Leaders for the Greatest Good

Thacher grads leave here having lived within a community that both supports them and holds them to the highest of standards. They know about taking on their share of the work and then some; about respecting and maintaining trust when it’s given; about cultivating the kind of confidence that allows them to share unique ideas, talents, or art with the world. Here, read about the many ways Thacher alumni forge their own paths as thoughtful leaders and community members. 

“Thacher laid the groundwork for my success. I attended Stanford University and took fascinating classes alongside some of the best and brightest. I worked at Google for two years, and now I am living the American dream, as a founding member of a technology company in California’s Silicon Valley,” says Belsasar Lepe, who co-founded global technology company Ooyala. The company specializes in hosting videos for large corporate and media clients like AOL, Warner Brothers, TV Guide, and National Geographic. Ooyala harnesses the power of big data to help broadcasters, operators, and media companies build more engaged audiences. 

A sociologist and senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, Christine Carter, PhD, is the author of The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work and Raising Happiness. After receiving her BA from Dartmouth College, Christine received her PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. Quoted and featured widely in the media, her books and classes have helped thousands of parents raise joyful children and live lives that maximize their greatest strengths with the greatest ease. 

Erin is the co-founder of Equal Playing Field, (EPF)an organization dedicated to the advancement of women’s equality in sports at grassroots and elite levels. So far, the group has run camps for 1600 girls globally, and set two soccer world records: in June 2017, women from more than 20 countries played at 19,000 feet atop Mount Kilimanjaro; then in 2018 they trekked 100km through the desert to play at the Dead Sea in Jordan. Outside of EPF, Erin has spent 12 years working in international security and development for a range of NGOs, think-tanks, and the private sector, as a conflict and security specialist. She has also been a three-sport elite athlete (swimming, Olympic Modern pentathlon, and soccer)–playing soccer in the UK women’s premiership as well as competitively in Saudi Arabia, Scandinavia, the U.S., China, Afghanistan, and Jordan.  >>Read More

Aviator, entrepreneur, filmmaker, investor, and famously reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes attended Thacher. Among his other activities at Thacher, Hughes was featured on the alto sax in a jazz combo called Hank’s Hilarious Hextet. Though his family withdrew him from Thacher after his mother died, Hughes was a loyal alumnus and donated the funds to build our first science laboratories.

After beginning his career as a session musician and touring with the likes of Elton John and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, James found his forte as a composer of movie scores. His soundtracks—more than 100 to date—have earned him a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, and eight Academy Award nominations. Among his best-known film scores are Pretty Woman (1990), The Sixth Sense (1999), King Kong (2005), I Am Legend (2007), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Hunger Games films (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018).

While studying product design and engineering in college, Peter Frykman discovered that “90 percent of the world’s products are designed for 10 percent of the population. Faced with issues of global water and food scarcity, I prefer to design for the other 90 percent.” He went on to found Driptech, an international water technologies company that began on the Stanford campus and is currently based in Pune, India. Driptech produces affordable, high-quality irrigation systems designed for small-plot farmers. The World Economic Forum selected Driptech as a “Technology Pioneer” and BusinessWeek has featured Driptech as a “top five most promising social enterprises.” 

Raul Pacheco is the lead singer for Grammy award-winning band Ozomatli. Ozomatli is a band on a mission—a social mission that has spent the better part of the last 15 years fusing activism and music, enjoying tremendous success in each realm. When the band first began, it wanted to help ensure that property in downtown Los Angeles continued to be utilized for local inhabitants. To draw attention to its cause, the band fused together traditional Mexican folk songs, funk and reggae bass lines, alongside looped tracks from DJ Cut Chemist. This tension between musical styles is what makes Ozomatli so unique in the musical world. Later, Ozomatli’s embrace of this fusion of music and social activism took a new and somewhat unexpected turn when the band members were appointed as “cultural ambassadors” by the U.S. Department of State. With musical influences as varied as Carlos Santana and Southern hip-hop’s Arrested Development, every tune laid down by Ozomatli feels like a lyrical and tonal trip around the world at breakneck speed. 

After graduating from Dartmouth College and later earning her master’s at Oxford, Rukmini Callimachi began working as a reporter in New Delhi, India, filing stories with Time magazine and other news organizations. Before becoming a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, she was West Africa bureau chief for The Associated Press, breaking several major stories focused on al-Qaida and Islamic extremism. This work led to being a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “her discovery and fearless exploration of internal documents that shattered myths and deepened understanding of the global terrorist network of al-Qaida.”  She is the winner of the George Polk Award for International Reporting, multiple Overseas Press Club Awards, and the Michael Kelly prize.

Unlike his brother Amos, whom he followed to Thacher, Thornton did not thrive in Thacher’s rugged outdoor culture. Where Amos excelled at sports and “out-of-door life and study,” Thornton preferred indoor pursuits. It was at Thacher that he penned the first play in a writing career that would eventually produce Our Town, the classic American play, and earn him three Pulitzer Prizes. 

As a junior at Emory University, William Hockey earned summer internship offers from top tech companies as well as management consulting firm Bain & Company. He chose Bain but went on to co-found computer software company Plaid shortly after graduating. Named to Forbes Magazine’s list of 30 Under 30 Changing the World, Hockey and his partner used their experience working at Bain to create a platform that makes banking data easier for developers to use. As Hockey puts it, Plaid “takes archaic systems like the financial transaction records of banks and credit card issuers and lets smart young people use that data to build new and disruptive companies.” In fact, companies have been so impressed with Plaid’s software that popular mobile apps like Foursquare and Venmo, as well as American Express, Chase, and Bank of America, have teamed up with Hockey’s company.