Top U Business Alumni

When we say Ute Pride, we mean business.  Serious business.  Here are five distinguished U of U alumni that have excelled in business nation-wide.
 
David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airways, was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1959.  He moved to the United States at age five where he later studied business at the University of Utah.  He first co-founded Morris Air in 1984, but Southwest Airlines bought out the company for $130 million in 1993.  He then founded JetBlue Airways in 2001, and in 2002, he donated his entire salary and bonus from the year, an equivalent of $290,000 to JetBlue Crewmember Crisis Fund, designed to help JetBlue employees experiencing hard times.  In 2008, he also announced the opening of his new airline, Azul Brazilian Airlines, of which he is now the CEO.  He has adult attention-deficit disorder (ADD), speaks fluent English and Portuguese and is a citizen in the United States and Brazil.
 
The current president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios, Edwin Catmull, is also a Ute; he studied physics and computer science.  While studying at the U as an undergraduate and a graduate student, Catmull’s ambition was to create a computer-animated movie, and he was inspired by movies like Peter Pan and Pinocchio.  His programs and systems have been used to create movies like Toy Story and Finding Nemo.  He has received three awards for his software programming and development and their contributions to the animated film industry.  He is also the most recent recipient of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which was presented to him at the Academy Awards in 2009.  The award honors “an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry” (see http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/about/awards/sawyer.html).
 
Procter and Gamble is a parent company to more than 45 companies including producers of household goods such as Bounty, Crest, Febreze, Herbal Essences, Pampers and Tide.   They also employ a U of U alumnus, Robert “Bob” McDonald, as President, CEO and Chairman of the company.  McDonald graduate in Engineering from West Point in 1975 and with an MBA from the University of Utah in 1978.  He also served as a captain in the U.S. Army for five years.  His total calculated compensation in 2010 equaled more than $16 million.  In 2007, he received the Leadership Excellence Award from the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Business Review.  He loves to read and works out every morning.
 
The Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas, Nevada, the 2002 Winter Games Olympic Torch here in Salt Lake, The Dubai Fountain in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the Fountain of Nations and Leapfrog Fountain at Epcot Studios in Orlando, Florida, the Fountain at the Lincoln Center in New York and many more water designs around the world are products of WET Design, whose founder, Mark Fuller, graduated from the U in Civil Engineering.  He was an Imagineer at Walt Disney Studios before leaving with two fellow Imagineers to start WET Design in 1983.  Not only has Fuller’s company designed all of these fountains, but the company has also pioneered many technologies being used in fountains all around the world.  Some of these technologies have fountains rising out of pavement rather than pools and compressed air power instead of pumps.  Many of his designs include choreographic movement with the fountain and few, if any, boundaries between the fountain and its audience. 
 
Marriott International started at a root beer stand in Washington, D.C. in 1927, but the corporation’s founder John Willard Marriott started right here in Utah at the U.  He was a member of the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity and graduated in 1926.  The root beer stand soon added Mexican items to the menu and became The Hot Shoppe.  The next year, Marriott opened the first drive-in restaurant east of the Mississippi, and his one stand/restaurant became Hot Shoppes, Inc.  It wasn’t until 1957 that Marriott expanded to motels and hotels, and ten years later, he expanded to include two more restaurants.  Though best known for its hotels, Marriott International still stands as a parent company to other hospitality, hotel chains and food services companies.  Marriott passed away in 1985.  The J. Willard Marriott Library on our campus is named in his honor.