1. The History of AOL with Gerry Campbell FourWeekMBA

Gerry Campbell, CEO, Entrepreneur, and Author. Former Senior Vice President and Group General Manager at AOL, between 2001-2006. And today CEO at Kryptonomic.io (https://www.kryptonomic.io/), helps you understand your customers and deliver the Web3 projects they love.With Gerry, we go through the early years of the commercial Internet. The first tech giants, as walled gardens. The rise of search engines, and from there the take over of Google. A startup in the mid-90s become a tech behemoth by the early 2000s. We revisit the history of the key events that led to the rise of Google and many interesting events in between. Gerry’s incredible experience at CompuServe, Compaq, AltaVista, and AOL is an incredible opportunity to make sense of these events.Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:Gerry, thank you for joining this conversation on the Four-Week MBA podcast, and it's a pleasure for me because you have an incredible experience, especially in a period of time that was an important transition, it actually represented an important transition for the internet, for what today we call Web 1 or Web 1.0. But really, you have been actually senior vice president and group general manager for AOL during the period of 2001-2006, you also have been at AltaVista CompuServe. So, when I looked at your past experience, to me, it was such a pleasure to invite you for this conversation, so thanks for joining.Gerry Campbell:Oh, I'm excited to be here. There's so much really cool history that I was fortunate enough to observe, participate in a little bit of, and I love to share the stories because it's a time when nobody was really looking, there was really cool stuff going on, and it turned out to be important. And I think we had the idea at the time, but I love going through this stuff. It's fun to share, and there are some really great business principles as well.Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:Yeah. And that's the whole aim of the podcast. So, we try to look and dig into very interesting business stories and history and try to reconstruct it based on the people that really lived through it.So, to start a little bit from your perspective, How did you end up working for several of the first big tech players on the internet in the first internet era? How did you end up there? How did it feel to work for those companies at the time?Gerry Campbell:Yeah, sure. So, I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, which is an unexpected place maybe by some to be involved in such early things, but I grew up just miles from CompuServe, which was one of the very first online services actually dating all the way back to the late 1960s, so there was a big history there. It was an established company. My personal interest was I'd always been a tinkerer, I got in trouble for tearing my bikes apart, and I got in trouble for taking computers apart as I got older, and so as a tinkerer, obviously, and I think I was an entrepreneur as well. Science showed very early because I started a bike shop in fourth grade or something like that. So, the internet and the technologies to me were fascinating.So, I got a copy of WIRED Magazine number issue two, and it talked about this online world and it was happening in IRC chat. And I think I was probably in my early twenties at the time and my attention was just captured. I thought this was the coolest thing ever. I'd been up to my elbows inside my Mac at that time and taken it all apart and was just fascinated with things it could connect to, and I was goofing around places and pulling files and telnetting and all that crazy stuff. So, I worked in between undergraduate school and then went back to Ohio State. I Actually went to Ohio State twice, which is in Columbus,