AOL cofounder on Mark Zuckerberg, the merger from hell and tech's future

Nearly a decade ago, AOL cofounder Steve Case was at a conference when a promising young entrepreneur "sheepishly" approached him to share how Case had unintentionally helped turn him into a coder.

As Case recalled in a recent interview, the man approached him and said: "I just want you to know that I learned to program when I was 13-years-old by hacking into the AIM system."

The coder was none other than Mark Zuckerberg, then in his early 20s and running a fast-growing startup called Facebook. 

"He mentioned the hacking group he was part of and I actually remembered the name. They were one of the most notorious ones," Case recalled in an interview this week on Mashable's Biz Please podcast, which you can listen to below or download on iTunes or Stitcher. "We had a team of people trying to protect us from people like Mark. but we were glad we could give him some experience in [his] early days of coding."

"For most Americans, AOL was, for its time, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram combined."

The anecdote is just one of many from Case's long and prestigious career coming to light thanks to his new book, The Third Wave. 

The book is part memoir and part manifesto. In it, Case provides glimpses into his ups and downs growing AOL and merging with Time Warner. He uses this to provide a guidepost for the next generation of startups that are looking to upend heavily regulated industries like health care and finance -- as opposed to just building photo-sharing apps. 

While amusing, Case's first exchange with Zuckerberg is also a reminder of the vast influence that he and AOL have had on multiple generations of entrepreneurs and Internet users. 

"For those of you who don't remember or who weren't old enough, it may be hard to appreciate how significant AOL's role was in ushering in the Internet age," Case writes at one point in the book. "For most Americans, AOL was, for its time, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram combined."

It took time for AOL to achieve that influence, and longer still for many in the business world to appreciate it. In fact, it took time for his family too. 

"My parents would call me up every once in awhile in the first decade of AOL saying, 'Steve, it doesn’t seem like this is working so well. Do you have a plan B? Are you going to get a real job?" he recalls now. 

Fortunately for him and many others, he stuck with Plan A and became, for a not insignificant period of time, what he describes in the book as a "mayor" of a robust online community.

Years later, as he admits in our interview, it's that sheepish young kid from Facebook who now serves as mayor of the Internet.

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