Michael Saylor

Michael Saylor is the founder, Chairman, and CEO of MicroStrategy, Inc., a premier global provider of business intelligence. He has served as trustee of the Saylor Foundation since its inception in 1999.  Saylor created this foundation because he had a very simple idea: Education should be free.

A voracious and often self-directed learner, Saylor graduated at the top of his high school class and attended MIT on a ROTC scholarship, completing dual degrees in Aeronautics & Astronautics and Science, Technology, & Society. Nevertheless, he has long felt that great learning doesn’t require a great deal of money or a brick-and-mortar institution; much of his world-class education had been gained from the back of a 500-person lecture hall at considerable expense for all involved. Yet those very same MIT lectures, the same academic-authored books–substantially the same experiences–are now offered for free to anyone with an Internet connection. The only problem lies in connecting these materials to students in a meaningful, unique, transformative way.

He believes that current technology–and its increasing diffusion among people in all countries–makes it possible to drive the marginal cost of each new unit of education, effectively, to zero.

Within two years of graduation, Saylor founded the company that he helms today, growing it through sustained attention to providing clients useful, integrated solutions–and empowerment. He brings this drive and conscientious attention to the Saylor Foundation’s Free Education project.