Michael J. Saylor
Encyclopedia
Michael J. Saylor is an American entrepreneur
Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

, industrialist, and co-founder of MicroStrategy, Inc.
MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy, Inc. , is a business intelligence software vendor. MicroStrategy's software enables leading organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make more strategic business decisions...

, an enterprise software
Enterprise software
Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software , is software used in organizations, such as in a business or government, contrary to software chosen by individuals...

 company specializing in business intelligence
Business intelligence
Business intelligence mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes....

 (BI), enterprise reporting, dashboard
Dashboard
A dashboard is a control panel placed in front of the driver of an automobile, housing instrumentation and controls for operation of the vehicle....

, and OLAP
OLAP
In computing, online analytical processing, or OLAP , is an approach to swiftly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational reporting and data mining...

 (on-line analytical processing) software. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors
Board of directors
A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization. Other names include board of governors, board of managers, board of regents, board of trustees, and board of visitors...

, Chief Executive Officer
Chief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...

, and President
President
A president is a leader of an organization, company, trade union, university, or country.Etymologically, a president is one who presides, who sits in leadership...

 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
Business intelligence
Business intelligence mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes....

, wireless security
Wireless security
Wireless security is the prevention of unauthorized access or damage to computers using wireless networks.Many laptop computers have wireless cards pre-installed. The ability to enter a network while mobile has great benefits. However, wireless networking is prone to some security issues...

, and speech automation
Interactive voice response
Interactive voice response is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF keypad inputs....

, including patents for an intelligence server, voice services, security monitoring systems, and a robotics workstation. 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
Lincoln, Nebraska
The City of Lincoln is the capital and the second-most populous city of the US state of Nebraska. Lincoln is also the county seat of Lancaster County and the home of the University of Nebraska. Lincoln's 2010 Census population was 258,379....

 in 1965. He traveled the world extensively while growing up as the son of an Air Force
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...

 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
Fairborn, Ohio
Fairborn is a city in Greene County, Ohio, United States, near Dayton and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The population was 32,352 at the 2010 census...

, Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...

, where he was voted Most Likely to Succeed and graduated at the top of his class in 1983.

In 1987, Saylor received an S.B.
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

 in Aeronautics and Astronautics and in Science, Technology and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 (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. While at MIT, Saylor took a system dynamics theory class which gave him the initial idea of modeling business with non-linear mathematics.

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. 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.

Career

Michael Saylor co-founded MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy, Inc. , is a business intelligence software vendor. MicroStrategy's software enables leading organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make more strategic business decisions...

 in 1989 at the age of 24 and has since served as the company’s CEO. He started MicroStrategy with the consulting contract from Du Pont, which provided him with $250,000 and office space in Wilmington
Wilmington, Delaware
Wilmington is the largest city in the state of Delaware, United States, and is located at the confluence of the Christina River and Brandywine Creek, near where the Christina flows into the Delaware River. It is the county seat of New Castle County and one of the major cities in the Delaware Valley...

, Delaware
Delaware
Delaware is a U.S. state located on the Atlantic Coast in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered to the south and west by Maryland, and to the north by Pennsylvania...

. MicroStrategy’s early focus was on data mining
Data mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

 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. Saylor and Bansal moved the office to Tysons Corner
Tysons Corner, Virginia
Tysons Corner is an unincorporated census-designated place in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. Part of the Washington Metropolitan Area located in Northern Virginia, Tysons Corner lies between the community of McLean and the town of Vienna along the Capital Beltway . The population was...

, Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

 in 1994 and the company grew quickly in the years following.

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). In 1996, Michael Saylor was named KPMG
KPMG
KPMG is one of the largest professional services networks in the world and one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PwC. Its global headquarters is located in Amstelveen, Netherlands....

 Washington High-Tech Entrepreneur of the Year. Then in June 1998, he took the company public with an initial stock offering
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...

 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 – often put the company (and their CEO Michael Saylor) in the spotlight. His appearances on CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

, 60 Minutes
60 Minutes
60 Minutes is an American television news magazine, which has run on CBS since 1968. The program was created by producer Don Hewitt who set it apart by using a unique style of reporter-centered investigation....

, and the Charlie Rose show
Charlie Rose (talk show)
Charlie Rose is an American television interview show, with Charlie Rose as executive producer, executive editor, and host. The show is syndicated...

 helped make Michael Saylor a household name in business and technology. In July 2000, Michael Saylor was named as one of People Magazine
People (magazine)
In 1998, the magazine introduced a version targeted at teens called Teen People. However, on July 27, 2006, the company announced it would shut down publication of Teen People immediately. The last issue to be released was scheduled for September 2006. Subscribers to this magazine received...

’s Most Eligible Bachelors.

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." According to MicroStrategy’s 2010 Proxy statement
Proxy statement
A proxy statement is a statement required of a United States firm when soliciting shareholder votes. This statement is filed in advance of the annual meeting. The firm needs to file a proxy statement, otherwise known as a Form DEF 14A , with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission...

, 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.

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
Disgorgement (law)
Disgorgement is the forced giving up of profits obtained by illegal or unethical acts. A court may order wrongdoers to pay back illegal profits, with interest, to prevent unjust enrichment...

 of $8.3 million. The stock lost 90% of its value in a few weeks and Saylor's personal net worth plummeted $6 billion on March 20, 2000. 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.

In 2002, Michael Saylor was profiled by Mark Leibovich in a four-part feature in The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

 which says Saylor was known for his grand goal statements like "intelligence everywhere" and "purge ignorance". 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
Konosuke Matsushita
was a Japanese industrialist, the founder of Panasonic, a company based in the suburb of Kadoma , Osaka in Japan. For many Japanese, he is known as "the god of management"...

; 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
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

 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. 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."


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.

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." The company's most recent release of the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform in July 2011 was MicroStrategy 9.2.1, featuring MicroStrategy Transaction Services. Also announced was MicroStrategy Cloud, a cloud
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

-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
MicroStrategy Gateway
MicroStrategy Gateway is a cloud-based service provided by MicroStrategy, Inc. that connects enterprise applications to the Facebook social graph...

, which connects enterprise systems to the Facebook database. One such example is MicroStrategy Wisdom
Wisdom (application)
Wisdom is a Facebook application released by Strategy Network Incorporated. It runs on MicroStrategy Gateway technology. The Wisdom application is available for free and links with the user’s Facebook social graph.-Application development:...

, which allows businesses to analyze Facebook data and perform fan segmentation using psychographic profiles. Other social apps include Emma
Emma (application)
Emma, the Friendly Marketplace is a free mobile application released by Strategy Network Incorporated on July 23, 2011. The name Emma derives from an acronym for "Electronic Marketplace for Merchandise and Activities"...

, a secure online marketplace, and Alert
Alert (application)
Alert is a free mobile application developed on MicroStrategy Gateway technology that allows users to follow their favorite Facebook Pages in one integrated place on their mobile device...

, an intelligent news reader. In September, MicroStrategy Cloud Personal was released in public beta. This SaaS
Software as a Service
Software as a service , sometimes referred to as "on-demand software," is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are typically accessed by users using a thin client, normally using a web browser over the Internet.SaaS has become a common...

-based BI tool is free and self-service, allowing users to share their dashboards to the web, Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, or Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

.

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.

Charitable donations

The Saylor Foundation
The Saylor Foundation
The Saylor Foundation is a 501 non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC. It was established in 1999 by its sole trustee, Michael J. Saylor, who is Chairman, CEO, and President of the business intelligence company MicroStrategy...

, of which Michael Saylor is the sole trustee
Trustee
Trustee is a legal term which, in its broadest sense, can refer to any person who holds property, authority, or a position of trust or responsibility for the benefit of another...

, 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
Academic major
In the United States and Canada, an academic major or major concentration is the academic discipline to which an undergraduate student formally commits....

. Saylor.org works with credentialed professors and higher education peer reviewers to provide this course content, which is openly licensed
Open content
Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....

. The academic structure of Saylor.org follows the philosophy of making open educational resources (OER)
Open educational resources
Open educational resources are digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone...

 available to all. In The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential by Anya Kamenetz
Anya Kamenetz
Anya Kamenetz is an American writer living in Brooklyn, New York City. She is a staff writer for Fast Company magazine and a columnist for Tribune Media . During 2005 she wrote a column for The Village Voice called "Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young"...

, 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."

Saylor has made various contributions to charitable organizations including the Georgetown University Medical Center
Georgetown University Medical Center
Georgetown University Medical Center is the medical campus at Georgetown University. It is also a $225 million biomedical research and educational organization. The Medical Center contains over 80% of Georgetown University's sponsored research funding and is led by Howard J...

's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Courage for Kids and Fight for Children. In 2010, he acted as the event chairman of the Washington Humane Society’s annual Fashion for Paws show. Saylor is a previous recipient of the Technology "Good Scout" Award.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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