Steve Case's Road Trips Across America Reveal the Promise of Startups for Cities

Steve Case is no stranger to starting up a company. In the early 1990s, he helped to co-found America Online, later renamed AOL, a service that for the first time allowed millions of people access to the the internet. It was a monumental shift for the world, one whose significance sometimes gets lost in today's ubiquity of iPhones and binge streaming. Case went on to become chairman of AOL Time Warner after a tumultuous merger, but he eventually left Big Media behind and all its attendant cynicism to focus his energies on the optimism of startups — which brings us to his latest project.

Case's new book, "The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places Are Building the New American Dream" (Avid Reader Press), is out today.

The book threads together anecdotes from his visits to more than 40 U.S. cities that have been part of an initiative of the same name, The Rise of the Rest, launched in 2014 by Case's company Revolution to identify and juice startups outside of Silicon Valley with seed funding from Revolution. Case traveled for years to these cities on a bus or in a recreational vehicle, often with his wife Jean. On each of these multiple bus tours, Case and his team visited five cities in five days and invested at least $500,000 in startups after pitch competitions. The initia