company, because there was so much friction between the two managements. I think there was a, like a point or two when Steve Case said that, “Well AOL probably also made some mistakes. And yeah, he will thought that I was kind of arrogant because I was not really involved. But there was actually because I wanted people to really stand on their own and not feel like I was breathing down the neck.” 

But if you do read the book in this chapter, it was very clear that he put 95% of all the blame on Time Warner, and he’s probably not on *inaudible. So it was a very interesting story with a lot of bruised egos, that’s for sure.

Preston Pysh  31:51  

Yeah, it was fun to read. Alright, so go into chapter 10. This one’s called the “Visible hand” and this is real quick roll up. This is where he says saying that if you want to be successful in the third wave, you have to integrate with government and you have to play nice. You have to have them on your side, if you want to be successful in the long run.

Stig Brodersen  32:12  

I think also his point was that even in today’s world where most companies or many companies have gone global, you still need to figure out a way to work with the local authorities. And that’s just not going to change in the futurea d he’s also talking about, he has a lot of critique and feedback to the American system and why it’s not supporting entrepreneurs as well as they should. And he goes into detail with that. 

But I think one of the interesting things is that apparently he was one of the founding fathers behind the Jumpstart Our Business StartupsAact in 2012. And back then, to invest in private businesses, as a shareholder, you should be an accredited investor. That would mean that you need to have a net worth of a million dollars or an income of $200,000 over the past two years. He revoked that. So he also made it possible for crowdfunding, and was kind of clear like reading to chapter 10, but also chapter 11 that that was one of his landmarks. One of the things that he was really proud of like he had this thing with AOL until that went south. And now he saw himself more as a, not necessarily only as a businessman, but also someone who was working for society. That was kind of like his masterpiece. So I think that was an interesting discussion as well and a very good initiative at that.

Preston Pysh  33:31  

Alright, so in chapter 11, this one’s titled “America disrupted,” and this one has a really simple theme to it, where he says that a lot of the times, new technologies and new ideas are born here in the United States. One of the examples he gives is the car industry. So the automobile was invented in the US, you had US car companies that were initially established. But now after the market matures, you see that the best car companies in the world are foreign car companies. They’re the Toyotas. They’re the Mercedes Benz. They’re the whatever one you want to say. But they’re not Chevys or the Fords. 

This is Steve Case’s opinion that it has a tendency for the technology to be born in the US. And then the optimization that basically be migrated out of the country to some other foreign country. What he’s saying that in this third wave, it’s more likely to be beneficial to countries outside of the United States, and that’s his argument.

Stig Brodersen  34:36  

Yeah, well, it’s really a political loaded chapter. I mean, this is all for his his own account. I mean, he’s talking about something like immigration policies saying, “Oh, so we were really lucky that we Steve Jobs could get a visa, for instance, could you do that today?” And he talks about, well, the founder of Snapchat, he tried to get American visa like, I mean, I definitely don’t want to say that’s pro or con, but he was talking about, like how the policies are basically affecting all small businesses, primarily in a negative way, and if we don’t change the policies in the States, then we will lose our competitive advantage compared to the rest of the world. 

I think that was like his, it was more like a red flag kind of chapter and whether or not he’s right about that, but definitely I don’t want to be involved in that discussion. Again, there was not so much his own business and what he’s previously done, it was more like, how can we make American competitive? Probably more of looking at himself as a statesman today.

Preston Pysh  35:31  

So moving on to the 12th chapter, this is the last one, it’s “Ride the wave,” and what the wave that he’s referencing is “The Third Wave.” And this was basically just the summary of the entire book, and the ideas in the book, and how this third wave is going to be very dynamic faster than anything we’ve seen in the past. And if you’re not doing something to continue to grow your understanding of what it is that’s going to be coming, you’re going to be left in the dust and not being able to navigate this new environment optimally. So that’s really kind of the highlights from the book, Stig, did you have anything else for the final chapter? Anything else you want to highlight?

Stig Brodersen  36:11  

No, there was more like summing up all the other chapters and encouraging people to start up their own companies and saying it might sound stupid that you can be the largest hospitality provider and don’t own the same hotel. Today ,it’s called Airbnb. How can you have the largest transportation company and well not owning a single car is called Uber today. Saying you need to challenge the current beliefs, starting a new company and make US better. I guess it was like his send off message or his takeaway to to the reader.

Preston Pysh  36:41  

Overall, I would say it’s a good book. I’d leave it at that.

Stig Brodersen  36:45  

It seems like, Preston, we were like really skeptic in the beginning and then you were like, “Now we talked about it was a lot of fun stories. It was okay.”

Preston Pysh  36:52  

It was good. Yeah, it was a good book. Alright, so I got a couple highlights here for everybody. We do this annual Shareholders Meeting out in Omaha where we go and see Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger live. It is the Woodstock for capitalists. I’m telling you, if you’ve never been to this, it is a blast in our community is so much fun. Let me tell you, there’s so much fun. On Saturday night after the meeting, we have a pub crawl, which is a blast. If you want to go to this thing, go to our website, go under the About Us tab and you’re going to see a spot where you can sign up for live events. That’s where this is at, if you want to sign up and go to this. We would love to have you there. We can hang out all weekend and we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. And the people in our community have pretty similar interests when it comes to investing. So there’s a lot of people there that can talk your ear off about intrinsic values and anything else you want to talk about. You will be in a good community to do those conversations. So sign up for that on our website. 

The next thing that I want to tell you is that we read all of our books on Audible. If you want to get your free book, if you want to read this one that we just talked about for free, go to our website, click on the link, you get a free Audible book. And some of these books are expensive. They’re like $30, but you get the first one for free. And Audibles also is only $15 per book. So it’s a great deal. 

The other thing, sign up on our email list, you’ll get our executive summary of this book. I’m looking at it right here, and it’s about five pages long and it summarizes every chapter. And that is completely for free. Just go to our subscribe link on our website and click on the email list. And that’s what’s going to get you on those so that you receive these summaries completely for free. We don’t spam you. 

The last thing is check out our TIP Academy site. We have some things that are free and some things that are paid. There’s a lot of learning to be done on our TIP Academy site. I can’t recommend this highly enough for you guys. So if you’re on our website, theinvestorspodcast.com, go there. Check it out. See if there’s anything that you like.

Stig Brodersen  38:55  

This was all that Preston and I had for this week’s episode of The Investor’s Podcast. We’ll see again next week.

Outro  39:02  

Thanks for listening to The Investor’s Podcast. To listen to more shows or access to the tools discussed on the show, be sure to visit www.theinvestorspodcast.com. Submit your questions or request a guest appearance to The Investor’s Podcast by going to www.asktheinvestors.com. If your question is answered during the show, you will receive a free autographed copy of The Warren Buffett Accounting Book. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This material is copyrighted by the TIP Network and must have written approval before commercial application.

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