How John built the fortune
John Sall's wealth comes from his ownership of SAS Institute, the analytics software company he co-founded in 1976 with James Goodnight, Anthony Barr and Jane Helwig. SAS grew out of a statistics project at North Carolina State University that had been funded by agricultural research agencies to analyse crop data. When the university-based work outgrew its funding, the group set up a company to license the software to the many customers who already relied on it.
The business model, annual software licences that customers renew year after year, produced reliable revenue and allowed SAS to grow without outside investors. Banks, drug makers, governments and insurers used SAS for statistics, forecasting and data management, and the company became one of the largest private software makers in the world. Barr and Helwig left early, leaving Goodnight and Sall as the owners. Sall is widely reported to own about a third of the company, with Goodnight holding the rest.
SAS has repeatedly considered an initial public offering but has stayed private, which keeps Sall's fortune tied to a single company whose value is not set by a stock market.
SAS has long been known for an unusual workplace culture, with on-site health care, child care and recreational facilities on its campus, and for low employee turnover. The company has repeatedly appeared on lists of the best places to work, a reputation that Sall and Goodnight cultivated deliberately as a way to retain skilled programmers and statisticians.
The company has also adapted its products as computing shifted from mainframes to personal computers, servers and then the cloud. Its newer platform, Viya, was built to run in cloud environments and to support machine learning alongside traditional statistics.
Companies and holdings
Sall has served for decades as an executive vice president of SAS Institute, based on a large campus in Cary, North Carolina. His personal technical contribution is JMP, a desktop program for visual and interactive statistical analysis that he began developing in the late 1980s for the Apple Macintosh. JMP found a strong following among engineers and scientists in manufacturing and research.
In 2022 SAS moved JMP into a wholly owned subsidiary, JMP Statistical Discovery, with Sall continuing to lead its development and product direction. He remains a member of the SAS board.
Sall's influence at SAS extends beyond JMP. As one of the two remaining founders, he has been part of decisions on the company's long-term direction, including its long resistance to outside investment and its emphasis on reinvesting a large share of revenue in research and development.
The JMP subsidiary has its own sales and development organisation and serves customers in semiconductors, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods, where engineers use it to design experiments and improve manufacturing quality.
Early life and career
Sall was born in 1948 and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. He studied history at Beloit College in Wisconsin and then earned a master's degree in economics at Northern Illinois University. He later pursued graduate studies in statistics at North Carolina State University.
Before SAS was incorporated he joined the statistical computing project at North Carolina State, where his programming skill made him a central contributor. He wrote large portions of the early SAS code before the company was formed.
Philanthropy and public life
Sall and his wife, Ginger, are known for environmental and international development giving. He has served on the boards of the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, and the couple have funded conservation of land in North Carolina and elsewhere, as well as programmes on global health and poverty reduction. With the Goodnights, they co-founded Cary Academy, an independent school near the SAS campus, in 1996.
Sall rarely appears in the business press and prefers to talk about statistics and software design. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and regularly speaks to technical audiences about data analysis.
Sall has also supported higher education and scientific research in North Carolina, including programmes at North Carolina State University, the institution where SAS began.