The tuition bill arrived before the business idea. At the National Institute of Technology in Warangal, Kalyan Varma saw fellow students facing a fee increase they could not afford. He and his friends began contacting people who had already graduated, asking them to help people who might otherwise have to leave.
There was no software platform to demonstrate. There were students, alumni and a request that needed to become believable. The calling took time. Eventually, graduates contributed. The effort continued over subsequent years, supporting more than 200 students. A university’s past had found a practical way to pay for somebody else’s future.
Varma would later become the co-founder and CEO of Almabase, building tools for alumni engagement and fundraising. But the problem had already introduced itself. Having a list of graduates was one thing. Getting a person on that list to care enough to act required considerably more work.
The tuition bill came first
There is a pleasing inconvenience in this origin story. The future software entrepreneur encountered the human difficulty first. A payment needed making; an alumnus needed a reason to trust the appeal. No amount of tidy database management could settle the second question on its own.
The scholarship initiative became part of The Lakshya Foundation, which Varma helped start with friends. His college contemporary Srihari Maneru would eventually become his Almabase co-founder. The relationship between their student work and their later business was unusually direct: other colleges wanted help doing something similar.
Varma’s ambition still returns to educational access. In December 2021, he took that subject to TEDxPandri, speaking about the future of education. He had described the chance to speak at a TED event as a childhood dream. The argument he brought to the stage concerned who gets to study, and how alumni participation might help pay the bill.
“Do institutions understand their alumni enough to focus on their needs?”
Kalyan Varma, on alumni centricity
The long way back to campus
After graduating, Varma worked at Goldman Sachs from 2008 to 2011. His job involved software development. It was a substantial technical apprenticeship, followed by a departure into entrepreneurship that produced several businesses before it produced Almabase.
There was Daily Station, a grocery delivery venture. There was Deliverywala, a broader delivery service. There was Social Heart, an online marketplace for products made by NGOs and social enterprises. The last of these tried to give buyers a connection to the people making what they bought. All three ventures closed.
He also spent time working at the venture of a former Goldman colleague. Then he and Maneru returned to the educational problem they already knew, starting Almabase in 2014. The path had included deliveries, commerce and another technology job. A straight line would have been easier to draw and rather less accurate.
Goldman Sachs
entrepreneurship
Almabase
industry council
His later public conversations make room for the business mechanics behind the mission. In a SaaSBoomi podcast, he discussed finding early American customers, customer development, marketing and partnerships. These are prosaic subjects compared with changing access to education. They are also the subjects a company has to get right if it intends to keep doing useful work.
Give the graduate a vote
Almabase’s premise requires looking at a familiar institution from the other end of the email. A university has campaigns, targets and events to organize. The recipient has a career, friends, obligations and perhaps a fading recollection of where the student ID ended up. The fundraising calendar does not automatically take precedence.
Varma calls his preferred approach alumni centricity. Programs should begin with alumni needs and behavior. A relationship can draw on loyalty, but it should also offer value. The graduate needs a reason to remain involved that makes sense in the life they are living now.
In practice, Almabase offers directories, job boards, mentorship programs and spaces for groups, alongside event management and online giving. These are different invitations to participate. A person looking for a professional connection and a person ready to fund a scholarship may belong to the same community while needing very different things from it.
The scale is now far removed from the original student calling effort. Almabase’s company page reports more than 500 customers and more than $100 million raised for causes. Those are platform totals reported by the company, spanning the work of many institutions and their supporters. The founder’s contribution is building the means for those people to organize.
There is an important distinction inside that ambition. The software can help a team send a message, run an event and connect information. The relationship still depends on what the institution chooses to offer. A beautifully delivered appeal remains an appeal.
Coffee, with a statistical complication
A conversation in Chicago shows how Varma thinks through the work. Over coffee with Joseph Volin, then senior director of constituent engagement at Illinois Tech, he got into the relationship between alumni engagement and donations. If people who attend events give more, does attending the event make them give?
Volin proposed another route through the question: identify the group whose behavior is associated with giving, then consider how to engage that group. Proving that one activity caused a donation was a different problem from deciding where a team should spend its attention.
Varma carried the discussion back to product design. Engagement reports should help institutions find useful segments and decide what to do next. He wondered how the platform could surface those patterns. The coffee had acquired a product agenda, an occupational hazard when two people enjoy metrics quite this much.
He wrote about the exchange with evident pleasure, crediting Volin’s perspective. The episode makes his interest in customer discovery tangible. Here was a founder allowing a practitioner’s question to change the question he was asking himself.
Leave some room on Friday
His working habits have a similar appetite for observation. In a productivity framework published in 2020, Varma recommended writing weekly objectives clearly enough that completion would be unambiguous. Allocate them across Monday to Thursday. Leave Friday mostly open, because work has an irritating habit of taking the time it takes.
He also proposed tracking time and working with an accountability partner. The tracker was intended to guide the person doing the work. Reviewing the record could reveal which objectives kept slipping, and whether time was going where the person believed it was going. The framework made room for adjustment rather than a weekly ceremony of surprise.
He distinguished proactive work from the reactive demands of calls, messages and tasks. His own schedule changed between India and the United States. The goal was a repeatable structure suited to the job. Behind the advice sits a recognizable concern: a full day can be remarkably effective at hiding an unattended priority.
There is more to his day than the tracker. His company biography mentions PlayStation, entrepreneur podcasts and long walking conversations with colleagues. In early 2025, he described enjoying the chance to write code again during a break from the usual routine. The pleasure of creating something from scratch had stayed with him.
Curiosity appears in his writing well before that. In a short 2015 post, he urged readers to stay curious at any stage of life. It is an apt companion to the later habits: ask a better question, keep a record, see what happened. Neither a founder’s title nor a familiar routine needs to close the investigation.
“There is no greater joy than a customer telling you that they love you.”
Kalyan Varma, writing about customer service
Customer care has its own place in his account of the job. In 2019, Varma argued for treating service as part of a startup from its first day. He acknowledged the business benefits, including retention and referrals, while dwelling on the satisfaction of a customer’s trust. A useful exchange could make the work meaningful along the way, before any eventual verdict on the company.
The conversation gets another chair
The questions have brought him into a wider professional circle. In July 2024, Almabase announced his appointment to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s Industry Advisory Council for a three-year term. His work now includes helping advise an organization serving the same institutional community his company works with.
Partnerships extend that practical interest. Almabase expanded its relationship with Blackbaud in 2022, connecting alumni engagement with the systems advancement teams already use. Its collaboration with FundMiner addresses what happens after money is raised: honoring donor intent and showing how funds are used. A gift has a working life after the thank-you message.
In 2026, Varma added a podcast, The Future of Fundraising. Early conversations included Kelly Holdcraft of William & Mary on alumni success, Nicholas Linde on the gap between annual and major giving, and Jay Davenport on primary giving. His role at the microphone gives the people running advancement offices room to describe their own decisions.
The student once needed graduates to answer the phone. The CEO now needs institutions to listen to their graduates. Both jobs involve an invitation, a reason to trust it, and a person with the freedom to say yes. Varma’s unfinished work lives in the space between sending that invitation and earning an answer.