bain-and-company
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Colton Calandrella Is Building Software That Knows When to Get Out of the Way
Before Barti, he taught math, timed airport lines, and built software inside Bain. Now Colton Calandrella is applying the same systems instinct to the invisible work behind independent eye care.
Ilana Walder-Biesanz
Ilana Walder-Biesanz is the founder and CEO of National Math Stars, a nonprofit that finds mathematically extraordinary children as early as second and third grade and gives each of them a decade of mentorship, advising, and funding worth more than $100,000. A child prodigy herself who took college courses at 13 and finished her undergraduate degree at 19, she pairs an engineer's rigor with a theater critic's flair. Before building National Math Stars she was a product manager at Yahoo, a Bain consultant, a Gates Cambridge Scholar, a Fulbright researcher of German opera staging, and a working opera critic. In December 2025, Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos named her one of five recipients of a $5 million Courage & Civility Award.
Raef Sully
Raef Sully is the CEO of Lilac Solutions, an Oakland-based company pioneering direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology using ceramic ion exchange beads. A structural engineer turned management consultant turned industrial executive, Sully brings 30+ years spanning tall buildings, the Australian Army Reserve, Bain & Company, and a decade running Nutrien's $10 billion nitrogen and phosphate division. He joined Lilac as COO in mid-2023 and ascended to CEO in February 2024 - the same month the company closed a $145 million Series C. Under his leadership, Lilac has achieved 87% lithium recovery at the Great Salt Lake, unveiled Gen 5 technology with 20x higher production rates, and signed a binding 10-year offtake agreement with Traxys North America targeting 50,000 tonnes of lithium product.
Diana Peng Bockus
Diana Peng Bockus is the Chief Executive Officer of NGM Biopharmaceuticals, a South San Francisco biotech developing first-in-class medicines for liver disease, oncology, and ophthalmology. Appointed CEO in April 2025, she joined the company in 2020 to lead business development and restructured a pivotal Merck partnership that freed NGM to build a wholly owned pipeline. A Stanford and Wharton graduate with roots in management consulting at Bain & Company, she now steers a privately held biotech backed by $515M in total funding, focused on rare diseases like primary sclerosing cholangitis and hyperemesis gravidarum.
Kurt House
Kurt Zenz House is the Co-Founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Andreessen Horowitz. A Harvard-trained earth scientist and serial energy entrepreneur, he built KoBold from the ground up to solve one of the most consequential problems of the energy transition: finding enough copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel to power a decarbonized world. Under his leadership, the company discovered the Mingomba deposit in Zambia - potentially the most significant copper find in a century - and raised over $1 billion to develop it. Before KoBold, he founded C12 Energy (CO2-based enhanced oil recovery) and Phase Change Resources (natural gas asset acquisition), and held research and teaching roles at MIT and Stanford.