$MSTR: Beyond Bitcoin?
MicroStrategy → Strategy... What is their original Business about again?
$MSTR:
The Hidden Business Intelligence Fortress
Not so Micro of a Strategy…
We all know about MicroStrategy — since february now just “Strategy” —
instituional King of Bitcoin, second only to the anonymous (yet not so infamous) Satoshi Nakamoto. As of this moment MSTR holds 3% of all BTC which is insane. After the BTC craze almost no-one remembers what MSTR’s was orginally about: Business Intelligence Software.
Which honestly is quite sad considering it’s pretty cool on its own. Imagine the frustration of some investor who isn’t a Bitcoin fan but genuinely liked MSTR for its business intelligence only to see it getting totally overshadowed by their massive Bitcoin treasury ☺ (unlikely). The point here is that business intelligence was never really exciting, which is what made MicroStrategy’s move to hoard Bitcoin so wild.
Birth of MicroStrategy
Michael Saylor the founder of MicroStrategy actually aspired to be a pilot..? Doesn’t surprise me one bit, the guy is quite something. However after being diagnosed with a benign heart murmur, he remained on solid earth, graduating from MIT with double majors in Aeronautics & Astronautics and Science, Technology & Society… impressive AF.
From there Saylor proceeded by hacking into tech world, with the help of a colleague from MIT he developed a data mining and business intel software based on non-linear models (the wiki gist of it).
Business Intelligence?
First, what exactly is business intelligence (BI)? BI utilizes a variety of tools and strategies to organize unstructured or raw data and turn it into useful, actionable insights and from thre turn it into applications. Ik sounds boring as hell.
This field has evolved significantly since MicroStrategy's founding in 1989. Back in the 90s, the primary function of BI was to report raw data in a structured way. This information was often delivered to a customer in the form of a CSV file (Comma-Separated Values) or a static report to just explain past events and consumer behaviors for a company.
MicroStrategy used to be the apex predator when it came to business intelligence. McDonalds and other big corporations relied exclusively on MSTR for their BI software which handled massive datasets that most companies couldn’t even begin to decipher without drowning in spreadsheets.
Nowadays BI is more saturated and comepetive & MSTR’s core offering has remained but BI as a whole has evolved. The tools are being put to use by the Business Intelligence Software itself to serve as an assistant rather than just numbers. So instead of showing what already has happened by turning the statistics into solid data, modern business intelligence is anticipating trends, predicting outcomes and even help enterprises develop entirely new products and assets tailored to individual needs.
The Data Age
Remember when “Big Data” was the big corporate thing of the late 2010s? Well let me remind you what the big fuzz was about before AI completely took over the whole narrative. Every CEO was out here flexing about how they were sitting on mountains of data that supposedly would help provide “invaluable” insight into how consumers would behave etc. This would enable them to scale their business exponentially.
Interesting fact: By 2017, 90% of the data was created in the 2 years prior
Anyways this goes into the heart of the contemporary “MicroStrategy”. Ever since 2019 their main focus has been to liberate data, transmute it between multitiple platforms and formats essentially finalizing something which is incomprehensible to start with into a legit roadmap for success whether it is your product or business idea.
Microstrategy’s Business Intelligence Simplified
Instead of me explaining (as usual) I figured I would just show what they do ☻
Dashboards & Reports
MSTR offers customizable dashboards that show KPIs, revenue, costs, trends for individual companies. Which is quite a standard offering in BI.
(Microstrategy dashboard for a hotel)
Embedded Analytics
This ties into dashboards and reports but the key here is that they allow for companies to build analytics into their apps.
This maybe makes you a bit perplexed, but basically it allows for all the financial data to just pop up and one can customize it and interact with efficiently. If I were to try to make an anology: imagine you’re driving an old, clunky car (your company), and nothing works properly. Instead of blindly troubleshooting, you install a full instrument cluster (MicroStrategy) so you can spot the errors, fix it and get back on the road literally.
Also MSTR was early on mobile services. As far back as 2012, they offered Mobile♦BI, allowing regular employees to pull insights on the go instead of waiting for back-office reports. For context in 2012, Apple released the iPhone 5…
Predictive Analytics & Cloud Support
MSTR nowadays isn’t just displaying what happened yesterday. The real effort is now being spent on predicting what might happen tomorrow. Trend forecasts, anomaly detection, even tools for management to make smarter decisions before certain events. Plus, it all works within the MicroStrategy cloud so whether your company is running a single office or a global empire, everyone sees the same dashboards, same data, same insights no matter update or version.
HyperIntelligence
This is what’s truly fascinating here. Since 2019, MSTR doubled down on making data lucid between platforms.
Someone’s info on LinkedIn for example can be pulled straight into your company’s dashboard. Any missing pieces of info? The system can cross-reference other sources like mail and whatnot → until you’ve got a complete picture. If I am being honest slightly creepy but in 2019, this was waaay ahead of the curve.
AI & BI
And of course they have AI… less said about that the better, but one thing which stood out to me was that the MSTR’s AI isn’t just a chatbot, it possess some of the generative elements typical LLMs have but more seamlessly integrated into the system. So for example the AI could help design the website, dashboard, analytics or help target weakpoints for the enterprise instead of having to enter a chat and manually fill out a request etc. Everything else seems like fluff though if I am honest.
Unfortunate Reality…
MicroStrategy is no longer on top of the food chain, they dominated back in the 90s with their semantic modeling edge which was the CSV file reports turning raw data into actionable insight. Additionally business intelligence as a whole back then was way less crowded than it is today. Michael Saylor was also wrapped up in some legal controversy during the dot.com bubble which I think hurt MSTR brand moving into the 2000s.
Moreover as Microsoft’s “office” got widespread adoption among corporations worldwide with their ecosystem and specifically excel becoming the go-to for literally everyone on the planet. They essentially set themselves up to dominate the BI landscape. Add cloud services, strong enterprise support, and cheap pricing to that and suddenly MicroStrategy’s dominance was lost. And by the late 2010s there are so many BI alternatives I think nobody really cares anymore.
From Bits → Bitcoin
People are calling Saylor an idiot and that he will cause the biggest financial crisis ever with the Bitcoin Strategy he created claiming he pivoted into stashing Bitcoin because his BI enterprise was failing. To me that isn’t true at all… do you know how many publically traded companies survive and actually thrive like MSTR has for 3 DECADES?
(This look like a dying business to you?)
On average, the lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has gone from 61 years in the 1950s to less than 18 years today. $MSTR is getting listed this friday… So… ☻
Sure they lost their dominance but they are still in the game, adapting, innovating and keeping up. That just makes me more certain that Michael Saylor is a genius. He’s not just a Bitcoin King, but has the intellect to build and sustain a company over decades.
Hold your horses! I know what you are thinking.
“This is the biggest Saylor-Fanboy there is!😠”
It’s true I am.
AND the move towards stashing Bitcoin was genius, you wanna know why? Because The Simpsons told me, that’s why.
This Simpons episode is from 2021. What’s even more crazy about this is that the ticker GME 0.00%↑ is GameStop which has 5000 BTC currenly...
Anyways if you managed to read this whole post to the end, thank you ♥ — Hope you learned something!
Disclaimer: This post is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It reflects personal opinions and is not intended as financial advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.