The Third Wave by Steve Case
One question that I always ask myself when looking at a book is “why does it exist?”. It’s not as easy a question as one might assume. A fiction book usually exists to entertain the reader, but that is not a guarantee. Sometimes they are trying to convince people of something, and some of the worst are an attempt to prove that the author is smarter than the reader. The Third Wave by Steve Case is like many books written by CEO’s a bit of a Frankenstein monster when it comes to reasons for existing. That doesn’t make it bad, but it makes it far less likely that every aspect of the book is going to be good.
The beginning of the book discusses the vision of future technology. This is the titular third wave and the part of the book I was most interested in. It soon turns to a history book of AOL. This was less interesting, but I have some nostalgia for AOL. But much of this isn’t really about AOL or how they grew. It was about Steve Case. This becomes more obvious as he reaches the point in the story where he discusses the merger with Time-Warner, as it seems more important to the book to convince you it wasn’t Steve Case’s fault than explaining what happened. It then moves on to the necessity of third wave companies to work with government. This seems to be a way for him to discuss his time in government more than giving any real advice on how to do it.
There is an assumption by many people that a successful CEO must know how to run every business and someone successful in the tech industry must, necessarily, understand all technology and how it is likely to impact the future. This has some basis in reality. I’d much rather ask Bill Gates on advice on starting a new tech company than the average person on the street. But Bill Gates hasn’t run a real startup in decades and things have changed. The same is true for Steve Case. He knows more than the average person, but the assumption that his advice is more than a good starting point is not practical. His discussion of building connections seems as much an excuse to name drop former presidents as it does to really tell you how to do that. I suspect his answer if he was honest is that if you run a multi-billion-dollar company you’ll get to me these people, which is probably excellent advice if you can do it.
If you’re interested in Steve Case and AOL, then this is the book for you and there are excellent bits of advice for CEO’s, government officials and people creating a startup. For everyone else, the problem is that the most popular word in this book is I. That is because this book to mark something off the list more than he had anything he needed to say so while there is nothing wrong with this book it lacks the passion to make it great.
