March 23, 2000 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Michael Saylor, the billionaire chief executive of a northern Virginia software company, has created a $100-million foundation that will be devoted to making a free college education available to anyone — through the Internet.
Mr. Saylor, 35, heads MicroStrategy, which creates so-called data-mining software that helps companies sort through and make sense of vast amounts of information on products, sales, and inventories. He will use technology to create online courses featuring lectures from “the greatest minds” in academe, business, politics — and just about every other conceivable field of knowledge, says Mark Bisnow, vice president for business development at MicroStrategy.
The $100-million, Mr. Bisnow says, is merely a “down payment” to get the philanthropy off the ground. Mr. Saylor plans to continue to donate large chunks of his fortune — estimated to be about $13-billion — to the foundation.
The project has only been in the works for about a month, and the details of how the foundation will achieve its goal are still being worked out, Mr. Bisnow says. But the plan does include the creation of a charity that will hire experts from diverse fields to do everything from developing curricula to using advanced technology, such as streaming video and broad-band reception, to make high-quality videotaped lectures available to students through computers.
“People are only going to use their computers to take courses, we think, when their computer operates almost like a TV, with really cool pictures, where you can stop and fast forward and rewind,” Mr. Bisnow says. Such technology is expected to be widely available within five years, he says.
In preparation, Mr. Saylor plans to invite “a thousand or more of the brightest minds of our age to come into our TV studio to record lectures and thoughts,” Mr. Bisnow says.
Mr. Saylor is also working with federal officials as well as private sources to come up with ways to make sure that all students can gain access to the computer equipment and software needed to participate in the online courses.
Mr. Saylor is the latest high-technology entrepreneur to dive into philanthropy with both feet.
Michael Dell, founder of the Dell Computer Corporation, last year established a $114-million foundation that is expected to focus on education and children’s health.
Steve Case, chairman of America Online, also has a foundation with assets worth approximately $100-million. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of $21.8-billion, is the world’s wealthiest philanthropy.
Like many of his peers, Mr. Saylor wants his philanthropy to be as technologically advanced as his business.
“These people don’t want their name on buildings,” says Mario Morino, a retired software entrepreneur who now runs a non-profit organization that helps charities find ways to use the Internet to improve their services. “They’re asking, ‘How do you take the knowledge that we have and the tools that we have developed, how can we use those tools to address some of the social problems and issues that have been affecting the country for a long time?’”
Mr. Saylor, the son of a non-commissioned Air Force officer, attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on an R.O.T.C. scholarship.
“He feels like everybody ought to be able to go to college and get the best courses,” says Mr. Bisnow. “But if they can’t afford tuition or housing, they ought to be able to get online on their computers or on a community computer and get that same education.”
