S teve Case is a pioneering American technology entrepreneur who is the co-founder and former CEO of America Online (AOL), the company that brought the internet to millions of Americans for the first time in the 1990s. He co-founded the company in 1985 and, as CEO, built it into the dominant internet service provider of its era, famous for its ubiquitous "You've Got Mail" slogan and its aggressive marketing of free trial CDs. At the peak of the dot-com bubble, AOL was a massive and powerful media and technology giant.

His career-defining moment was his orchestration of the disastrous 2001 merger of AOL with the traditional media conglomerate, Time Warner. The deal, which was the largest in U.S. history at the time, is now considered one of the worst corporate mergers of all time, having destroyed a massive amount of shareholder value. After leaving AOL, Case has reinvented himself as a successful venture capitalist through his investment firm, Revolution. He is also a prominent advocate for the "Rise of the Rest" initiative, which focuses on investing in and promoting entrepreneurship in cities outside of the traditional tech hubs of Silicon Valley and New York.