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Michael J. Saylor

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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 and Chief Executive Officer 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. He is also the author of The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything.

Education and early career

Michael Saylor was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1965. He attended high school in Fairborn, Ohio, where he graduated at the top of his class in 1983.

In 1987, Saylor received an S.B. in Aeronautics and Astronautics and in Science, Technology and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 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 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 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, Delaware. MicroStrategy’s early focus was on data mining software for companies. The company got 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. Saylor and Bansal moved the office to Tysons Corner, Virginia in 1994 and the company grew quickly in the years following. Saylor received media attention for his leadership of the growing company and for his accumulated wealth as its majority owner. In 1996, Michael Saylor was named KPMG Washington High-Tech Entrepreneur of the Year. In June 1998, he took the company public with an initial stock offering of 4 million shares priced at $12 each.

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. 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 July 2000, Michael Saylor was named as one of People Magazine’s Most Eligible Bachelors. 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 goal statements like "intelligence everywhere" and "purge ignorance". The New Yorker magazine reported that one of his talks to a group of new employees lasted eight hours. A 1999 Fortune magazine profile noted that he described his business by comparing it to the acts of famous historical figures such as Thomas Edison or Caesar.

In 2008, Michael Saylor and the rest of MicroStrategy had its 10-year anniversary as a public company. 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 time. By 2009, MicroStrategy had offices in more than 20 countries worldwide. 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.

In 2010, MicroStrategy released a Mobile BI product for iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry, following Saylor's belief that mobile will shape a "new class of applications that will change the way we think about our business." In 2011, Saylor announced the release of several social applications built on MicroStrategy technology, connecting enterprise systems to the Facebook database. Also in 2011, Saylor equipped his employees with 2,300 corporate iPads. He has been interviewed on his company's adoption of iPads for business functions.

In June 2012, Saylor published his first book, The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything, which provides an analysis of trends in mobile technology. The Mobile Wave was on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best sellers lists, mentioned in a CNN article, and featured in a Forbes article. At the MicroStrategy World user conference in Amsterdam in July, he gave his predictions for the future of mobile, including 5 billion smartphones by 2015 and 5 billion tablet computers by 2022.

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. 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."

Saylor has made various contributions to charitable organizations including the Georgetown University Medical Center'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.

References

  1. Patents attributed to Michael Saylor
  2. ^ Glasser, Jeff (July 15, 1996). "From the Ground Up and Up". The Washington Post.
  3. ^ Leibovich, Mark (January 6, 2002). "MicroStrategy's CEO Sped to the Brink". The Washington Post.
  4. ^ Michael Saylor in Fortune Magazine
  5. MacFarquhar, Larissa (April 3, 2000). "Caesar.Com". The New Yorker.
  6. ^ Salter, Chuck (December 19, 2007). "The Reeducation of an Internet CEO".
  7. Jaffe, Harry (March 1, 2000). "The Seven Billion Dollar Man". 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.
  9. SEC Press Release, December 14, 2000
  10. Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy's cult leader, By David Plotz, Slate.com, March 23, 2000.
  11. "Billionaire pledges $100 million for free Internet university". CNN. March 17, 2000. Retrieved November 30, 2007.
  12. America's Most Wanted
  13. "MICROSTRATEGY INCORPORATED Annual Report". Form 10-K. Feb 24, 2010.
  14. "2010 MicroStrategy Proxy Statement". March 31, 2010.
  15. Michael Saylor keynote address, MicroStrategy World 2010
  16. Stamper, Jason (10 August 2011). "'We're pushing the accelerator to the floor': Q&A with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy". CBR Online.
  17. Cox, John (August 5, 2011). "iPads power productivity gains at MicroStrategy". NetworkWorld.
  18. "Riding the Mobile Wave: The Future of Computing". The Brookings Institute. October 5, 2012.
  19. Joynt, Carol Ross (June 27, 2012). "MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor's "The Mobile Wave" Examines the Implications of Mobile Technology". Washingtonian.
  20. "HARDCOVER NONFICTION BEST SELLERS".
  21. "Best-Selling Books, Week Ended July 15". The Wall Street Journal.
  22. "Jobs of the Future: Why the Political Class Should Read Michael Saylor's "The Mobile Wave"". Forbes. 10/09/2012. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  23. Sutter, John (September 10, 2012). "How smartphones make us superhuman". CNN.
  24. Evans, Steve (10 July 2012). "MicroStrategy's vision: No cash, no queues, no teachers". {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
  25. "Saylor Foundation to Launch Multi-Million Dollar Open Textbook Challenge!". Open College Textbooks Blog. August 9, 2011.
  26. Kamenetz, Anya (2011). The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  27. "Quality Cancer Care: It's a Collaborative Effort" (PDF). Spring 2003.
  28. "Courage for Kids". June 16, 2008.
  29. "Fight for Children Supporters".
  30. "Fashion for Paws".
  31. "SAIC's Walt Havenstein to be Honored as Tech Leader". ExecutiveBiz.

External links

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