2019 Olin Emerging Leaders

These Olin Business School emerging leaders will be honored at a luncheon on April 5. They’re innovators, dedicated entrepreneurs, and benefactors.

Harsh Agarwal, BSBA 2006
Director, EQT Partners, Inc.

Harsh Agarwal arrived at Washington University as the first in his family to study outside India. He is remembered by his professors and classmates as the “finance junkie” who would spend hours talking about companies, working with classmates to build financial models or pitching his class to invest in Apple in 2003.

Fresh out of Olin, Agarwal landed an investment banking job at Goldman Sachs in New York City, advising on M&A transactions aggregating more than $55 billion in value. In 2008, Agarwal moved to TPG Capital in San Francisco to begin his investing career. Over the next eight years, he pursued his MBA at Stanford University and advanced at TPG, investing in early-stage and mature technology companies. Agarwal next pursued a more entrepreneurial path by moving to the Swedish private equity firm, EQT Partners, to help build EQT’s US technology sector investing efforts, and where he continues to pursue his passion for investing in his role as a director in New York City.

Agarwal is grateful for the generous support of scholarship donors who made his Olin education possible as well as the alumni community that helped him launch his career. He currently sponsors an Olin undergraduate scholarship and is an active participant in Olin’s treks and mentorship programs.

SiSi Beltrán Martí, BSBA 2004
Director, marketing, Build-A-Bear Workshop

SiSi Beltrán Martí grew up in Puerto Rico and came to St. Louis in 2000 to attend Washington University. In 2004, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Olin Business School with majors in International Business, Marketing and Romance Languages. Upon graduation, Beltrán Martí joined Build-A-Bear Workshop, where she is currently the director of marketing.

Beltrán Martí is an avid community volunteer. She is the current president of the Olin Alumni Board at Washington University and also serves on the boards of Forest Park Forever, Casa de Salud and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. In addition, Beltrán Martí is the immediate past chair of the Multicultural Leadership Society for the United Way of Greater St. Louis and has been a mentor for college students through Washington University and the Regional Business Council. In 2007, the St. Louis Business Journal named her one of St Louis’ Top 30 under 30, and in 2014, the publication honored her as a Diverse Business Leader. This past year, Beltrán Martí was named the Kathryn Nelson Keeper of the Park by the City of St. Louis and Forest Park Forever.

Alexander D. Borchert, BSBA 2006
Managing director of investments, Altus Properties

Alex Borchert’s passion for entrepreneurial real estate investment was sparked in his junior year at Olin. He tapped into the Olin network by reaching out to alumni to investigate career paths in real estate development and investment—leading to an internship that launched his career.

Today, Borchert leads the investment division at Altus Properties, one of the Midwest’s most active private equity real estate investment and development firms. At Altus Properties, Borchert is responsible for the leadership of its equity investments, acquisitions, dispositions and project capitalizations. While there, he has been instrumental in nearly tripling the firm’s assets under management, leading its expansion into new markets and developing its ground-up development platform.

Borchert continues to actively invest in his relationship with Washington University. He sits on the university’s Alumni Board of Governors and Olin’s Alumni Board, where he serves as past president. Not only did Borchert deliver the keynote address at Olin’s 2017 undergraduate commencement ceremony, he and his wife, Dana, have supported an Olin undergraduate scholarship since 2011. He also serves on the Board of the United Way of Greater Saint Louis and the Alumni Board of St. Louis Priory and spends his free time enjoying his hobbies of downhill skiing and aviation with his wife, three-year-old Wyatt and four-month-old Willow.

Atima Lui, BSBA 2012
Founder and CEO, NUDEST

Atima Lui was born to a Sudanese refugee father and black activist mother in Topeka, Kansas, where her dark skin tone never quite fit in with the standard of beauty in her community. Today, as founder and CEO of fashion and beauty tech startup NUDEST, Lui licenses patent-pending skin tone matching AI technology to help fashion and beauty brands produce and sell products for women of all skin tones.

Before graduating from Harvard Business School in 2016 with her MBA, Lui led digital brand marketing initiatives at Walmart US. She was named one of CIO.com’s Top 20 Female Entrepreneur’s to Watch and has been featured in Forbes, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, the Huffington Post, and SELF and on CBS. Lui has experience working for Google, YouTube and Apple in online ad sales, product marketing and media roles. She earned her BSBA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she started a full-service hair, nail and tanning salon targeted toward multicultural customers while triple majoring in International Business, Marketing and Spanish. Lui is also a graduate of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

Teresa Teodori, BSBA 2009, MSF 2009
Head of strategy and chief of staff, Gerson Lehrman Group

After graduating from Olin, Teresa Teodori joined McKinsey & Company in Dallas, focusing on serving private equity clients on both due diligences and portfolio company work. She moved to New York City in 2011 to join New Mountain Capital, a middle-market private equity firm with over $15 billion in AUM, where she led two private equity investments, multiple debt investments and several add-on acquisitions. While there, she became the first female vice president on the private equity team.

Teodori then took on a new challenge at Platform Specialty Products, a highly acquisitive public company in the specialty chemicals space. She ran the integration of the three agricultural chemicals businesses Platform acquired, and then ran R&D strategy, driving the investment process for and management of $100 million in annual spend. Last year, Teodori joined Gerson Lehrman Group, a leading B2B platform business that connects clients with insights to power better decisions, as head of strategy and chief of staff to the CEO. She has worked closely with the CEO articulating a new strategy, vision and purpose statement for GLG, as well as with the broader leadership team to drive execution.

Teodori currently serves on the Olin Alumni Board, as an executive chair on her WashU reunion committee and in Olin’s mentorship programs. She also sponsors a scholarship in loving memory of her late grandmothers, Myra Buonocore and Philomena Teodori.