Sanjay Baskaran earned his MBA in Marketing and Supply Chain from Michigan State University and is a member of the Spartan Founders Club. Baskaran has been involved with the Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation as a mentor to student entrepreneurs and has supported the next generation of Spartan founders through the Spartan Founders Club. He began his career in consulting and financial services, holding leadership roles at Deloitte, HSBC and Visa before joining Amazon, where he served as general manager of North America Credit Cards. He later led TaxAct at Blucora and served as CEO of One Technologies. Today, Baskaran is the CEO and co-founder of AlumX.AI, a company focused on strengthening alumni connections through intentional, technology-enabled introductions.
"My journey feels like a beautiful culmination of a career in customer-obsessed building, investing and mentoring. I have been a builder for most of my life, working backward from customers and co-creating easy-to-use solutions that bring technologies and people together at companies like Amazon and Visa. Over the last six years, I have also developed a deep admiration for entrepreneurs. I started investing in a personal portfolio of more than 25 startups in tech and deep tech while mentoring early-stage founders at Harvard Innovation Labs and the Burgess Institute at MSU.
That experience eventually led me to a problem I couldn't stop thinking about: alumni engagement, which sits at just 6-10% for most schools. During a business school advisory board meeting, I discussed the challenge and realized that, despite decades of efforts, it remained largely unsolved and had become something people simply accepted as the norm.
One evening, I sat down to write a list of two or three ideas and ended up spending over six hours writing a paper on what’s broken, why it’s broken and how we can use technology to take a revolutionary approach that not only addresses those gaps but sets a new standard. I shared that paper with a few alumni friends, and they asked me how much I would need to make it happen. Beyond investors, a number of friends and colleagues who are passionate about alumni engagement have joined me at AlumX.AI in various roles to make this vision a reality.
Universities have two very different objectives when it comes to engaging their alumni. University advancement focuses on fundraising and has effective strategies for engaging 2-5% of alumni who raise 85-90% of the donations. Alumni advancement, on the other hand, focuses on the broader goal of serving 95% of alumni by providing resources and opportunities to connect. While the first has become well established, the second remains an area for growth.
Alumni advancement tends to be a second priority for universities, receiving less attention and fewer resources while remaining difficult to do at scale. The software providers in the space have focused on selling to universities with features designed primarily for institutional needs. In my view, they have overpromised and underdelivered on alumni engagement.
Universities often focus on alumni giving and engagement, but that can make it difficult to consistently serve the broader alumni population. At AlumX.AI, we flip the model by putting alumni at the center. We collaborate with chapters, universities, colleges and others in the ecosystem to serve alumni needs first, while complementing the work universities are already doing. To create that network effect, we built a closed-loop, direct-to-alumni business powered by AI and technology. The platform enables contextually relevant, peer-to-peer introductions, helps turn those introductions into meetings and supports additional alumni needs.
Building AlumX has also drawn on lessons from throughout my career in tech and financial services. Those experiences laid the foundation for becoming a builder: being customer-obsessed, gravitating toward hard problems, thinking big and co-creating with talented people. They also taught me how to scale a business, mitigate risk and maintain a bias for action through quicker test-and-learn cycles.
I use the “one-way door versus two-way door” approach for decision-making. For decisions that are easily reversible, or “two-way doors,” we move quickly with 80% of the data, along with instinct and experience. For the few big decisions that commit us to the future and are difficult to reverse, or “one-way doors,” we take our time to gather the data and make sure we get them right. This approach allows us to move quickly while balancing risk and reward.
Being an entrepreneur means you are often the first and last line of defense, from the largest decisions to the smallest details. I find myself challenged every day to learn new skills in areas I don't know well in order to get the job done and stay within budget. AI has been a great companion in that process.
I’ve volunteered my time at the Burgess Institute and Harvard Innovation Labs as a mentor for many years. The opportunity to share some of my talent and resources through the Spartan Founders Club with young student entrepreneurs is both inspiring and exciting.
As a mentor and member of the Spartan Founders Club, I’ve been impressed by a few things.
First is the infectious enthusiasm and out-of-the-box thinking of student and early-stage entrepreneurs. Second is the Spartan grit and perseverance to stay with a problem and dive deep to solve it. Finally, there is a genuine openness and willingness to iterate when reality tests their hypothesis.
Interacting with bright young Spartan founders helps me stay sharp and connected to emerging ideas and new ways of thinking. It also aligns with my ethos of paying it forward by sharing lessons and experiences that could help founders along their development journey. There is joy in seeing a founder solve a complex challenge and turn it into momentum.
The grit to solve hard problems is part of what makes an entrepreneur. Every successful venture starts with ambiguity. If you have a passion for the impact you want to make, take the leap and be willing to test, iterate and push forward.
Don’t get rigidly attached to your initial solution. Iterate as you go. Have a bias for action, keep talking to customers, run small experiments and move forward by learning quickly.”
The Spartan Founders Club (SFC) is a philanthropic consortium of MSU alumni and friends willing to stand together to support students and grow MSU’s campus-wide nationally ranked entrepreneurship education program. SFC members agree to an initial financial donation for three consecutive years as part of their commitment. If you're interested in joining or want to learn more, visit https://entrepreneurship.msu.edu/spartan-founders-club