From a family business in Texas to the edge of the wild.
Mital Patel is a third-generation entrepreneur from Longview, Texas, who has spent his career where business, creativity, and purpose meet. He grew up inside his family's hospitality business and, after graduating from the Conrad N. Hilton College at the University of Houston, joined it in 2003. In the two decades since, through the 2012 merger that created NewcrestImage, he has worked across nearly every side of the business, from operations, development, and design to redevelopment, adaptive reuse, and fund management, shaping both the properties themselves and the strategy behind them.
He is an active champion of the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO), where he has held several leadership positions and remains deeply engaged in its community of global leaders.
But the through-line of his life runs beyond boardrooms. Mital is an adventurer and fine-art photographer with a deep love of the natural world, a passion that has grown into its own body of work and its own ventures. As founder of The Simba Trust, he rallies support to bring education and essential resources to underserved children in Kenya; through conservation-led travel with Tembo Journey Editions, he brings others to the wild places worth protecting. Business, photography, and conservation are, for Mital, a single pursuit: to build things that outlast him and leave people and the planet better than he found them.