Content deposed

In your speech today, you talked a lot about content, saying that it is not an online service's most valuable asset. In other words, you were saying it is no longer king. That was pretty surprising, coming from an AOL executive.
I don't think content in this business is what it is in the television business. At AOL, we're giving people convenience in a box. People don't need to know more about the news or more about their computer; they don't need more places to talk to people. What they need are more convenient activities. And what's winning here is content that is more convenient.

What we're about is [this]: if I like to go out to bars just to talk to people and drink a couple of beers, I [could also] go to a chat room. That's more convenient than going out to the bar. If I'm a kid and I've got to do a term paper, instead of going to the library I go search the Internet for my subject. That's a lot more convenient. If I've got to book a trip next week somewhere, instead of calling my travel agent and trading phone calls for an hour or a day or two days, I now just book it myself. It's a lot more convenient.

Everything we're doing is a more convenient version of what's out there. We pull it all together and it's one-stop shopping for convenience. Now, do you need content for that? Of course you do. But people aren't coming here because of the content. They got the content in most cases somewhere else in another form.

They're coming here because the content is more convenient in this format and in this usage. And so our basic selling proposition of AOL is convenience in a box.

What happens when someone else develops convenience in a box that's equal to America Online or better?
Then the problem is they have to get a better brand, at least as good a brand.

On a more personal note, can you talk about some of your personal goals?
It's hard to separate them from the company's goals because I come in to do a mission. I have a life beyond AOL. I have a group of friends who don't really know what I do for a living and don't care. So that's my balance in the world. I have a son that I'm very close to and love very much.

When I come into a company, my goal is really to figure out what the company needs to do and help achieve that. In any company I'm in, it's about people, the product, and the quality of the product. At our place, it's member services, member quality. If I'm in the theme park business, it's our visitor experience. At the end of the day, that's sort of the root of it. If you make people happy, you'll have a successful product. They will say good things about you and you'll win over time.

You've got a lot of successes under your belt. Do you have any failures, anything that didn't work out well?
I think every success also has embedded failures. What you have to do is learn from your mistakes and you keep plowing through. I worked for this wonderful fellow named Steve Ross, who was the founder of Warner Communications. He started two funeral homes with his father-in-law and turned [that] into Warner Communications. [He was] a great entrepreneur.

Steve used to say, "At Warner Communications, you'll never be fired for making a mistake. At Warner Communications, you'll be fired for not making a mistake, because if you're not making a mistake, it tells me you're not trying anything new and the product we've given you to manage is going to wither away."

So I think within every success I've had there have been plenty of failures. At AOL we've got plenty of failures, but the overall effect is success. I think what we don't want to do is stop with the failures, but we want to say, "That's part of the learning experience, part of getting ahead. Let's learn from it, let's keep going."

How will you judge your success at AOL? It sounds like your M.O. is to build a place and leave. Does that mean that when you leave, AOL will be set?
Every place I've left has been set when I left. When I go into a place, I try to develop a growth strategy. I try and turn that into an operating plan and then build a culture that perpetuates that strategy. If I do those things successfully, I don't have to be there anymore. I've done my job. Now, sometimes it's fun to be there and sometimes I stay.

But that's the real challenge of, I think, any CEO in a high-growth business. That's really what I'm focused on. There's an enormous amount of manpower development around that culture. Part of building the culture is manning the plan, putting the right people in the right jobs to make that plan turn into reality, and working with them on achieving it. By the way, I always find that if you help other people achieve their goals, they'll help you achieve a bigger goal.