Leo is a husband, father of five, and CEO of Aquinas Companies, a Catholic commercial institution 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 Life Sciences, a drug and medical device product development firm, and is Co-Founder and CEO of Brevitest Technologies, a spin-out of Fannin. As of January 2023, Aquinas was 100% owned by The Linbeck Family Charitable Trust, a public charity.
Leo is also an Adjunct Professor of Management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business and is a 2-time winner of the Alumni Teaching Award at the Jones School. From 2005 to 2021 he was a Lecturer in Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Leo is a native Houstonian. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame with degrees in Civil Engineering and Program of Liberal Studies (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, Fort Worth, and Houston, he went to Stanford, where he earned his MBA. He is the only student 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.
Over the past 20 years, Leo 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. He continues to write computer code for business and pleasure, which always strikes non-engineers as exceedingly odd, and has 9 issued patents.