Steve Case

Watching Steve Case's presentation at Stanford I come away with two thoughts.

First I find it amazing that he had this fuzzy vision from the time that he was in college about this network of connected computers. He knew that it would happen and that he wanted to be a part of it. It wasn't his first job or even his second, but by the time that he got his third job he was part of this new thing. That is amazing to me.

The second set of thoughts that I have are around his 3 P's. The more I think of them the more powerful the message is to me. People, Passion and Perseverance: Three things that concisely sum up the Entrepreneurial experience. As in the article this week ("Questions every Entrepreneur must answer") you have to have the right people, the right mix of skills and the right team to make something work. Passion - Every one has to have the passion to make it happen. We used to have a saying at Streamline: "We can't have people that want to debate whether or not there is gold in them thar hills, we need people who believe that their is gold and spend all their time finding it." That is passion. Believing in the vision and doing everything possible to make it happen. Lastly Persistence. No entrepreneurs journey is a straight line. There are roadblocks around every turn and the entrepreneurs job is to get around them (or knock them down or go thru them). To hear a guy who built a company with a market cap of $350 Billion talk about his roadblocks was inspiring.