Akshay Ramaswamy

Akshay Ramkumar Ramaswamy (born February 16, 1997) is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur. Ramaswamy is known for co-founding and leading Alma Campus, a "social" college directory, as its chief executive officer.
Early life
Ramaswamy was born in White Plains, New York to Sujatha Sambandam and Ganesh Ramaswamy. He and his younger sister, Jothi Ramaswamy, were brought up in Mohegan Lake, New York, a small town in Westchester County. Ramaswamy lost his father to sudden illness as a sixth grader and grew up in a single parent household.
At Lakeland High School, Ramaswamy was at the top of his class. As the valedictorian, his graduation speech went viral on YouTube with over 100k views. He was also co-captain of the debate team, where and he and his partner were ranked 6th in the country by the National Speech and Debate Association. He was one of 150 Coca-Cola Scholars, chosen from 100,000+ applicants.
Career
College years
As of 2019, Ramaswamy is still studying at Stanford University. He flipped tickets for the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival on Craigslist. He was named Kleiner Perkins Fellow in 2017.
Alma Campus
As a residential assistant for freshman his junior year at Stanford, Ramaswamy built a website with Chetan Rane, another computer science student, to compile hundreds of upperclassmen course schedules for his freshmen to use in course planning. Initially titled SchedFriend, the website became a central resource for course planning at Stanford, with over 25% of the Stanford student body on the platform within the first couple months of launch. After going through a serious of accelerators, including the Lightspeed Ventures Summer Fellowship and Cardinal Ventures, Ramaswamy and Rane renamed the platform to Alma, with the goal of helping more students connect with their alma mater through a more modern, "social" directory.
The platform gained traction at universities across California and Massachusetts, leading to a number of well-known venture capital firms and entrepreneurs investing in the company's $1 million seed round, including Marissa Mayer, Norwest Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures, and the former VP of Product at LinkedIn, Parker Barille. The platform has garnered some criticism, however, for adding to the problem of social media exhaustion.
Other
Ramaswamyis an active board member of ThinkSTEAM, a nonprofit geared towards teaching girls programming through the arts.

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