CVC's Ashes
By Michael Swaine
Readers of Web Techniques will surely recall Steve Case's childhood memoir, CVC's Ashes. (For those not in the know, CVC was Case's first company. He wasn't the boss.) Its account of the mogul's struggles with the Cub Scouts and the Little League and with the rigors of a tony private school while growing up in Hawaii is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. CVC's Ashes has been embraced by readers worldwide for its unique spirit and its human pathos.
The equally pathetic sequel, Ebiz, continues the story, recounting Case's years as an impoverished entrepreneur, his encounters with the lumbering CompuSaurus and with the Evil Empire of the North, the carpet-bombing of America with AOL discs, and the recent Grand Acquisition of Time Warner.
These excerpts from the two books capture, we hope, some of the style and substance of the man who is Steve Case.
In later years when I was in charge of new-topping research at Pizza Hut I recalled the hard scrabble of my childhood and wondered how I had come so far so fast. Weekends and evenings and summers back then my older brother Dan and I labored to bring in some extra income with a limeade stand and sold magazine subscriptions and set up offices in our bedrooms, and it was only the fact that we lived in the better part of Hawaii and my Pa was a high-paid corporate lawyer for the sugar and pineapple industries that made life tolerable.
Somehow, mostly by dint of Ma's saintly spirit, we got by, despite my big ears.
It was all uphill from there.
It's a wonder any single one of us is alive with all the things against us in this world, and that's a fact.
