[citation needed] During his sophomore year at Drexel University, he switched his major from electrical engineering to computer science after a visit to the campus by famed American business and technology icon Steve Jobs;[6] the focus of his bachelor's degree was artificial intelligence and compiler and language theory.

[7] During his time at college, Baum expressed curiosity in understanding how computers and software could be applied to enable people to process large amounts of data in complex decision-making.

[6] Reality Online was funded by Venrock, the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, and later acquired by Reuters in 1989.

[11] Their goal was to build a search engine for real-time flows and massive historical corpuses of machine data.

[12] 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.