AOL founder Steve Case Friday night told
Newsmax TV that he resisted until now writing a book looking at his past building the company, once the top website and Internet provider in the country. Case says he was more interested in looking to the future and "not so good at looking backwards."
"What changed about a couple of years ago, which led to this book, was that I realized that this third wave was going to have a transformative impact on lives changed, how we think about learning and health and food and energy, a lot of important aspects of our lives," Case, 57, told "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth Friday of his new book,
"The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future."
Watch
Newsmax TV on
DirecTV Ch. 349,
Dish Ch. 223 and
Verizon FiOS Ch. 115. Get Newsmax TV on your cable system —
Click Here Now
"Some of the lessons from that first wave would be helpful to the third wave and I talk in the book about three P's in particular," said Case, explaining those "P's" as partnership, policy, and perseverance.
In the first wave of the Internet, when companies were focused on building the "on ramps," partnership was very important for AOL, originally known as America Online, Case told Hayworth. At that time AOL had 300 partners..
In the second wave, over the past 15 years or so, companies have been building services onto the Internet, resulting in the rise of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, he explained, and partnerships were not so important.
But in the third wave, which will integrate the Internet more in the parts of daily life, such as how children learn and people stay healthy, partnerships will become more important again, Case said he explains in his book.
"You really want to change education, you're going to have partner with a teacher, partner with the schools, partner with the universities," he told Hayworth.
Policy was also important in the first wave of the Internet, as it was important to have a connection with the government, and will again become important in its third wave, said Case, as will perseverance.
"Once I realized this third wave, what was going to happen next, I wanted to give people a sense of that but also give them lessons from that first wave that can help them in the third wave because I think there are going to be a lot of similarities between them," Case told Hayworth, explaining further about why he chose now to write his book.
Case, 57, who these days finances start-up companies through his Washington venture capital firm, told Hayworth that many people are nervous about what is happening in the United States.
"They worry about the work itself. We've seen the middle class kind of hollowed out and we now have 34 percent of people in this country say they're part of the freelance economy," said Case. "This is a new concept. There's a lot of things changing pretty rapidly — and that will continue to accelerate in this third wave."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.