Kiwanis Club of Houston
 March 17th Luncheon

Speaker: Leo Linbeck III

Leo is the President and CEO of Aquinas Companies (his family’s business and parent company of Linbeck Group, one of the leading institutional construction companies in the US). He is also the Founder and Chairman of Fannin Innovation Studio, Houston’s most active biotech and medtech development company. Additionally, Leo has also been on the faculty of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business since 2005, where he teaches a popular MBA elective on family business.

Leo is a native Houstonian. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame with degrees in Civil Engineering and Great Books. He then completed his Master’s Degree in structural engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he had his first startup company in the software business. After working in Japan, Los Angeles, and Houston, he went to Stanford, where he earned his MBA. He is the only graduate in the history of the GSB to both graduate as valedictorian and win the Arbuckle award, the student-awarded prize for contributions to the school. He previously taught at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and served on the curriculum committee at Stanford. He has been actively involved in education reform, and serves as board chairman of two education non-profits, Families Empowered and Seton Education Partners.  He is also Founding Chairman and current Vice Chairman of the Urban Reform Institute and ran the largest non-partisan SuperPAC in the 2012 election cycle, the Campaign for Primary Accountability.

Leo and his wife of 33 years, Ellen, have 5 children, four dogs, and two workshops. Leo continues to write computer software and design and build medical device prototypes (once an engineer, always an engineer).