Michael J. Saylor

Michael J. Saylor (born 1965) is an American entrepreneur, industrialist, and co-founder of MicroStrategy, Inc., an enterprise software company specializing in business intelligence (BI), enterprise reporting, dashboard, and OLAP (on-line analytical processing) software. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors, Chief Executive Officer, and President of MicroStrategy. Saylor co-founded the company in 1989 with MIT classmates Thomas Spahr and Sanju Bansal.

Saylor is named as an inventor or co-inventor on 30 patents in the areas of business intelligence, wireless security, and speech automation, including patents for an intelligence server, voice services, security monitoring systems, and a robotics workstation.^[1] He has been recognized for his entrepreneurship in the technology field and his charitable donations.

Education and early career

Michael Saylor was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1965.^[2] He traveled the world extensively while growing up as the son of an Air Force sergeant, at various points during his childhood living in the United States, Japan, and New Zealand. He says his father taught him character, while his mother, whom Saylor considers an important influence in his life, taught him charisma. Saylor was an avid reader from his early days, and says he finished reading hundreds of books by the sixth grade. He attended high school in Fairborn, Ohio, where he was voted Most Likely to Succeed and graduated at the top of his class in 1983.^[3]

In 1987, Saylor received an S.B. in Aeronautics and Astronautics and in Science, Technology and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He attended MIT on an Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship, but a benign heart murmur kept him from becoming a pilot. His thesis was a simulation of the effects of war, famine, and other disasters on different systems of government.^[4][5] While at MIT, Saylor took a system dynamics theory class which gave him the initial idea of modeling business with non-linear mathematics.^[6]

Following his graduation from MIT, Michael Saylor was employed by Federal Group, a boutique management consulting firm. He then worked as a venture manager at Du Pont de Nemours and Company from 1988 to 1989. The time he spent creating computer simulations at MIT prepared him for his work at Du Pont, where he constructed models to simulate business interactions.^[7] Saylor built a simulation that predicted a 1990 recession in several of Du Pont’s business markets. This demonstrated his capabilities to Du Pont executives who then hired Saylor as an independent contractor.^[2]

Career

Michael Saylor co-founded MicroStrategy in 1989 at the age of 24 and has since served as the company’s CEO.^[6] He started MicroStrategy with the consulting contract from Du Pont, which provided him with $250,000 and office space in Wilmington, Delaware. MicroStrategy’s early focus was on data mining software for companies. The company scored a relatively large deal with McDonald’s early on in its history, inspiring Saylor to take the company in the direction of business intelligence (BI). It expanded into that market with a BI software platform, services, and support. He predicted that MicroStrategy’s BI products would help users create a competitive advantage in their industries.^[2] Saylor and Bansal moved the office to Tysons Corner, Virginia in 1994 and the company grew quickly in the years following.^[3]

Saylor accumulated wealth as the majority owner of MicroStrategy and received much media attention as a popular young billionaire and "visionary" (as Stewart Alsop called him in Fortune Magazine).^[8] In 1996, Michael Saylor was named KPMG Washington High-Tech Entrepreneur of the Year.^[2] Then in June 1998, he took the company public with an initial stock offering of 4 million shares priced at $12 each.

MicroStrategy’s tremendous growth in its early years as a public company – nearly doubling its revenue annually^[6] – often put the company (and their CEO Michael Saylor) in the spotlight. His appearances on CNN, 60 Minutes, and the Charlie Rose show helped make Michael Saylor a household name in business and technology. In July 2000, Michael Saylor was named as one of People Magazine’s Most Eligible Bachelors.^[9]

Michael Saylor has been described as "obsessed" with the company’s mission, often working into the late hours and devoting more attention to his work life than his personal life. Mark Ein, founder of Venturehouse Group, is quoted saying, "It's not about wealth creation for Mike. He really wants to build something. I don't think he's driven by anything else."^[10] According to MicroStrategy’s 2010 Proxy statement, Saylor is the controlling shareholder of MicroStrategy, holding 65.8% of the total voting power in the company. He beneficially owns 393,146 shares of class A common stock and 2,358,700 shares of class B common stock of the company.^[11]

In March 2000, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought charges against Saylor and two other top MicroStrategy executives for the company's inaccurate reporting of results. Saylor's sanction was to consent to fraud injunctions, $350,000 in penalties, and personal disgorgement of $8.3 million.^[12] The stock lost 90% of its value in a few weeks and Saylor's personal net worth plummeted $6 billion on March 20, 2000.^[13] Previous to the announcement of the restated financials, Michael Saylor stated his intention to donate $100 million towards the founding of a free online university.^[14]

In 2002, Michael Saylor was profiled by Mark Leibovich in a four-part feature in The Washington Post which says Saylor was known for his grand goal statements like "intelligence everywhere" and "purge ignorance".^[3] Another MicroStrategy slogan, "Information like water," came from a story that inspired Saylor to build a product that would become as essential as water in peoples’ lives. This parable was told by the Japanese businessman Konosuke Matsushita; in it, a beggar owning nothing but an empty bucket says, "I was walking through a town square, and I saw a fountain full of clean, fresh water. I walked over to that fountain, I filled up my bucket, and I walked off happy."

Saylor is also known for his epic-length speeches. The New Yorker magazine reported that one of his talks to a group of new employees lasted eight hours. He often talks about business by comparing it to the acts of famous historical figures such as Thomas Edison or Caesar.^[4] Chuck Salter explains:

MicroStrategy's ultimate mission, [Michael Saylor] declared, was to build a wireless "personal-intelligence network," an effort he likened to the Roman Empire spreading civilization, because both missions were "timeless, ethical, and imperative."^[6]

In 2008, Michael Saylor and the rest of MicroStrategy celebrated its 10-year anniversary as a public company and the "leading independent provider of open systems business intelligence software". Its annual revenues over those ten years had grown from $96 million in 1998 to $351 million in 2008, and the employee base grew from 907 to 1,582 in that same time. By 2009, MicroStrategy's revenues exceeded $377 million and the company had offices in more than 20 countries worldwide.^[15]

In 2010, MicroStrategy released a Mobile BI product for iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry. This signifies Saylor's belief that mobile will shape a "new class of applications that will change the way we think about our business."^[16] The company's most recent release of the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform in July 2011 was MicroStrategy 9.2.1, featuring MicroStrategy Transaction Services.^[17] Also announced was MicroStrategy Cloud, a cloud-based platform-as-a-service designed and optimized for large data volumes, high concurrency, and high performance.

In 2011, Saylor announced the release of several social applications built on MicroStrategy Gateway, which connects enterprise systems to the Facebook database.^[18] One such example is MicroStrategy Wisdom, which allows businesses to analyze Facebook data and perform fan segmentation using psychographic profiles. Other social apps include Emma, a secure online marketplace, and Alert, an intelligent news reader. In September, MicroStrategy Cloud Personal was released in public beta.^[19] This SaaS-based BI tool is free and self-service, allowing users to share their dashboards to the web, Facebook, or Twitter.

On mobile computing in the workforce

Michael Saylor has been interviewed extensively on his company's adoption of iPads for business functions. He saw the iPad's introduction in April 2010 as a ripe opportunity to increase the mobility of MicroStrategy's workforce, and by 2011 Saylor had equipped the employee base with 2,300 corporate iPads. ^[20]

Charitable donations

The Saylor Foundation, of which Michael Saylor is the sole trustee, launched Saylor.org in 2009 as a free online university. There are currently over 200 courses available on Saylor.org, offering free access to college-level materials and coursework in the twelve most popular major fields of study. Saylor.org works with credentialed professors and higher education peer reviewers to provide this course content, which is openly licensed. The academic structure of Saylor.org follows the philosophy of making open educational resources (OER) available to all.^[21] In The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential by Anya Kamenetz, Saylor.org is described by one business management student: "It gives you all the readings, lectures, final exam, breakdown what the purpose of the course was and whether it was 100% complete on the website."^[22]

Saylor has made various contributions to charitable organizations including the Georgetown University Medical Center's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center,^[23] Courage for Kids^[24] and Fight for Children.^[25] In 2010, he acted as the event chairman of the Washington Humane Society’s annual Fashion for Paws show.^[26] Saylor is a previous recipient of the Technology "Good Scout" Award.^[27]

See also

• MicroStrategy
• Business intelligence

References

1. ^ Patents attributed to Michael Saylor
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Glasser, Jeff (July 15 1996). "From the Ground Up and Up". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/washtech/daily/june96/061596saylor.htm. 
3. ^ ^{a b c} Leibovich, Mark (January 6, 2002). "MicroStrategy's CEO Sped to the Brink". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A2889-2002Jan5. 
4. ^ ^{a b} Michael Saylor in Fortune Magazine
5. ^ MacFarquhar, Larissa (April 3, 2000). "Caesar.Com". The New Yorker. http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2000-04-03#folio=034. 
6. ^ ^{a b c d} Salter, Chuck (December 19, 2007). "The Reeducation of an Internet CEO". http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/career/careerbuild/saylor_sidebar.html. 
7. ^ Jaffe, Harry (March 01, 2000). "The Seven Billion Dollar Man". http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/6649.html. "Saylor first created computer simulations at MIT. In a thesis he simulated a Renaissance Italian city-state with three branches of government and used computer science to design "a more stable, more equitable government." After that, modeling business simulations was easy." 
8. ^ Alsop, Stewart (September 8, 1997). "Now I know how a real visionary sounds". CNN. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1997/09/08/230819/index.htm. 
9. ^ America's Most Wanted
10. ^ Jaffe, Harry (March 01, 2000). "The Seven Billion Dollar Man". http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/6649.html. 
11. ^ "2010 MicroStrategy Proxy Statement". March 31, 2010. http://ir.microstrategy.com/financials.cfm. 
12. ^ SEC Press Release, December 14, 2000
13. ^ Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy's cult leader, By David Plotz, Slate.com, March 23, 2000.
14. ^ "Billionaire pledges $100 million for free Internet university". CNN. March 17, 2000. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/16/internet.university/. Retrieved November 30, 2007. 
15. ^ "MICROSTRATEGY INCORPORATED Annual Report". Form 10-K. Feb 24, 2010. http://ir.microstrategy.com/secfiling.cfm?FILINGID=1193125-10-38870&. 
16. ^ Michael Saylor keynote address, MicroStrategy World 2010
17. ^ "MicroStrategy Announces the Release of MicroStrategy 9.2.1, Featuring Exciting New Product, MicroStrategy Transaction Services" (Press release). July 6, 2011. http://www.microstrategy.com/news/pr_system/press_release.asp?ctry=167&id=2292. 
18. ^ Stamper, Jason (10 August 2011). "'We're pushing the accelerator to the floor': Q&A with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy". CBR Online. 
19. ^ Menninger, David (September 29, 2011). "MicroStrategy Takes Cloud Computing Personally". Ventana Research. http://davidmenninger.ventanaresearch.com/2011/09/29/microstrategy-takes-cloud-computing-personally/. 
20. ^ Cox, John (August 05, 2011). "iPads power productivity gains at MicroStrategy". NetworkWorld. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/080511-ipad-microstrategy.html?page=1. 
21. ^ "Saylor Foundation to Launch Multi-Million Dollar Open Textbook Challenge!". Open College Textbooks Blog. August 9th, 2011. http://collegeopentextbooks.org/blog/2011/08/09/saylor-foundation-to-launch-multi-million-dollar-open-textbook-challenge/. 
22. ^ Kamenetz, Anya (July 2011). The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. http://www.scribd.com/doc/60954896/EdupunksGuide. 
23. ^ "Quality Cancer Care: It’s a Collaborative Effort". Spring 2003. http://lombardi.georgetown.edu/pdf/about/LM/2003_spring.pdf. 
24. ^ "Courage for Kids". June 16, 2008. http://www.courageforkids.org/the-courage-cup-prepares-to-welcome-the-kids-of-work-to-ride-to-the-5th-annual-courage-cup-the-meltzer-group-first-chukker-foundation-and-aka-join-microstrategy-and-legal-times-as-sponsors/. 
25. ^ "Fight for Children Supporters". http://www.fightforchildren.org/About_Us-Supporters.html. 
26. ^ "Fashion for Paws". http://support.washhumane.org/site/PageServer?pagename=f4p_aboutus. 
27. ^ "SAIC’s Walt Havenstein to be Honored as Tech Leader". ExecutiveBiz. http://blog.executivebiz.com/saics-walt-havenstein-to-be-honored-as-tech-leader/12197. 

External links

• Michael J. Saylor Official Bio
• The Saylor Foundation: The Free Education Initiative
• MicroStrategy Homepage
• MicroStrategy World
• Official Business Intelligence Blog

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Name	Saylor, Michael J.
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Date of birth	1965
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