March 15, 2005
The Making of America Online
Co-Founder Marc Seriff’s Epic Saga Inspires MBA Students at McCombs

Marc Seriff was seduced by the siren call of the under-funded, overworked start-up early in his career, and he’s been under its spell ever since. In his keynote address to the Spring Plus Program at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, Seriff, co-founder of America Online Inc., provided the lurid details of companies dashed by poor timing, too little investment, or lack of customers.

A testament to the power of persistence, Seriff’s story gave the MBA students in the audience a sense of what it takes to achieve success.

Noting that “any good high-tech career can be chronicled by the t-shirts you pick up along the way,” Seriff structured his tale of corporate false starts and incremental advances by describing some of the t-shirts he acquired prior to America Online.

Seriff’s saga of serial entrepreneurship began with the launch of Telenet in 1974, a technology start-up that was eventually acquired by GTE. He and his colleagues were responsible for introducing the nation’s first successful commercial email system, Telemail. And while “Telemail Survived the New York Transit Strike,” and even continued to be used until 2003, Seriff moved on when he realized his entrepreneurial spirit couldn’t survive in a corporate culture.

His next company, Digital Music, introduced Home Music Store, the first music download service in 1981. That’s 1981…20 years before the iPod made downloading music a mainstream activity. Seriff’s t-shirt from that era proudly proclaimed, “I Get it Digitally”; the rest of the world didn’t get it, and Digital Music faded away.

By 1982 when his third company, Control Video, introduced Gameline, the world’s first downloadable game system, Seriff had solidly established himself as a man ahead of his time. That company’s t-shirt boasted a July 4, 1983, ship date for its first 80,000 set-top boxes that would allow users to download Atari games to their TV sets.

They had only shipped about 1,000 units and sold perhaps 200 when the bottom dropped out of the market and Seriff was forced to unload 79,000 boxes in the nearest dumpster. Gameline didn’t last long, but the t-shirt did.

Seriff and his partners had burned through $21 million and sunk two companies, but the thought of giving up never entered his mind. As providence would have it, the Internet Age was just dawning and the rosy glow of success peeked just over the horizon.

Teaming with Steve Case and Jim Kimsey, Seriff started Quantum Computer Services in 1985, the company that would later become America Online (AOL). Quantum’s technology, Qlink, connected personal computer users with information, games and each other, and it was the first product Seriff had created since Telemail that passed an anniversary—a fact declared prominently on Quantum’s first t-shirt.

Seriff spent the late 1980s building the technology and establishing partnerships with computer companies, and by 1991 AOL’s t-shirts were proclaiming, “Having a Great Time, Wish You Were Here!” It still wasn’t an easy sail, but as competitors like Prodigy and Netscape reared their fearsome heads, AOL out-maneuvered them time and again to finally become the 29 million-subscriber powerhouse that it is today.

“The keys to AOL’s success are the people—it was absolutely the right team coming together at the right time—our persistence, and fundamentally brilliant marketing,” Seriff said. “We were clearly not an overnight success.”

“One of the most important lessons I learned in my career is that cutting edge without good marketing is just cutting edge, it’s not a product,” he said. He points out that many of the companies that actually make the big technology breakthroughs never go anywhere. “We did not win on technology,” admitted Seriff. “The product was as good as it needed to be.”

With its success, AOL’s t-shirts started getting classier—the mid 1990s saw multi-colored editions, and one sported a magazine cover featuring the company. AOL was now large and successful—it was feeling less and less like a start-up and more and more like a corporation.

But the start-up guy who had become accustomed to the texture of the cheap cotton/polyester blend and the jingle of cheesy taglines was starting to feel uneasy. When he discovered that the AOL legal department had its own t-shirt, he saw the writing on the wall; and in 1996 when the annual giveaway was a leather jacket instead of a t-shirt, Seriff knew it was time to go.

Since retiring to the Texas Hill Country, the Austin native is satisfying his urge to be involved in early stage ventures, but instead of companies, he’s now investing his money and his time in community-building endeavors. Through the Seriff Foundation, he and his wife Carolyn have so far launched three nonprofits to bring stronger, more unified health and human services to the rural communities of Burnet and Llano counties.

“Our goal has been to encourage existing nonprofits to work together, to operate professionally, and to be good stewards of their money,” Seriff said.

Through the Seriff Foundation and their work with nonprofits, the Seriffs helped launch the Boys and Girls Club of the Highland Lakes. The foundation operates the Children’s Day Celebration in Marble Falls which now draws more than 3,200 of the town’s 5,500 residents. The Seriff Foundation has also turned its attention to healthcare related needs in the Highland Lakes area, helping with care for children at elementary schools, launching an annual health expo for the elderly, distributing 50,000 social and health services guides, and supporting the Dental Association’s Mission of Mercy, which provides dental care to the indigent.

Applying his hard-won wisdom to the world of the small-town nonprofit, he’s adding incredible value to the community. Not only that, but Seriff is having fun again. And the caption on his shirt? “There’s No Place Like Home.”