Adam Rein is the head of SolSolution’s Social Impact, but he plays two roles on our team. First, Adam helps to find and measure the social impact of SolSolution’s efforts, and second, he helps to define the financial and business model of this non-profit company. Adam received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1999 and extended his studies to business and public administration with an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and an MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2010. During those years, he cultivated his acuity in finance with Bain & Company between 2003-2006 followed by a year working at the World Economic Forum.

Answer from Adam

Q: Soren approached you to be one of the founding members of SolSolution back in 2007. What was it that caught your interest and made you want to be a part of SolSolution?
Adam: I’ve always had an interest in two areas: one is our energy challenge and the other is our education challenge. To me, they’re very similar in that both of them are big and perhaps two of the biggest things that impact our world. Education is what impacts our lives and growth, and energy is very much what shapes our environment and economy. In both of them, there are very complex systems which go about actually shaping what happens. Although everyone agrees on the end goal, cleaner energy and better education, it’s very hard to think about what the actual process is to get there.
      Originally, I had been working on how you can work with students to do energy efficiency work in the homes of their families. I was always looking for the intersection between energy and education, and what I recognized is that there’s actually a really poor learning about what energy is and what it’s impact is in our world and our schools. Certainly, when I was in school, I don’t think I ever heard the word kilowatt-hour, or even coal or natural gas. So I was always looking for ways to help find the intersection that might change things in the future. So I met Soren when I was at MIT when I was working on and researching energy efficiency, and he was working on launching SolSolution. We got connected, and we’ve been working together since.

Q: Were there any teachers or educators who really made an impact on you while you were learning?
Adam: It was actually my senior year of high school when we had an ethics class. I guess I went to a different sort of high school. They merged this ethics course as a part of the history classes. My teacher Warren Spaeth taught a lot about the history of ethical dilemmas. Everything from World War II to modern-day politics, and I think that’s what pushed me to include an ethics component in my college major. It’s always helped me focus in looking at opportunities professionally and personally about where is the real ethical component. How are you really making an impact on those around you.

Q: What is your favorite food?
Adam: Growing up as a kid, it was black licorice which earned me endless ridicule. So much so that I think I started to not like it as much as I did. But probably right now, Stacy’s Cinnamon Sugar Pita Chips. I go through a bag of those a day.