What can Steve Case, Co-Founder, AOL and Giants like Apple/Atari teach us about Partnerships?

Varidus
Varidus
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read
Steve Case, Former CEO of America Online (AOL). Photo credit: www.wikimedia.org

Steve Case is an amazing Executive and an Entrepreneur. He co-founded AOL, which he joined much later and merged it with Time Warner. Later AOL was sold to Verizon for $4.4 Billion Dollars in cash. It was a LONG journey. You can read about it here.

Steve is our idol for partnerships. Why do we say that? Its all about standing on the Shoulder of Giants and Growing to Scale.

AOL first partnered with Atari to launch their first service to rent games for a $1. This was big in those days (think 1980s) when there was no internet and gaming was the one big thing. So AOL did a smart thing by standing on the shoulder of the Giant (Atari) in those days.

Then AOL partnered with another Giant Apple to to launch Applelink, a pre-internet online service for Apple’s value chain. These are two very good example of how an early stage pre-internet firm could partner with large giants to launch its commodity online service.

Fast forward to today’s day and age, all companies can partner with Giants. By Giants, we don’t necessarily mean only very large firms. They could also be mid-market firms. Any company can very quickly get started with partnering by doing the following:

  • Defining their ideal partner type
  • Defining how to incent the partner (margin or fee)
  • Implementing it via a simple partner agreement
  • Augmenting it via software automation.

All of this can be achieved within a week or less.

Most businesses think they need expensive lawyers to do this and the answer is a simple “No”!.

Partnering is all about figuring out how your business can be attractive to a prospective business who could partner with you and how they are attractive to you. Implicitly, you don’t compete with each other and rather need each other or maybe there is very little overlap in what markets you focus on.

In Steve Case’s own words “ I think the startups are going to need to partner with larger companies, including middle-market companies, because if they’re trying to take on health care or education or energy or transportation — pick the sector — I think increasingly it isn’t going to be just about the software or the app”. The Wall Street Journal published a very nice interview with Steve Case on this topic. Again, think Giants!

At Varidus, we call this Partner Program in a Box. If you want to get started on partnering, its very easy. Just email us or check it out here!

Happy partnering and growing your innovation!

Varidus

Scaling Innovations

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