DuPont Seeds MicroStrategy

A story about how Michael Saylor turned down a job offer from DuPont and instead negotiated them into becoming the first customer and investor for his company MicroStrategy.

"I was working at DuPont right out of college doing simulations for their billion-dollar decisions. When an executive wanted to make their case, they didn't really want an objective simulation - they just wanted data to support what they already wanted to do. I built a simulation that said 'don't do it' and ended up leaving DuPont because they didn't even want the real results.

The executive asked 'Where's that kid who's doing that model?' When told I quit, he said 'Go hire him back, give him what he wants.' They offered me more money but I didn't want to work there. The executive said 'Give him whatever he wants.'

So I said 'I want to start my own company. Give me a quarter million dollars, let me hire 8-10 people from DuPont, and become my first customer with a few million dollars worth of contracts. I'll start MicroStrategy to do the same simulation work for companies.'

Instead of being an employee, I got DuPont to seed fund my company and become a multimillion dollar customer. That's how MicroStrategy started when I was 24 years old. We did business intelligence - taking companies' data and providing insights. By 34, I was a billionaire with a public company worth $11 billion."