CATALYST MAGAZINE: Fall 2025
Beyond Bios
How Catalyst redefined leadership through curiosity, resilience, and connection.
RIKO KARACHIWALA
Catalyst Student
It's not every day that a group of high school students find themselves sitting three feet away from the CEO of an industry leading self-driving car company, a global public-health leader, or the former president of the NBA G league. Yet, in the Catalyst Semester, this is what a normal Wednesday morning looks like. We have had the incredible opportunity and privilege of hearing first-hand field stories from some of the most accomplished leaders in the Bay Area. We get to hear the human stories that never make it into LinkedIn bios.
Catalyst is intentionally interdisciplinary and intentionally unconventional. We learn by doing and experimenting; by failing and recovering; and by doing it all publicly, in front of peers, faculty, and the people who have done this dance at the highest levels of their careers. Our guest speaker sessions aren’t lectures.
They are intimate, unscripted conversations where accomplished individuals present their stories as a model or mentorship gift to and in dialogue with us. This process reveals the real messy mechanics of leadership and surprising pivots. Across all of our sessions, three leadership themes surfaced time and time again: curiosity, resilience, and interdisciplinary problem solving. But don’t just take it from me, feedback from my peers has confirmed that the themes above have been central to the guest speaker series that our program offers. The following three sections will explore how each emerged through the stories our speakers told, and more importantly, how those stories shaped the perspectives of Catalyst students themselves.
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Curiosity
When Catalyst visited Google X, Rey Banatao modeled a kind of curiosity that doesn’t just ask questions; it attacks what Google calls impossible “Moonshot” problems with imagination and hope. His team is currently working on an idea that sounds too good to be true: turning plastic back into raw chemical oil so it can be infinitely recycled. “We’ve already extracted all the oil we need, and then some, to make enough plastic goods for everyone on the planet,” Rey shared during the quick pitch of his product he gave our team during our visit. No playbook exists for this. No established field is waiting for them. Rey and his team have to make it as they go. Rey explained that tackling “Moonshots” isn’t about having the right answers but about being willing to look at the wrong ones long enough to learn from them. To illustrate this point he showed us a large statue situated in a large open space in his office, of the Gordian Knot with a giant axe cutting through it. He described the statue as a representation of how his team and other teams at X approach messy, larger-than-life problems. Instead of trying to untangle it delicately, he shared that sometimes the smartest move is to come at it with an axe, ultimately encouraging us to attack problems unconventionally and creatively. He taught us to refuse to accept the knot on its own terms. Rey’s unorthodox way of problem solving heavily resonated with student Parker Smith, who once described himself as someone who “only liked problems with clear steps”. But in a more recent interview, he shared that Rey’s talk about creative freedom in the face of ambiguity inspired him to approach roadblocks with a similar attitude as the Guardian Knot axe statue: with an open mind that allowed for unorthodox solutions. “[He] made the unknown feel less scary [...] I [feel] empowered to tackle these giant and intangible problems, like the [climate crisis]” Ultimately, Rey showed us that curiosity isn’t passively waiting for inspiration. It's the brave and intentional choice to walk toward and grapple with something even when it doesn’t yet make sense. But curiosity isn’t just an attitude; it is the catalyst that drives our classes and learning. Field days, workshops, and semester-long independent projects all require the same curiosity that Rey modeled: the courage to step into uncharted territory with questions. In the process, I’ve learned that curiosity keeps us from shrinking in unfamiliar or uncomfortable environments. It has given us a foothold, a place to start.
Resilience
In an industry famous for rapidly and constantly changing, CEO of Waymo, Tekedra Mawakana, stands out as a result of her defiance to follow suit. After more than a decade helping guide teams across Google, she stepped into her leadership position at Waymo, a company known as Silicon Valley’s “grandma.” The nickname stuck because of Waymo’s slow and methodical approach to driverless technology. Unimpressed by the race to be first, Tekedra shows resilience by embracing that reputation instead of running from it. Her mantra, “Advance Safely,” pushes directly against Silicon Valley’s obsession with speed. While competitors announced riskier milestones and boasted with flashier claims, Tekedra insisted on something far more difficult: doing things the right way, every time. This isn’t resilience in the dramatic, movie moment sense. It is the quiet kind that requires discipline, consistency, and a general refusal to compromise values even under enormous pressure. For Bodhi Compton, her display of resilience inspired a vision he imagined for himself as a future leader. After the session, he reflected on how consistently Tekedra returned to one idea. Culture. Whether she was explaining how Waymo evaluates safety protocols, responds to competitors, or makes hiring decisions, she always came back to the same principle: do the work thoroughly, not performatively. Bodhi captured it simply: “While competition is good, you can’t focus on what other people are doing [...] your product isn’t going to improve unless you work on it.” Hearing from someone at the top of her field value discipline over speed shifted how Bodhi thought about progress, especially in the field of technology. What stuck with him wasn’t her position or her industry; it was her commitment to excellence without shortcuts in the face of a culture that encourages them. At Catalyst, messy problem-solving is the norm. We have learned that complex systems rarely reward speed. Instead, they reward patience, re-evaluation, and a willingness to pivot without collapsing or losing hope, and Tekedra’s resilience mirrors the skills we practice in our classroom.
Interdisciplinary Problem Solving
While curiosity and resilience are both tenets that fuel us as learners in this program, interdisciplinary problem solving is a skill incredibly unique to how Catalyst students are learning how to move through the world. It's the intellectual muscle we have trained and used the most throughout the program and also is the one all our speakers model in completely different ways. None of their paths fit into neat academic boxes, rather, they have all worked at the intersections of a wide range of fields. Their lives and stories taught us this:
The problems worth solving never belong to a single subject.
Nicole Rubin. Dan Reed. Chike Aguh. Three leaders who seemingly had nothing in common due to their vastly different stories, career paths, skillsets, and communities, had a surprising commonality at one point. Although it manifested in unique ways, these individuals unanimously displayed a reliance on interdisciplinary problem-solving skills.
Nicole’s work in supporting families in medical crisis means she must blend the various disciplines of public health, psychology, logistics, nonprofit strategy, and deep empathy to adequately serve in her role as a Nonprofit Impact leader. She taught us that effective solutions come from understanding whole systems, not isolated issues. Dan demonstrated interdisciplinarity through his confident and optimistic outlook on life, reflected in his unconventional career path, where he was unafraid to jump between completely differing industries and jobs due to his ability to identify obscure ways to apply skills he already had. Finally, Chike’s work lives at the intersection of technology, education, and economic mobility, which taught us how to leverage an interdisciplinary understanding of the economy and politics to unveil a system that can help us predict the future of the workforce and find success. Despite the differences in attitudes and careers, Nicole, Dan, and Chike’s stories reinforced the importance of the founding principle of our interdisciplinary program. They taught us that no problem, or its answer, belongs to one profession or subject, and to begin to attack a challenge is to understand the problem from all angles. After wrapping up our last guest speaker experience, Catalyst students unanimously agreed that this segment of the program completely shifted their outlook on how to approach the workforce and leadership positions they will have in the future. “It made me realize that solving real problems won’t look like classes do. It’s more like mixing everything you know and hoping it creates something meaningful,” said Eilir Bjorlin in an interview reflecting on Dan Reed’s unconventional career path and pivots. Matthew Majalya shared a similar sentiment, following our Nicole Rubin session, sharing, “I used to think you had to pick a field. Now I think you should pick a purpose and learn whatever helps you serve it.” Interdisciplinary problem-solving is not a bonus skill for the future. It is the future. Careers are becoming less single-tracked, problems are more entangled, and solutions are more collective. Whether Catalyst students go into engineering, public health, art, entrepreneurship, teaching, or law, they will face challenges that demand knowledge from multiple fields. Our classroom already mirrors this reality. Our assessments force students to blend subjects. It's messy and nonlinear, but so is every modern challenge.
Looking back at these sessions, what stands out isn’t the prestige of the roles these leaders hold. It’s the intimacy of the conversations we got to have with them. Clustered together in a small library conference room, asking unfiltered questions, watching them think out loud were just some of the authentic moments that made the learning resonate.
Three tenets that came up again and again: Curiosity. Resilience. Interdisciplinary problem solving.
They were presented in different words and different stories, but always with the same core message:
Leadership is human. It's relational. And it's built through habits, not titles.
We were privileged to learn from people who didn't just tell us how to lead – they showed us. And now, as Catalyst students, the question we all hold is this: How will we take these lessons beyond the classroom? And how will we use them in our teams, in our communities, and in our futures?
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