Michael Baum

In September 2014, Baum bought Château de Pommard, a Burgundy winery established in 1726, and moved to Burgundy with his family.

Continuing to explore the possibilities of advancing an understanding of chaotic systems, Baum began to explore the application of search technology to large-scale machine data. Reconnecting with Rob Das and Erik Swan in 2003, the three co-founded Splunk. Their goal was to build a search engine for real-time flows and massive historical corpuses of machine data. Splunk was the sixth startup for Baum and the first pure-play big data company to reach significant customer and revenue scale and debut on the public markets. Baum, Das and Swan and their team at Splunk have been awarded two US Patents for their work.

After graduate school, Baum moved to Silicon Valley and started his second company, Pensoft, a software company that created a small footprint object-oriented database for wireless devices including the GO Corporation's pen-based computing operating system. It was here he first met Rob Das, the company's Chief Architect. Pensoft was backed by Institutional Venture Partners and Mohr Davidow Ventures. AT&T acquired the company in 1993. In his third start-up venture, Baum connected with Rob Das and Erik Swan as co-founders at 280, an early hosted business collaboration platform exploiting the Java (programming language) to bring real-time interaction around unstructured data to the Internet. Crosspoint Venture Partners backed 280. The company was acquired by Infoseek in 1997. Infoseek partnered with and later merged into The Walt Disney Company to form Disney Internet Group where Baum was VP of e-Commerce. Baum left Disney and joined co-founder Robert Simon to start his fourth company, dotBank, an Internet money exchange platform for person to person and business to business payments, synthetic currencies and financial transactions. dotBank was later acquired by Yahoo! where Baum became VP of e-Commerce.

Baum pursued a career in technology and entrepreneurship. He teamed with co-founders Mark Goldstein and Doug Alexander and started Reality Online, a stock market modeling company. Reality Online was funded by Venrock, the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, and later acquired by Reuters in 1989.

Michael Baum (born May 28, 1962) is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as the Founder & CEO of Splunk, a big data software technology used for understanding machine-generated data primarily for systems management, security forensics, compliance reporting and real-time operational intelligence. Baum is the founder of six technology start-ups, five of which have been acquired and one (NASDAQ: SPLK) which went public. He has also been a venture capital investor with Rembrandt Venture Partners, Advent International and Crosspoint Venture Partners. Baum graduated with a computer science degree from Drexel University and an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In September 2014, Baum became CEO & Propriétaire of Château de Pommard, a Burgundy winery established in 1726.