AutumnOak
Business Accelerator
Guiding Entrepreneurs at Every Stage
A Catalyst for Business Success
AutumnOak is a start-up accelerator built on over 30 years of experience. Our founder, Sanjay Sathe, gained valuable insights and knowledge as a founder and CEO of two successfully acquired start-ups, and global corporate experience. He’ll bring his distinctive experience and proven business acumen to help you scale your business, avoid the pitfalls, and successfully achieve your goals.
“Sanjay is a visionary leader who has assembled a great team and executed on a plan to build RiseSmart into a high potential, venture funded company.”
Luis Buhler, consulting CFO
Business Development and Acceleration
Accelerate your business growth, overcome challenges, and significantly improve the bottom line. As our partner, you’ll benefit from Sanjay’s vast sales and marketing experience, innate ability to scale businesses across a variety of industries, and a deep network of connections at senior levels. Your big ideas brought you this far, now it’s time to let us propel your business to the next level.
“I was fortunate enough to participate as an investor in Sanjay's successful GenomeSmart Venture. From beginning to end, Sanjay's proactive communication and expectation-setting fostered confidence and clarity in the entire process. Sanjay's approach for interacting and supporting the investor group made the experience that much better.”
John Kennedy, CMO, CDO
Result-driven Business Strategy
Sanjay’s life-long passion for helping small businesses grow, his drive for excellence, and his talent for determining the right go-to-market strategy makes him uniquely qualified to map out your business goals. He’ll help you develop a game plan that scales your company, promotes accelerated growth, and retains key employees through a positive and lasting culture—reducing the high cost of turnover.
“Sanjay created a remarkable culture at RiseSmart that still exists today. Because of his leadership and the culture he created, RiseSmart continues to be the best place I have ever worked.”
Laura Kashul, executive career coach
Securing Start-up Capital
We'll navigate the investment labyrinth with you and identify funding options that ensure you receive critical investment capital bolstering your long-term prospects. Sanjay’s experience raising multiple millions of dollars in venture capital and private equity, his connections within the investment community, and his role as a savvy Angel Investor uniquely position him to help you procure the right financing at the right time.
“Sanjay is a great networker and his ability to articulate a vision is exceptional. He is also very focused on delivering results for his stakeholders and investors.”
Prabhakar Reddy, investor, board advisor
Facilitating Mergers and Acquisitions
Create a legacy that includes a successful exit strategy. It all begins with identifying the right acquisition partners and nurturing them—a skill Sanjay has honed over the years with his two successful exits. When your entrepreneurial vision includes a merger or acquisition, we'll guide you with the deal structure and negotiations, and assist with realization of your financial goals.
Inspirational. Guiding.
Bridging.
There is an endless amount of resources available on entrepreneurship. Rarely do you meet someone who has been through the trenches and knows what it takes to build a large-scale business. Sanjay has done just that multiple times over. Not only does he provide thoughtful, actionable, and practical guidance, he has the innate ability to connect at the human level. He cares about your wellbeing and treats you as a trusted partner. He keeps you focused on what moves the business forward. Between Sanjay and his network, you'll get the job done.
Kareem Barghouti – Founder & CEO VastBiome – Reverse Engineering the MicroBiome!
Sanjay brings in a great network and experience in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. As a budding entrepreneur, I met Sanjay through one of the TIE conferences and he was friendly and always eager to help. In AppZen's early days he was instrumental in connecting us with many VC and partners, many of those introductions went a long way in putting the company in the hyper growth phase. I would highly recommend founders to seize the opportunity to work with him.
Anant Kale, Founder & CEO, Appzen – An AI platform for modern Finance teams
“The day I met Sanjay there was no way I could know what a profound and positive impact he would have on the trajectory of Aniline. His insights, experiences, and powerful network of high-quality people make him an absolutely critical element of our journey as a company. He is a true business partner and mentor. Sanjay rolled up his sleeves from day one and has been highly engaged since. Any early stage company should consider themselves fortunate for the opportunity to work with Sanjay.”
Kevin Gregson, Founder & CEO, Aniline – Mid-Market HR Insights Platform & Marketplace
“Sanjay has been an inspiration from the day we met him. Having built a company in the HRTech space and exited from it, his learnings on go-to-market, sales and marketing strategies have been invaluable. His extensive network also gives us the in-roads into very important conversations with senior HR executives globally. Sanjay continues to be on our Board of Advisors and makes sure he dedicates time helping grow our business at Tydy.”
Kiran Menon, Founder & CEO, Tydy - Employee Onboarding Automation
“Sanjay has been a critical mentor, advisor and partner in Cooleaf's growth. He embodies the 'pay it forward' mentality that has made Silicon Valley known globally as a place to build technology companies. Sanjay has been instrumental in introducing us to key decision makers at prospective customers, investors, and partners. He understands the challenges of building technology companies and the necessary pivots to strategy that are often required of founders. I've learned a lot from Sanjay and would highly recommend working with him to any founders interested in growing and scaling their business.”
Prem Bhatia, Co-Founder & CEO, Cooleaf - Top Performance Reward Platform
“Sanjay was high impact in our early days at Stella when we were refining the customer value proposition, and then in the later years in helping to open doors and continue to be a wonderful sounding board on our journey.”
Rich Joffe, CEO, Stella.ai - Shared Talent Network
“Sanjay has been a super advisor to Track, helping us see the bigger picture of what's right in front of us. From the very early days of our company he had conviction in our opportunity, team, and approach and continues to be an advocate for us. Sanjay rolled up his sleeves to work along side us, make powerful introductions, and be a radically candid voice of experience when we making important decisions.”
Trent Bigelow, CEO, Track.tax
About Sanjay
Sanjay Sathe is an accomplished corporate global executive and a serial entrepreneur having just had his second startup GenomeSmart get acquired by Konica Minolta Precision Medicine. GenomeSmart is an AI/ML based platform in the Genetics space which helps people assess their risk of genetic disorders now so that they can catch things early and do something about it. The focus is on early detection of hereditary cancers and reproductive genetics by serving individuals through Hospital systems, Genetic testing labs, Health insurance companies and Enterprises. He had raised a seed round for this venture. He has expertise to assist early stage startups move from “Survival” to “Thrival”, by helping with fundraising leveraging his extensive silicon valley and other networks, assisting with Product-Market fit, Go-to-Market Strategies, how to build lasting cultures, hiring leadership teams, how to scale the business and how to get acquired
Sanjay considers himself a “global citizen” having lived and worked across the globe and has a diverse skill set having driven value across over seven industry segments. In an adverse situation, when Sabre Inc (the last corporate job he had) went private and cut a significant part of the company, while being offered separation he identified an opportunity by recognizing that the traditional model of outplacement was broken. So he decided to disrupt this $3B space and put America back to work. Raised $1.25M in angel funding in 2007, built the technology platform (like eHarmony in the job space) and then raised $25M from top tier Silicon Valley VC firms (Norwest, Storm Ventures and Accel-KKR), built the business, delivered strong growth for years and then in Sep 2015 got acquired for $100M by Randstad a global $22B HR services leader. Though he negotiated an all-cash deal, he stayed on for the next two years and after rolling out RiseSmart Globally by building out a multi-language platform and launching the solution in international markets, he left to start GenomeSmart.
Prior to RiseSmart he was the vice president for enterprise data management and ran Big Data globally for Sabre Holdings, a $2.5 billion global leader in travel commerce and the parent company of Travelocity. Before Sabre, he was SVP Marketing & President International for Brierley & Partners, a CRM and loyalty management company that serves global brands such as Hilton HHonors, Hertz #1 Club Gold, Sony and Nokia and led the efforts for launching Star Alliance’s Frequent Flyer offering globally. He also worked as a Marketing and Product leader in Europe with Lufthansa, and earlier in Asia with Lufthansa, HSBC and other major corporations.
Sanjay currently is a Board Advisor and an active Angel investor, a LP with several VC funds and a mentor with several incubators including Plug & Play Tech Center, the world’s largest incubator. He has numerous awards to his credit over the years including 2017 Stevie Award for CEO of the year, the Top 5 Outstanding Asian Americans of the year in 2016 from the Asian American Business Development Center, and the Triple A Alumni Achievement Award of AIM in 2013, and is also an Executive in Residence at AIM. Sanjay graduated with an MBM from Asian Institute of Management, Manila, Philippines in 1988 and did an Executive Program at Wharton School of Business.