The cofounder of America Online and the presidential ambassador for global entrepreneurship shares a road map to success for future innovators.
Steve Case was on the leading edge of the Internet revolution when he cofounded AOL in 1991. He was an entrepreneur in a business that hadn’t even been invented, yet he saw how significantly his efforts could change not only America but the world.
In The Third Wave, Case uses his insights garnered from nearly four decades of working as an innovator, investor, and businessperson to chart a path for future visionaries. From his position as an investor in start-ups like Zipcar and LivingSocial, Case predicts the future of the economy and describes what he calls the “Third Wave of the Internet”. AOL and other companies introduced early consumers to the Internet in the first wave; search giants such as Google and companies such as Apple have led us into the second wave, the app economy; and the third wave will be “the Internet of things”, in which every experience, product, and service will be transacted online. Using his own experience and examples from companies he’s invested in, he lays out a vision for the future of success in a disrupted age.
Fascinating insights from a successful entrepreneur not an academic in an ivory tower This book is a must-read for those interested in thinking about how technology will impact our lives in future, especially for people with entrepreneurial aims. The key selling point of this book is that it offers the perspective of someone who has been in the game and has seen the changes first-hand. While most books from academics can be useful when sharing insights from their own research and that of others, I find that they have limited insight into trends and developments in the real…
A compelling personal account of an inclusive and explosive digital revolution from one of those who launched it It was Alvin Toffler who introduced the concept of multiple “waves” of socioeconomic development in his classic work, The Third Wave (published, coincidentally and appropriately, in 1984). Briefly, by way of background:
An exceptional vision of what’s to come when the Internet integrates into everything we do Steve begins the “Third Wave” with a nod to Alvin Toffler’s book of the same name, which Steve read early in his career. Toffler’s Third Wave described how the Information Revolution would transform society similarly to the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution before. (In a nice nod to history, Toffler wrote a blurb at the beginning of this book). What’s remarkable about this book is not that Steve Case predicts THAT the Internet will transform our lives in ways we…