Almost by accident, Jim Kimsey shaped the modern internet. A former Washington bar owner, he was asked in 1983 to transform the fortunes of a failed video game company. Six years later, he helped to steer it into a tie-up with Apple to offer electronic mail, downloadable software libraries, bulletin boards, multiplayer games, airline reservations, stock quotes and sports news. By then it had been renamed America Online — soon known simply as AOL.
The firm would become famous for its on-screen message, “You’ve Got Mail”, immortalised in a 1998 film starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
When Kimsey, aged 47, took on the financial rescue, he became a mentor to the 25-year-old Stephen Case, a former Procter & Gamble brand manager who realised the internet’s potential to spawn social media. When their first attempt at an online service, Q-Link, went live on November 1, 1985, only 24 users logged on during the first 14 hours. It grew, however, at a rapid rate.
Their partnership was often rocky, as the young Case chafed under the restraints imposed by Kimsey, a Vietnam veteran. Case even had ironic T-shirts printed with the slogan, “I need adult supervision”, but he later conceded that without Kimsey, “AOL would never have happened”.
Although it has since been eclipsed by Facebook and Twitter, AOL enjoyed significant success in the late 1990s. Kimsey and Case had engineered its flotation on the New York stock market in 1992. The following year, Microsoft tried to buy the business, but the AOL board rejected Microsoft’s suit by one vote.
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In 1995, Kimsey resigned as chairman. “One of the best things I ever did,” he said, “was to let Steve run the company. That one decision to get out of the way made me look like a genius.” Five years later, AOL was the senior partner in a disastrous merger with Time-Warner. It was bought last year by Verizon Wireless, the American telecoms giant.
Kimsey’s AOL shares made him a billionaire. After he left the company, he devoted his life to philanthropy and became a prominent figure in the Washington social set; for a time he reportedly dated the US-born Queen Noor of Jordan. He established the Kimsey Foundation to benefit the arts and education, and once threw a fundraiser for a zoo in which cocktail-drinking guests mingled with a cheetah, wallaby and penguin.
It was a world away from Kimsey’s humble beginnings. His father was a low-level Washington civil servant, who ran paper rounds and took care of neighbours’ cats to make ends meet. Kimsey attended Gonzaga, a local Jesuit high school, but was expelled in his final year for a series of rebellious acts, culminating in a row with the headmaster. “I was a wiseass,” he admitted.
After a year at St John’s College high school, where he met his future wife, Bronwen Krummeck, he went on to study at Georgetown university. He did not stay long, however, transferring to West Point military academy, from where he graduated in 1962. He became an army ranger and had three combat tours — one to the Dominican Republic and two to Vietnam. After assuming a command in Duc Pho, a rural district on Vietnam’s south-central coast, Kimsey helped to finish building an orphanage that the previous troops had begun. Years later, having made his billions, he returned to visit it.
Bronwen became a secretary at the South African embassy; they married in 1964 but later divorced, having had three sons. Mark is a Washington stockbroker; Michael was a medical officer in the military and is now an executive with the Kimsey Foundation; and Raymond directs documentaries.
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Kimsey left the army in 1970 and began working as a stockbroker. When he had raised $2,000 (then £830 at the exchange rate), he opened local bars and restaurants. One, Bullfeathers, on First Street, is still a favourite of Congressional members and staffers.
In 1975, he was barred by the Securities and Exchange Commission from associating with any investment company for a minimum of five years, for allegedly participating in a scheme that misled investors. Five years later, a fellow West Point graduate introduced Kimsey to William von Meister, an online pioneer who had started AOL’s forerunner, but was having trouble keeping control of the finances.
Kimsey’s wealth enabled him to build a 21,000 sq ft mansion in McLean, Virginia, overlooking the Potomac River. He was puzzled by the small, run-down house next door, with 5ft weeds growing out of the roof. It turned out to be a 1959 Frank Lloyd Wright house, still inhabited by the original owners, who no longer had the wherewithal to maintain it. Kimsey bought it for $2.5 million and, after his neighbours eventually moved out, spent another $1 million restoring it.
“If I wanted to have a romantic dinner,” said Kimsey, “I wouldn’t do it in my house, which is ostentatious. I would do it in that place. If it hadn’t been a Frank Lloyd Wright house, I would have torn it down. It just happened that the right thing to do was restore it.”
His other great passion was country music. In 2012, after seeing the film Crazy Heart, he recorded an album, My First Rodeo, under the pseudonym Verlin Jack. In one song he had a personal message for his assistant, Nancy, who arranged both his business and romantic affairs: “I know it may sound wrong, but you’re half my pimp and half my mom. Without you I’d be gone.”
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Jim Kimsey, entrepreneur and co-founder of AOL, was born on September 15, 1939. He died of cancer on March 1, 2016, aged 76