Distinguished Alumni Awards 2024

Mark Hoplamazian, ’89

President and CEO of Hyatt Hotels Corporation
Corporate Winner

As a young investment banker, Mark Hoplamazian, ’89, worked 100-hour weeks, which taught him to stay focused even when tired or jet-lagged. It was excellent training for the future CEO of a hotel conglomerate with properties in more than 75 countries spread over six continents in time zones that sometimes vary by the quarter hour. “Those weeks tested my stamina, but I liked the camaraderie of a bunch of us working long hours together,” he says. “I liked pitching in. It’s a cool feeling.” 

Togetherness is a theme that runs through Hoplamazian’s career. He’s a people person, a “big hugger.” Check out his Instagram feed: he’s all over the world, taking selfies with groups of Hyatt workers leaning in to him. “I ask. I learn. We find common interests—children, family, how we spend time outside of work. I remind them, ‘I’m Mark. I’m a person. I’m not just the CEO.’”

A comfort in “not knowing” is another theme. When he joined Hyatt Hotels Corporation in 2004, he knew nothing about hotels. “I knew about finance. About hotels, I’d say, ‘Really, I don’t know—yet.’ I didn’t have a choice but to adapt.” He says he witnessed that kind of resourcefulness in his father, an entrepreneur who died when Hoplamazian was a teenager. Work ethic is a family thing too. “We’re over-indexed as a family. We say ‘work is what we do.’”

In 2017, Hoplamazian implemented a new strategy for Hyatt, with a focus on luxury and wellness. He sold $5 billion in properties and spent $3.6 billion on purchases such as Miraval Group, Apple Leisure Group, and Dream Hotel Group. “We tripled our luxury offerings and expanded lifestyle properties fivefold,” he says. “We’re a much stronger company.” 

Not knowing is what led Hoplamazian to study business at Chicago Booth. Not long after college, he took a job as a financial analyst. He recalls being embarrassed in a meeting by not knowing the answer to a client’s question. (His boss didn’t know the answer either.) At that point in his young career, he realized he needed a broader education in business basics. “I wanted to lock down a solid foundation. I got that, and more, at Booth.”

It’s heady stuff managing a $15 billion empire that employs 200,000 people. Hoplamazian keeps his cool through meditation and deep breathing: “It calms my mind and clears the clutter.” As he’s aged, he says, he’s learned to lean into a problem with warmth and care. “People hesitate to take on tough topics, but if you’re sincere and sympathetic—if you’re there to learn—it’s not so hard.”

Luxury resorts are often featured in dating shows and television dramas, typically as the site of all sorts of shenanigans. Does he see a downside to lending a property for these purposes? With a smile, Hoplamazian says the 52-story Park Hyatt Tokyo is a pilgrimage for fans of Lost in Translation, the 2003 film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. Turns out at Hyatt they’re old pros at media-driven demand. “That kind of publicity is the gift that keeps giving.”

So where does a hotel executive who jets worldwide take a vacation? He goes off the grid with his family, he says, and they like it as active as possible, with hiking, rafting, and more. “I push the limits.”

Girish Gaitonde, ’89

Founder of Xoriant Corporation 
Entrepreneurial Winner

Girish Gaitonde, ’89, was working jobs in engineering, product management, and marketing at companies such as AT&T and Intel Corporation in the 1980s when he had the spark of an idea that would later become Xoriant, the company he founded in 1990. To bring his idea to life, he says, he sought a business education. “I could solve an equation,” he recalls. “But I needed basic courses, like management science.” Most useful of all the courses he took at Chicago Booth was a class taught by Steve Kaplan in which he learned how to use financial theory in real-life business situations to drive tactical business results. It gave him the framework to evaluate client situations for optimal solutions. 

“With an MBA, I had the confidence to leave corporate life and give my idea a try,” he says.

That germ of an idea grew into a $300 million consultancy that offers digital growth strategies. “In tech, I was at the right place at the right time,” he says. “I was helped by the macro situation in Silicon Valley.”

Gaitonde expanded Xoriant worldwide, but he kept the company tightly focused on technology businesses. “For 10 years, we did very well,” he says. “We got big and very profitable.”

That changed in the early 2000s. “With the dot-com bust, I was caught on the wrong foot,” he recalls. “We didn’t have enough alternative paths, and the revenues sank from $80 million in 2000 to a $17 million in 2004. I had to prune the company to the size it had to be for survival.” 

While it was no fun to flail, Gaitonde knew he was in the company of tech giants such as Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs, who had been through several downturns themselves. “Each has had many incarnations and many ups and downs,” he notes.

With rightsizing, Gaitonde also broadened his client base beyond the tech industry to include startups and Fortune 100 companies, mainly in financial services. After all, every enterprise can use technology to solve problems. “Change is the only constant,” he has said, when pitching Xoriant. “Digital transformation has become an imperative for all businesses.” 

In 2023, Gaitonde sold the company to ChrysCapital, a private-equity firm, for upwards of $250 million. “There’s always a right time to sell. I waited for the best buyers and a situation where my key team members made several million dollars,” he says. Gaitonde, still closely involved with Xoriant, serves on the board of the Silicon Valley company, which employs 5,000 people in 18 countries worldwide. 

What’s next? Gaitonde has been exploring a business in money management based on stock options trading, a strategy he’s been doing for the past two decades. He would also like to return to working with the Polsky Center, including as a judge of the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge, which he has done in the past. “The students had very good ideas and solid launches,” he recalls.

Gaitonde does daily cardiovascular exercises, even when he’s traveling. It’s nonnegotiable, he says. He meditates for the calm it brings him. Social ties are important, and he makes an effort to stay in touch with extended family and friends.

Throughout his career, he has seeded and advised startups. That experience gives him the bona fides to dispense advice to young entrepreneurs. First, do what you’re passionate about, he says. Be a continuous learner instead of a know-it-all. Focus, focus, focus—and don’t micromanage, because you can’t do it all. Most of all, persevere. “You won’t get it right the first time. Try. Try again.” 

Steve Kaplan is the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance and the Kessenich E. P. Faculty Director at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. 

Lloyd Lewis, ’88

President and CEO of arc Thrift Stores
Public Service Winner

Life sometimes serves up opportunities you never saw coming. That’s what happened to Lloyd Lewis, ’88, in 2005, when he was recruited to be CFO of arc Thrift Stores, a social enterprise that funds advocacy for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It’s also one of Colorado’s largest nonprofits.

He had spent a career in top-drawer finance: Smith Barney, IBM, and a tech startup sold to Micron. But then Lewis—whose son Kennedy was born with Down syndrome in 2003—spoke with a longtime close friend he knew from IBM. The friend strongly encouraged him to take the job, and he did. A few months later, Lewis became CEO, just as the company had started to falter.

His first task was to right the ship. Sales were backward and stores were burning cash, he says. With no experience in the nonprofit sector, Lewis gathered all of arc’s experienced managers in a room and asked them to come up with solutions. “I knew the least,” he says. “After we met together, we got back to basics. Within a year, sales began to turn around and earnings greatly increased.”

Today, arc Thrift Stores employs 2,000 people—a quarter of whom have intellectual or developmental disabilities—and is on track to provide as much as $400 million in funding for advocacy for those with IDD in Colorado over the next 20 years.

Lewis points out that arc’s way of thinking about inclusion and diversity—integrating people with IDD into the workplace, schools, and the community—may seem novel to those who are accustomed to a time when people with IDD lived separately from the rest of society. Sometimes even today, many people with IDD still find themselves segregated and underemployed.

“As we change perceptions, we open doors,” Lewis says, pointing to a company’s warehouse call center that’s staffed in part by blind agents. “Inclusion can be a smart business move if it’s done with heart and mindfulness.” Now president and CEO of arc Thrift Stores, he advocates for healthcare, housing, voting rights, and employment of people with IDD. “Getting a job, being treated with respect: these are goals a lot of us take for granted,” he says. 

Lewis says he’s seen firsthand how arc workers with IDD excel in teams. He says these workers enrich the workplace, and that people with IDD have nearly zero turnover. It’s a bottom-line win, he adds. “There’s an impact on morale, which results in higher revenue. I have the data: almost 20 years of revenue and earnings growth.”

Now 21, Kennedy is friendly and enthusiastic and an inspirational family member, says Lewis. School’s not for him, but Kennedy holds a trove of information and can answer most any question about favorite topics such as Harry Potter. “And as a Special Olympics basketball player, he’s fond of telling people he’s scored more lifetime points than Lebron James—a very optimistic self-assessment!” Lewis beams.

Arc Thrift Stores is more than its name implies. Revenue from its 35 stores provides food and vouchers to Coloradans in need. The chain is also the state’s largest recycler, with more than 1.5 billion pounds of donations recycled or repurposed since 2005. Additionally, its vehicle donation program has provided over $55 million in funding for hundreds of nonprofits across the country, including to Colorado Public Radio, which receives a substantial portion of the funds. Lewis estimates that arc Thrift Stores has created a nearly $4 billion economic impact on the state of Colorado during his tenure.

“This could be done anywhere,” says Lewis, who plans to expand the organization into New Mexico and Texas. “It’s like running any business: operations, budgets, and human resources. When I come back to Booth and talk to students, they want to know how to use their skills and education to make a social impact. I tell them that this is the most rewarding part of my career. Sure, there are challenges. It’s not all smooth sailing. But I’ve found that If you give, you get back more.”

Lewis is proud of his work on behalf of those with IDD, and of the commendations he’s received for his contributions, including NEWSED Community Development Corporation’s Civil Rights Award, recognition in the Congressional Record, and the World Citizenship Award bestowed by the International Civitans, whose previous winners have included luminaries such as Eunice Shriver, the founder of Special the Olympics, and Winston Churchill.

Aubrey Donnellan, ’15

Cofounder and COO of Bear Flag Robotics
Young Alumni Winner

When Aubrey Donnellan, ’15, won a scholarship to Booth, she was working in management consulting at Accenture and planned to return to the job after graduation. But a funny thing happened along the way: Donnellan caught the entrepreneurial bug. 

Or maybe it was the inevitable thing, given her upbringing as the child of real-estate entrepreneurs. She would have followed her parents’ startup ways earlier in her career but didn’t have the gumption back then, she says. Instead, she earned a BS in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and then worked at Boeing Satellite Systems before moving into tech and management consulting. 

Her plan was to concentrate on econometrics and accounting at Booth, but something changed when she got there. “There’s an energy around the Polsky Center,” she says of the venture creation arm of the University of Chicago. “It’s a low-risk place to bring an idea to life.” Donnellan was a cofounder of Tovala, a tech-enhanced oven and healthy-meal subscription plan that won Polsky’s New Venture Challenge in 2015. “I’m an engineer,” she says. “When founder David Rabie, ’15, asked for help designing the oven, it was, ‘Hell yes, let’s do this!’ I love a good problem to solve, and I’ve always been drawn to robotics.”

Between her first and second years at Booth, she took a summer gig at Glacier National Park in Montana. “It was the most transformative experience of my life,” she says. “I got to live in the park and advise management. I had never worked for a nonprofit.” Her task was to balance the park’s need to make money with its mission to protect the environment. “I learned to sit with that discomfort,” she says.

After Booth, Donnellan’s plan to go back to consulting shifted. Instead, she landed at her second startup, with Igino Cafiero, a classmate from Carnegie Mellon, working on a prototype for an autonomous vehicle.

By 2017, the pair had started Bear Flag Robotics, which focused on autonomous tractors. Farmers are hampered by labor shortages, a limited growing season, and the dangers of nighttime work. “We said, ‘What if we could retrofit tractors so they could run around the clock?’”

Deere & Company acquired Bear Flag Robotics in 2021 for $250 million.

Sound like a fairy tale? In the five years between founding and sale, Donnellan married, had two children, survived the pandemic, and moved from Silicon Valley to Denver, to be close to family. That’s the rosy part.

“I wanted to quit every day,” she says of the early days of Bear Flag. “You’re selling investors something that doesn’t exist and may not thrive. It’s a moral thing: people are entrusting you with their money.”

After the sale, Donnellan left the company. She’s taking her time looking for her next venture, which will probably be in climate and sustainability so she can leave the world better for her small children. She’s eyeing the banjo she keeps on a wall, spending time outside in nature with family, and reading trashy romance novels. “It’s fun and silly. Fun is important.”

Another startup? Yeah, sure.

“What’s not to love?” she laughs. “You take an idea or a problem to a space where you can be creative, where you learn, and where you’re challenged. You’re manufacturing something out of nothing. It’s the perfect soup.”