Michael Saylor

Cofounder of MicroStrategy

• Born: February 4, 1965
• Place of Birth: Lincoln, Nebraska

Primary Company/Organization: MicroStrategy

Introduction

Michael Saylor was one of the key innovators who developed the system of establishing relational databases through decision support systems (DSS). His company MicroStrategy focused on allowing businesses to combine information from a large number of separate databases and trace connections among them, which, in turn, enables functions such as monitoring existing sales, identifying successes or failures related to promotions and advertising campaigns, and predicting the possibility of improving sales through the use of the same or different strategies.

Early Life

Michael J. Saylor was born on February 4, 1965, in Lincoln, Nebraska. His father was a noncommissioned officer in the US Air Force, rising to the rank of sergeant. Much of Saylor's childhood was spent moving with his family when father was transferred from one base to another. Saylor therefore grew up in several locations in the United States, as well as Japan and New Zealand. He went to high school at Fairborn, Ohio, when his father was posted to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton.

The influence of his father was very important to Saylor, who once told an interviewer that he could not remember a single time when his father spoke an untruth or even a half truth. He attributes his moral character to his father and his charisma to his mother. As a young boy, he also was influenced by the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, which the latter was winning. His favorite book was Robert Heinlein's Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), which is about a high school student, Kip, who wins a space suit in a writing competition and is then abducted and taken to the Moon. He escapes but is recaptured and taken to Pluto and must then travel out of the solar system in order to find a way of saving the Earth from a monster called Wormface. The boy in the story manages to return to the Earth, where he is rewarded with a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The teenage Saylor had already set his sights on attending MIT with his tuition fees paid entirely by a scholarship from the Air Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). He went to MIT's Sloan School of Management and completed his thesis on creating a mathematical model for Niccolò Machiavelli's Discourses, in which he argued that war, famine, and natural disasters have different effects on the various systems of government that have operated in the world. He completed a double degree in aeronautics and astronautics, graduating with honors.

Although Saylor had planned to go into the US Air Force, and had been accepted to a jet-pilot program, a routine medical examination revealed that he had a benign heart murmur, so he was not allowed to train. Placed in the reserves, he no longer had a career in the Air Force.

Life's Work

Always interested in computing, Saylor became a systems engineer and went to work for Federal Group, a management consulting firm. In New York he helped to design computer simulation models. Because his employer wanted him to sign an agreement not to work for competing companies, he left and started working for the chemical division of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company in Wilmington, Delaware. He offered to build a global computer model for the titanium sector of Du Pont's business, and he predicted the decline in demand for some of Du Pont's products. He was paid $250,000 and used the money to establish the company MicroStrategy, which started operations in 1989.

Initially, as with many new companies, the first years involved the owner and a small number of employees working for long hours on their initial contracts. The first major one was with fast food giant McDonald's, which wanted to have a system by which they would monitor the successes or failures of their promotional campaigns. This project earned MicroStrategy some $10 million. The McDonald's contract led Saylor to devise a system called relational online analytical processing (ROLAP), which allowed for the integration of information drawn from a large number of separate databases, and by merging them, allow the answering of specific questions easily. This was later developed into what became known as decision support system (DSS), whereby company executives could locate data on particular products, marketing campaigns, sales offers, and advertising.

As the company grew, Saylor had two main business partners, both of whom he had met at MIT. Sanjeev "Sanju" Bansal, who had cofounded MicroStrategy, had a master's degree in computer science and lived in Burke, Virginia; Thomas Spahr had been a consultant with Booz Allen and Hamilton in Bethesda, Maryland. They decided to move from Wilmington to Tyson's Corner, Virginia. Work was so intense that for the first three months Saylor slept on a couch at a friend's house. He then managed to buy a house but again was working so hard with MicroStrategy that it was three years before he furnished it.

In 1995, MicroStrategy was the ninth-largest creator of DSS software in the United States. In the following year, Saylor was named the KPMG Washington High-Tech Entrepreneur of the Year. The company expanded and moved again, this time to Vienna, Virginia. Two years later, in June 1998, MicroStrategy was transformed into a public company. It was a difficult process and Saylor worked hard, apparently going through as many as five hundred drafts of prospectuses. What he wanted to do was to raise capital for the company and ensure that he and the ten other founding executives of MicroStrategy kept control of the company after it went public. The method eventually settled upon was to have a voting system whereby the eleven executives had ten votes for every share they owned and new stockholders would get only one vote per share.

When MicroStrategy made its debut as a public company, Saylor went from being in debt by about $11 million to becoming very wealthy. The shares' value soared in a year from $7 per share to $333 (although they later fell to $248). With Saylor initially owning some 44 million shares, it was not long before he was a billionaire.

The company continued to flourish. A growing number of large corporations began to see the importance of DSS software, which enabled many of them to save large sums of money and provide a better focus for their advertising budgets. Department stores were able to analyze which items were selling more than others and were able to compare sales by city, time of year, and particular advertising or promotional campaigns.

In addition to marketing his software to private companies, Saylor was keen to get the government to use his technology. He knew that it would enable local authorities to predict the use of new roads and identify crime "hot spots," for example. Although some saw the software as somewhat Orwellian, providing the government a Big Brother ability to observe what people are doing through the use of telescreens, MicroStrategy saw their relational databases as allowing authorities to predict places when and where crimes were most likely to occur, thus allowing police and other law enforcement authorities to be more alert at specific times and places. Other innovations by Saylor and MicroStrategy were in the areas of business intelligence, computer and wireless security, and speech automation. Altogether Saylor registered over thirty patents.

MicroStrategy also boasted a strong company ethic. The annual turnover of staff was about 10 percent, much lower than in many other computer companies. Saylor ensured that all staff were treated well. Indeed during the winter, the company's employees were known to join him on a Caribbean cruise.

In 2000, the company faced problems in the wake of an investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC was looking into charges that company earnings were not as high as had been claimed and that MicroStrategy had actually suffered a loss in 1999. The company stock fell from $226 to $86 and then reached $4 before recovering.

Saylor remained the chair of MicroStrategy's board of directors and its chief executive officer (CEO) until August 2022 when he stepped down as CEO but continued to serve as chair. He also earned attention for his book The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything, which was published in 2012 and reached seventh place on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

In August 2022, the attorney general for the District of Columbia sued Saylor for tax fraud. He was accused of pretending to be a resident of other districts to avoid paying more than $25 million in income taxes from 2014 to 2020. The attorney general also sought to recover unpaid tax and penalties from both Saylor and MicroStrategy that could total about $150 million. However, in 2023, DC Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams ruled that the city failed to meet the criteria to bring a claim against Saylor and MicroStrategy and dropped that part of the case. However, the attorney general was permitted to pursue the lawsuit seeking $25 million against Saylor.

Personal Life

Bansal famously told Washington Post correspondent Jeff Glasser that Saylor considered dating "a fluff experience." Saylor preferred to dedicate himself to his work rather than pursue romantic relationships.

Having been influenced not only by his parents, who he credited for ongoing inspiration, but also by science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein as a teenager, Saylor remained interested in US history throughout his career. He was long fascinated by figures such as US president Abraham Lincoln, British wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, inventor Thomas Edison, and emperor Julius Caesar. He also was known to enjoy architecture and to be a voracious reader on a wide variety of subjects. Saylor often credited his broad interests in general knowledge for helping him in his business work, often providing answers to problems.

Saylor established Saylor Academy (originally the Saylor Foundation) in 1999 as an initiative to provide free education to anyone; it grew to offer online college courses drawing content from various established universities, including MIT. Saylor also contributed to a number of other charities, including the Georgetown University Medical Center's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center; Courage for Kids; and Fight for Children.

Bibliography

Bonner, William, Addison Wiggin, and Kate Incontrera. Financial Reckoning Day Fallout: Surviving Today's Global Depression. Hoboken: Wiley, 2008. Print.

Hiraoka, Leslie S. Underwriting the Internet: How Technical Advances, Financial Engineering and Entrepreneurial Genius Are Building the Information Highway. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2005. Print.

Jouvenal, Justin. "Judge Dismisses Part of Tax Lawsuit Against Microstrategy's Michael Saylor. The Washington Post, 2 Mar. 2023, www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/02/michael-saylor-tax-false-claims-act-crypto/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

"Michael Saylor." Current Biography Yearbook, 2000. New York: H. W. Wilson, 2000. 493–96. Print.

Saylor, Michael. The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything. New York: Perseus, 2012. Print.

"Technology Billionaire Pledges 100 Million for Free Internet University." CNN Tech 22 Mar. 2000: n. pag. Web. 20 Aug. 2012.