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.
I found a deep passion to solve alumni engagement, which sits at just 6-10% for most schools. During a business school advisory board meeting, I discussed this challenge and realized it remains unsolved after decades of effort and is something people have 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 95% of alumni providing resources and opportunities to connect. While the first has become well established, the second remains an area for growth.
Alumni advancement is a second priority for universities, receiving less attention and fewer resources while also being hard 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.
Compounding this issue is the pressure universities face to set donation targets for Alumni Advancement, which results in many alumni getting frequent requests to give. This results in alumni not updating their contact information, not opening emails and not attending events. What’s worse is that if alumni disengage in the early years, it’s hard to get them engaged later.
At AlumX.AI, we flip the model. Our main customer is the alumni, and we are happy to collaborate with chapters, universities, colleges and others in the ecosystem to serve alumni needs first. AlumX is additive to whatever the universities do, with the goal of 3-5x the outcome through a powerful AI-enabled peer-to-peer network effect.
To get this network effect, we have built a closed-loop, direct-to-alumni business that uses AI and technology. The platform enables contextually relevant peer-to-peer introductions, and helps turn those introductions into meetings while supporting alumni needs. AlumX is focused on putting alumni first, using technology to engage them at scale while building a profitable business model. That combination is at the heart of what we are building.
I am most inspired by the impact AlumX.AI will make in the lives of 500,000+ living Spartans and hundreds of millions of alumni of various schools and organizations worldwide as we scale.
My career in tech and financial services laid the key foundation for becoming a builder: being customer-obsessed, gravitating to hard problems, thinking big and co-creating with talented people. Among the specific skills that helped me tremendously are experience with scaling a business, risk mitigation and a bias for action with a focus on quicker test-and-learn.
I use the one-way door versus two-way door approach for decision-making. Any decision that is easily reversible, a “two-way door,” we make fast decisions with 80% of the data, instinct and experience. However, for the few big decisions that commit us to the future and are not reversible, a “one-way door,” we take our time to make sure we have all the data and ensure we get them right. This type of decision-making allows us as entrepreneurs to move very fast while balancing risk and reward.
Being an entrepreneur means you are the first and last line of defense in many cases, from the largest of things to the smallest. I find myself challenged on a daily basis to learn new skills in areas I don’t fully know in order to get the job done under budget. AI has been a great companion to help me with this.
I’ve donated 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 via the Spartan Founders Club with young student entrepreneurs is inspiring and exciting.
As a mentor and member of the Spartan Founders Club, I’ve been impressed with a few things. First is the infectious raw enthusiasm and out-of-the-box thinking of student and early-stage entrepreneurs. Second is the Spartan grit and perseverance to stay on 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 plugged into emerging thinking and paradigms. It’s aligned with my ethos to pay it forward by sharing lessons and experiences that could help in the development journey. Finally, there is the joy of seeing a founder solve a complex challenge and transform it into momentum.
You are a Spartan, and the grit to solve hard problems is in your character. Every successful venture starts with ambiguity, and if you have a true love for the impact, take the leap to resiliently test, iterate and push forward. Don’t get rigidly attached to the initial solution and iterate as you go. Have a bias for action, keep talking to customers, run small experiments and move forward by learning fast.
Go Green! Spartans Will!”
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