Harvard Club of Seattle

How to Start-up a New Professional Sports Team and League
with Sanjay Parthasarathy, Co-Owner, Seattle Orcas

Please join us for a discussion with Sanjay Parthasarathy, Co-Owner & Operating Partner, Seattle Orcas, to learn how his start-up experience and passion for cricket led him and his partners to start a new national professional sports league and local team.

Sanjay Parthasarathy - Seattle Orcas Co-Owner

From Sanjay:

Seattle Orcas' aspiration to be America's Favorite Cricket Team means the owners and players are committed to do the work to earn the right.

To do the work at the grass roots in schools and in communities, to work on the infrastructure for the sport, and to work to help the USA national team be winners. It will take a decade or more to feel the momentum in all these areas, and we hope that the T20 World Cup, just concluded, and the 2028 Olympics will accelerate this by a few years.

But we better get started now with lots of initiatives, with the help of fans and businesses that are interested in supporting the sport. The Seattle Orcas Net Bowlers' Talent Hunt is an example of such an initiative.

Sanjay was born in Chennai, India. In addition to his work in technology, Sanjay has also been an active cricket player. During his cricket career, Parthasarathy represented his school, state, zone, university and two teams in a first division league. In an interview with GeekWire in 2015, he noted that cricket played an active role in developing his value for persistence in the tech industry.

Sanjay had a successful 19 year career at Microsoft rising to Corporate VP, Startup Business Accelerator, tasked with creating a new division to build an innovation engine and develop scalable and sustainable businesses around new ideas. He was then CEO and Founder of Indix, an AI and ML startup to compile, structure and manage product information and intelligence to power product search and discovery, ad targeting, pricing and merchandising, product catalog management and more. Indix was acquired by Avalara where he became Chief Product Officer. Most recently, he is Co-Owner and Operating Partner, Seattle Orcas professional cricket team. He is also a passionate collector of Indian art.

Sanjay has a master's degree in engineering from MIT, a master's in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from Anna University's College of Engineering in Chennai. He is on the Executive Board of the MIT Sloan School.