2014 Booth Alumni Award Winners: Distinguished Entrepreneurial Award
Since 1972, the Chicago Booth School of Business Distinguished Alumni Awards have honored outstanding alumni achievements, and those who embody the school’s dedication to limitless inquiry and courageous leadership.
This week we’ll look at the winners of the 2014 Corporate Award, Entrepreneurial Award, Public Service Award, and Young Alumni Award that given out to four alumni who have made an impact across the business world. Yesterday you read about, George Conrades, winner of the Distinguished Corporate Award. Today, you’ll meet Dhiraj Rajaram.
Distinguished Entrepreneurial Award
Dhiraj Rajaram, ’03, saw something huge in the strategic importance of big data. Important enough that Rajaram’s data-analytics firm, Mu Sigma, was founded in 2005 with $450,000 in funds from savings and the sale of his house.
The first nine months of the firms existence were far from smooth– Rajaram was the only employee to a company with zero clients. However, Mu Sigma’s course was forever changed when Rajaram convinced Microsoft to initiate a pilot project that analyzed consumer behavior.
Today, Rajaram’s company is valued at more than $1 billion, has a staff of 2,500 and a client roster that includes 75 Fortune 500 companies, including Dell Inc., Pfizer Inc., MasterCard Inc., and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. In 2011, Microsoft named Mu Sigma its preferred vendor for analytics. Based in Northbrook, Illinois and with a major operation center in Bangalore, India, Mu Sigma also has a number of U.S. offices and with more on the way.
Mu Sigma’s impressive array of industry heavyweight client more than reaffirmed Rajaram’s leg up on understanding the importance of data analytics. Said Rajaram in a 2011 Wall Street Journal story, “there cannot be any business that will not be impacted by analytics and decision science, and there’s a lot more to be done.”
Tomorrow, we’ll check out the winner of the Distinguished Public Service Award.
