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New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

So when that deal unraveled, I'm assuming that was the biggest contract that the company had.

Yeah, we were banking on that. We just raised a bunch of money, about $5 million, which for us was a lot of money.

So when Apple basically said they wanted to pull the plug and pull the rug out from under us, that was a scary time.

Did you think the company was going to collapse?

Yeah, we certainly possibly did.

From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raaz, and on today's show, How Steve Case made email and the internet a normal part of American life,

went on to forge the biggest corporate merger in US history.

If you happen to be over the age of, say, 35, there is a good chance the first time you ever used email was on a computer with an AOL account.

Because in the 1990s, AOL made sure of that by mailing free CD-ROMs to almost every household in the US.

You'd pop it into your computer, and within minutes you could magically type a message to someone else who had something called an email account.

And I promise you, if you do not know what I'm talking about, it was magical. It was a miracle.

This revolution in human communication was pushed by companies that are mostly forgotten now, CompuServe, Prodigy, Earthlink, Delphi, and of course AOL.

And out of all of them, AOL prevailed, in part because the company was smart, and in part, as you will hear, it was lucky.

Steve Case was as relentless as he was ambitious, and the way he did it, well, like many entrepreneurs, Steve went the corporate route out of college.

And in the early 1980s, he landed a job doing product development for Pizza Hut, but at night, he would tinker with his computer.

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