Faculty & Advisors
WBRG is based on the writings and speeches of these two teachers…
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Warren Buffett
CEO and Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett is widely considered one of the greatest business leaders and investors ever (and also one of the best business writers/teachers).
He’s your teacher via his writings and speeches
Read why today’s high school students should learn from this 95-year old who was born before television, the Internet, the iPhone, TikTok, and three decades before air conditioning became common in the U.S.
Charlie Munger, DOD Mentor
Also one of the great business leaders, investors, and thinkers (and a great influence on Buffett). Sadly, he’s now passed away, but like Buffett he’ll be your teacher via his writings and speeches.
During his lifetime, Charlie taught the power of learning from the “eminent dead.” So, to honor him, we consider Charlie to be our DOD Mentor (“dead or distant mentor”).
Charlie Munger photo license. Original photo by Nick Webb
Your Class Includes
Your WBRG teacher
An experienced business person (see faculty below).
Your fellow students
Who will teach you (as you teach them).
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Founders
Phyl Terry, Founder & Teacher
Phyl is the volunteer founder of The WBRG, and by day is the CEO and founder of Collaborative Gain, a leadership community for digital executives. Phyl also runs their own private investment fund and coaches top-level executives at big technology and financial firms.
For 15 years, Phyl was CEO of pioneering customer experience consultancy and oversaw projects with Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and many others. Before that, Phyl did a stint with McKinsey & Co and was on the team of the first startup that Amazon bought.
Phyl brings groups of CEOs out to Omaha for a private workshop and for the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and is the author of Customers Included, Never Search Alone, contributed a chapter to The Warren Buffett Shareholder: Stories from inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, and wrote "Who can Help the CEO?” in the Harvard Business Review.
Named by Fast Company as one of the Fast Company 100 – 100 leaders shaping the 21st century, Phyl is a graduate of the Harvard Business School and also founded and runs three additional pro-bono programs – Slow Art Day, Reading Odyssey, and the Never Search Alone global community helping more than 50,000 professionals and college students find good jobs.
Melissa Norcross, PhD, CoFounder & Teacher
Melissa Norcross is an accomplished strategy executive, having held leadership positions at organizations ranging from Fortune 100 to high growth technology companies. Her career spans three continents and multiple industries. Melissa currently runs Strategy & Research at Hyland Software. Despite starting out as an engineer, she spent most of her career working in strategy and consulting alongside extraordinarily smart and kind people. She has previously served as the Chief Strategy Officer for a financial software company, Strategy & Planning Executive for USAA and consultant for multinational strategy firms including McKinsey & Co. Her areas of expertise include strategy, process improvement, organizational transformation and leadership. She holds a BS in Engineering from MIT, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Ph.D. in Values-Driven Leadership from Benedictine University’s Center for Values-Driven Leadership.
Melissa is passionate about nerdy puns, building extraordinary teams, and solving wicked problems. Outside work, Melissa moderates Collaborative Gain’s peer-learning councils for C-level executives, volunteers for a portfolio of charitable activities, and publishes and teaches on strategy, teams, humility and change. She currently resides in San Antonio, Texas with her mother, husband and two beagles. Her son, a future engineer, and her daughter, a future data scientist, both attend university in the northeast part of the United States.
David Wagonfeld, CoFounder & Teacher
David is a Partner at Tandem Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and before that spent more than a decade as a partner at value investing hedge fund, Standard Pacific Capital. David has a passion for education and youth development, and, among other things, sits on the Board of Directors of Americans for Ben Gurion University. David also has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Allison Mnookin, Advisor
Allison Mnookin is a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management (TOM) Unit at the Harvard Business School. She co-leads the HBS Startup Bootcamp and brings two decades of experience as a technology executive for successful cloud and business software companies. She most recently was CEO of Quick Base Inc. and currently serves on the company’s Board of Directors. Prior to Quick Base, Allison held several leadership positions at Intuit. Most notably, she served as vice president and general manager of a $500M portfolio of small business products, including QuickBooks, which served more than 3 million small businesses at the time. Allison was also instrumental in the early formation and growth of Quicken Loans.
Allison also currently serves on the Board of Directors of LPL Financial (Nasdaq: LPLA), a firm that provides an integrated platform of proprietary technology, brokerage, and investment advisory services to independent financial advisors, and Bill.com (NYSE: BILL), a leading provider of cloud-based software that simplifies, digitizes, and automates back-office financial processes for small and mid-sized businesses.
Allison holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and an AB with honors from Harvard College.
Current Teachers
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Sara Barbato, Teacher
With a passion for financial literacy, ethical citizenship, and youth development, Sara is delighted to pursue these combined goals with her students at WBRG. She joins the faculty with 15 years of experience in business including finance, strategy consulting, technology, and non-profit. She also brings extensive experience in tutoring and training roles held throughout her career and with youth of all ages. Currently an active volunteer in her community, Sara has held professional roles as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley, grant-maker at The Tiger Foundation, manager at Bain & Company, and VP at TripAdvisor. She earned her MBA from Harvard Business School and BA from Williams College.
Mary Carol Mazza, Teacher
Mary Carol Mazza is a behavioral scientist, UX researcher, and strategist who has worked at the intersection of social science, technology, and business across industry, academia, healthcare, and government. She has held senior research and strategy roles at Apple, Meta, Google, Xerox PARC, Ernst & Young, and multiple startups, where she helped translate human insight into product, organizational, and system-level decisions.
With a passion for systems thinking and interdisciplinary connections, Mary Carol gravitates towards complex societal problems—especially those involving human behavior, incentives, and unintended consequences at scale. Her work spans product research and strategy, organizational design and culture, and leadership development, often focused on moments where technology and AI impact judgment, work, and lived experience.
Mary Carol completed her joint post-doctoral fellowship in healthcare innovation at Stanford School of Medicine and Palo Alto Medical Foundation. She holds a PhD in organizational behavior with a focus on decision making from Harvard Business School, an MA in social psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and an honors BA in economics and psychology, with a concentration in poverty, from Washington and Lee University. Her curiosity has taken her to study, work, and immerse herself in diverse cultural contexts across nearly 90 countries. She is energized by scuba diving, creative cooking, stimulating discussion, and mentoring- and of course, teaching!
Lauren McCadney, Teacher
Lauren is VP, Performance Marketing at CDW,a leading multi-brand provider of information technology solutions to business, government, education and healthcare customers. Lauren is passionate about building the next generation of talent; in addition to developing her own team she is on the CDW Emerging Leaders Steering Committee as well as a frequent contributor to several BRGs. She is an international speaker with teaching experience including UT Austin and The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Lauren has a BBA from Howard University. She earned her MBA at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Ron Pessner, Teacher
Ron Pessner is a product leader responsible for the Microsoft365 Copilot application. Ron has been at Microsoft since 2003. He leads the Office Copilot Hub Team, which includes responsibility for the M365 Copilot app, Copilot Pages, Microsoft Loop, the Fluid Framework, and Service Excellence. Previously, Ron was the Product Management leader for the Office Shared Team responsible for horizontal aspects of the Office suite including collaboration in Office documents, the files experience, and user experience coherence across M365 applications and platforms. Prior to joining Office, Ron was a Group Program Manager in Windows 10 responsible for the Windows Mobile 10 product release and the calling, messaging, and people experiences in Windows. Ron was a General Manager in Xbox LIVE responsible for Games for Windows LIVE, mobile gaming and Xbox SmartGlass, and a Product Unit Manager on Windows Media Center responsible for Media Center Extender.
Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, Ron led the web hosting business at Go2Net, a Paul Allen funded start-up. Ron previously worked in private equity at Petra Capital Partners, and in finance at Credit Suisse First Boston in both New York and Singapore.
Ron earned a master’s in business administration from Harvard University and a bachelor’s from the University of Virginia.
Jeff Prus, Teacher
Jeff Prus is Chief Product Officer of Caring.com, where he leads the product, design, and content teams that drive digital transformation for Caring's senior care marketplace and advisory service. He has been leading product management and customer experience teams for 25 years, having held senior strategy, product, and design roles at TaskRabbit, Zipcar, Intuit, Vistaprint, American Express, and Deloitte Consulting. Early in his career, Jeff worked as a semiconductor design engineer at Intel Corporation.
Jeff is an alumnus of the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master's Degree in Business Administration.
Jeff attended his first Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting with his parents in the late 1980s and has been a lifelong student of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's teachings and advocate of long-term, value investing ever since.
John Semel, Teacher
John is a Managing Director at Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, a mid-market M&A advisory organization. Over the past 25 years he has been Chief Operating Officer of Roar Social; Chief Strategy Officer of Zovio, a leading provider of online education technology services; Chief Strategy Officer of Mood Media; EVP and Chief Strategy Officer of John Wiley & Sons; EVP Business Development at The Weinstein Company; VP Strategy and Business Development of MTV Networks; Director of Hearst Ventures; SVP of Investments US for eVerger; and, Vice President of Channel One Interactive. John has a BA from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Vince Tsai, Teacher
Vince has over 20 years of experience leading digital ventures for both Fortune 500 and high-growth technology companies. His expertise spans product management, strategy and operations and currently serves as a senior executive for Balluun, a software startup powering B2B digital marketplaces. Vince also served in leadership roles for Yahoo!, ReachLocal and Accenture and earned degrees from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management (MBA) and Lehigh University (BSME).
Vince has a passion for education and youth development, having served as a school board member of Alliance College-Ready Schools, as well as Executive Board Member for the Taiwanese-American Foundation. As an avid investor in both public and private markets, Vince is excited to teach for WBRG and inspire the next generation of young business leaders.
Student Volunteers
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McKenzie Williams, Founding Student & Registrar
A founding student of the summer and yearlong WBRG classes, McKenzie loves the program and is the WBRG Registrar. She is a student at Phillips Academy Andover. She is passionate about math, computer science, and business – of course! Her hobbies include fencing, photography, reading, and watching anime.
Join the Faculty
If you are an experienced executive who might want to join our volunteer faculty, then know that here’s what makes a great WBRG teacher:
⭑ 15+ years of experience in finance, tech or other industries
⭑ MBA from Harvard or other top program
⭑ Relatable to young people and not take yourself too seriously (have a sense of humor and silliness)