Adam Rein oversees all aspects of CapShift’s operations, investments, and technology. Since 2014, he has served as a managing director for MissionPoint Partners, an impact asset managing firm. Previously, Adam co-founded Altaeros Energies, a startup launched out of MIT to bring low cost wind energy and tele-communications to the developing world. Adam is also a co-founder of Greentown Labs, the country’s largest clean technology incubator. Previously, Adam worked as a strategy consultant for Bain & Company. Adam has an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a BA from Yale University.
Adam joins me today to discuss CapShift and how they are the building the leading impact investing platform. He shares some lessons about the startup process. Adam tells us about the beginnings of Alteros and Greentown Labs, his other startups. We talk about dealing with some of the big changes of growing companies. Adam shares some advice to beginning founders and resources.
“Every venture I’ve worked on has had at least two or three moments where we were very close to failing and going under. Whether it’s some combination of luck or fate or hard work that there is some success bias in our sector.” - Adam Rein
Today on Startups for Good we cover:
- The various investing opportunities that CapShift offers
- The three key metrics that investors are looking for
- What is driving the increase in impact investing
- Adam shares what can be learned from failure
- How purpose driven ventures should communicate to their investors
Connect with Adam on Twitter and LinkedIn
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Transcript of the episode
Miles
Welcome to Startups For Good. Today, we have Adam Rein, who is president and co founder of CapShift. Previous to that he's been a founder, developed an incubator has more degrees than I can count. And it's now bringing together founders and investors impact investing platform he's going to tell us all about Adam. Welcome.
Adam
Thanks, Miles. Pleasure to be here.
Miles
Yeah. Glad to have you on the show. Perhaps we could start with your current venture. And I'd love to get into more of your background later. Can you tell us what is CapShift?
Adam
Sure happy to. CapShift is a new venture we started a couple years ago to build the leading impact investing platform serving large financial and philanthropic institutions. So that's a mouthful, but just stepping back, there's something many people don't realize $1 trillion of charitable assets sitting and foundations or Donor Advised funds, waiting to be granted away. But primarily sitting in traditional, you know, investment mutual funds, or money market accounts, not being tapped or utilized for good. And so we set up Camp Chef to help those institutions that manage that trillion dollars, much of it, you know, guided by wealthy families access the new wave of impact investment options, to use that money for good weather, it's a renewable energy fund or an affordable housing opportunity, or micro finance fund, so many great options and trying to make it easier to tap, so much capital sitting on the sidelines.
Miles
So this is money that's been earmarked for philanthropy to give away as a to a nonprofit to give away as charity, but it's being invested. In the meantime, why don't people just give it away right away?
Adam
Well, you know, most, most families, when they get wealthy enough start to think about their legacy. And so I'm sure you're familiar with many, you know, famous foundations, you know, whether it's the Rockefeller Foundation, or even Gates foundation that say, you know, it's very hard to give away money efficiently, quickly. And it's better to set it up for years, or even generations. And so you start to see these multi generational charitable vehicles. And traditionally, the view was, you know, investments is really just about only one thing, which is maximizing return. And so they would hire an investments team to invest that money in the stock market, or other vehicles, hedge funds to just make as much money as they could. And they didn't pay much attention to what I went to. So you could see these conflicts where environmental focus foundation may have a lot of money and, and ExxonMobil and BP, and then they might be donating money to, to nonprofits to fight those same, you know, oil and gas companies that are investing in. And so, you know, there's been this new 21st century model of philanthropy, saying, Hey, we should start to integrate our mission and values into our investments just like we do with our grant making.
Miles
Gotcha. So do you offer an array of different types of investments or different asset classes or do you focus?
Adam
Yeah, and so we we initially started this venture with partners and a lesser known part of the market called Donor Advised funds, which are big institutions like Fidelity, charitable or large community Foundation's that house, these charitable accounts on behalf of many individual or family clients. And so we had clients who said look, the families we work with care about all sorts of issues, it could be environment, it could be health, or education or poverty or racial justice. And so we work to build one of the broadest impact investing databases, we could, covering all types of products across all types of issues, because what we recognize is that, you know, impact or purpose is very specific to the individual. And so we wanted to try to bring high quality opportunities that could match the specific issue or geographical region that that a family would care about. So there's some things that are publicly traded, you know, you know, equities or fixed income, there's private equity funds, or private debt funds, you know, and all the way to investment options house by nonprofits. So it's a really complicated part of the market. But one we're trying to offer a platform, much like other platforms out there have done like Angel list or Kiva to try to bring some efficiency for folks with assets to find great opportunities.
Miles
So it's like an angel list for impact investing?
Adam
Yeah, I think that's it at a at a high level, I think the difference is, Angel list goes and targets angel investors directly. We've really gone to these large, multi billion dollar institutions or wealth management firms to make it easier for many, many families to access it through through them.
Miles
And how does that money reach a private company like a startup? Does it ever get to that individual level?
Adam
Yeah, so most of the opportunities, our platform, our funds, and some of those are venture capital funds, which invest in startups across the different sectors or issue areas, there's one that's targeting the circular economy investing in recycling based startups, for example, you can also use charitable assets to invest directly into companies, there's a smaller set of folks do that who are very comfortable and taking that kind of risk. But certainly, you can go to a donor advised fund or private foundation or directly and put get a tax break and put your charitable dollars into impact focus companies today. And we think that there's going to be a growing movement to do that.
Miles
Gotcha. Tell us a little bit about the scale. How have you grown over the years? And where are you now? Yeah, so
Adam
We, you know, a relatively new, we started it two years ago, you know, previously, I came out of the startup world and the family office investing world. And so the past year has been our first full year of launch, where he started to expand outside of our, our beta test. And we're kind of at the scale of moving 10s of millions of dollars into impact. And that's a great first step, you know, we're excited to go into hundreds of billions and billions of dollars. That's really the vision and there's a lot of capital, waiting to be moved. But really, for us, it's both inspiring people and making it easy to tell the stories of all the great investment opportunities, but also removing all of the hassle and complexity or other barriers, whether it's compliance barriers, or legal barriers or financial advisory barriers that have stopped people from doing this in the past.
Miles
One of the reasons I think it's so interesting to have you on the show is you've seen this market from so many different angles. I mean, you've been a startup founder, you've been an investor. And you've worked to create an incubator. And now you're sitting on the side almost of the LP, who's investing in VC funds. So you're seeing the ecosystem from a number of directions. And I'm really curious, as you've gone through that journey, and had those different perspectives, what learnings Have you taken away that you would share for a want to be startup founder or founder who's in the midst now of starting a startup for good?
Adam
Yeah. Well, it's funny miles because you and I first brush shoulders 20 years ago as undergrads, and it was only recently that we got reconnected, which was a lot of fun. And it was the way we originally connected was looking at, you know, the the Yale entrepreneurial society which you helped start and I, I got inspired by as an undergrad. And I think my first takeaway was, you know, many young people that we meet are kind of on this fixed, analyst's like track of, of going into financial services or corporate world. And I think very early on, I was inspired by the more risk taking side of the professional path to say, maybe there's a more more entrepreneurial journey where you can help create new ventures or new programs by taking a risk that they might fail. So I think one big takeaway has been, I think a lot of our education system and, and heroes out there, you know, we, the more heroes we can that are on the risk taking entrepreneurial side, the better because there's so many talented people that just need a little push to take some risk and do big things. You know, on the more recent side, you know, I coming out of grad school, I helped start up a clean tech company called Altereros, which now is working to bring low costs connectivity solutions to rural communities and businesses. We also help startup what's now the largest clean climate technology incubator in the country called Greentown Labs. And I think, you know, for me, 10 years ago, there was a lot less of an ecosystem to help startups and and the clean tech sector. And I think a big learning has been that, that, you know, people use the word ecosystem a lot, but that the more that it appears easier to do, the more you'll have people willing to take that leap. And so there's this, you know, virtuous circle that comes when you have, you know, really smart PhD students or people who want you know, are unhappy with their job in the corporate world, who think it's the best and not most natural thing in the world to make the leap to start that company, and be inspired just as I would. And then it's all that great talent that ultimately draws in the investment capital into the sector, because they're really taking the leap to bring the technology to market. So originally, I and I've always thought of myself as an entrepreneur, and when I met venture capitalists in school, they seemed out of touch from what I wanted to do, they didn't seem like people just had to say no, all the time, or kind of had to be up on a pedestal somewhere. But, you know, getting connected to the family office investment world was a more natural fit for me, where you could really work with mission driven families who very much integrated their purpose into their investment. And that's how I kind of found my path forward between these two camps.
Miles
And when you are investing from that perspective, what are the key metrics? Or what are the key things attributes that an investor is looking for in a startup?
Adam
From the perspective of like, a family investor?
Miles
Yeah, mission driven family office, are the other kinds of LPs that you work with a CapShift?
Adam
Yeah, I think we oftentimes talk about a triangle, which is just like every investor, you know, family investors look, you know, primarily at financial risk and return as as the core metric. I think there's two other elements that they bring in. One is most people we work with want to change the world in a big way. And so the idea of looking not just at the impact of a company today, but how do you measure the catalytic impact of what a company can do five or 10 years from now. And that takes looking not just at the widget that a company makes, if it's a education startup, which I know you've worked with, you could say, how many students does this startup help educate? But the maybe the more important metric is, if this new model is successful? How many other companies will replicate it? And how much can it transform the whole education market? So I think that's really the second leg of the stool. And then the third, and possibly the hardest is, we have to think about how does this personally touch the individual family member that's investing. And this is more like the angel investing world, which is, many angel investors don't just look at financial and don't just look at impact, they oftentimes look at, I am personally connected to this story. I personally care about this issue area, or the founder, and I have a connection because we are alumni from the same school. And so or it's in my hometown, and it's in the same city a block away from me, so I want to be connected. So there's that extra layer of not just financial assessment and impact assessment, but help making it easier for people to find a personal connection to the opportunities there. They're looking at putting capital and
Miles
And that last one, that personal connection, do you find that that drives people to do more? Or is that a screen that ends up making promising projects? Go starved for capital? Because there isn't that emotional tug?
Adam
Um, I think it's it works both ways. And I think you know, we are we're in a world now where there's been a raised awareness this year, not just about pandemics, but also about equity and racial justice and awareness that guys like you and me who went to the Ivy League school, you know, we may find it easier to raise money from other Ivy League alumni who feel connected to us, but entrepreneurs who may come from more underserved backgrounds may lack that that kind of personal connectivity to larger parts of the capital pool, you see the same thing with founders who come from smaller cities, and they may lack the access to the capital pool in the big investment hubs on the coast. So I think it works both ways. And so, you know, we tried to, you know, we can't solve it 100%, we can't change all the universe of investors. But we do try to make it easier for people to matchmake. And it's not just, oh, I can only raise money through my LinkedIn network. But no, we want to kind of raise awareness of all these unique attributes of your opportunity. So there's multiple ways, whether it's geography, or shared passion, or shared purpose that other people can connect into what you're trying to achieve.
Miles
Right? And impact investing has become really more popular over the last few years. Do you have any sense of what's driving that?
Adam
Yeah, you know, going back to the original story, there's something that was disconnected of, kind of my, my left hands gonna make as much money as it cans in my and then I'll give it to the right hand, which is gives it all away as fast as I can. And the two sides Don't even think about each other aren't connected, I think, you know, over decades, you start to see more of the integrated, you know, self, you know, just like people care a lot more about the values of the companies they work at today. And you see purpose driven companies, attracting and retaining talent, it's natural that wealth owners are also going to be purpose driven, and how they shop or even invest their money as well. I think On the flip side, 10 years ago, when I first started, the common criticism is there's just a lack of high quality investment opportunities. You know, 10 years ago, you had a clean tech sector that was losing a lot of money. You had very few ed tech funds with a track record, you had, you know, just a lack of quality products with track records. And now you started to see, you know, a lot more talented entrepreneurs and investment professionals, building out impact focused products, which does make it easier for people to put put capital in, I think there still is confusion, the word impact investing today, people get confused. Does that mean that I'm you know, generating market rate financial returns? Or is it concessionary returns? Does that mean include the public markets? Or is it private markets, and so a lot of the kind of inner circle still gets hung up on these definitional issue issues. There's, there's pieces of this and all those. And so I think the good thing is that mostly whatever someone's trying to achieve, now there's there's a way to do it. And I think there's work you know, capture is not the only platform, there's a lot of great new intermediaries, new new products and new ways for people to lower the barrier to getting this done.
Miles
Thank you for that. I'd love to change the topic to your own entrepreneurial journey. You mentioned Greentown being the largest climate incubator in the country, or maybe the world. I'm just looking at the website. And the numbers are astounding. Over 280 companies incubated over a billion dollars in funding raised 6500 jobs created and an 88% startup survival rate. Those all sound really impressive. We'd love to hear more about how that came came to be. And your role in it.
Adam
Sure, happy to and this is definitely it takes a village story. I was one of five co- founders. But Greentown has been you know, something I've worked on as my second or third job over the past decade. And something I'm very proud of. The President Emily takes a huge part of that credit. And she's really been at the helm for the past seven or eight years driving that vision forward. But you know, the origin of Greentown as many of these is that is a little bit accidental. You know, I, I was coming out of grad school, had met a really talented engineer named Ben Glass who had a vision for high altitude wind energy company. I was inspired and we worked on the business plan together and then launched a company together along with our third co founder (unintelligable). And we realized that we needed some somewhere to go to build this company, we needed cheap, you know, rent, it needed to be close to MIT where the founders were all coming out of and we needed some dirty space where we could build real prototypes of this novel technology we were working on. And we realized we weren't alone, you know, every year out of not just MIT but the other Boston area universities or other teams. It looked a lot like us that we're looking for something similar and so originally There were four companies that all, you know found is really dirty space that used to be the old distribution, beer facility for the Cheers bar. That was, you know, the basis of the the old TV sitcom Cheers. And we, I think we paid a couple hundred bucks of rent and there's no air conditioning, there's no heating system in the winter, it was kind of really, really gritty. But you know, that's sometimes what you need. It's the kind of our equivalent of the Silicon Valley garage. And we realized a lot of other people needed the same thing. And I think what helped us is that we formed Greentown, because more and more startups came knocking on our door asking if they could share this space with us. And we realized that we were all working on some sort of environmentally good or sustainable or clean technology solutions. And so there was a common set of investors, customers in turn suppliers, who, when they met, one of us wanted to meet all of us. And it was that synergy and shared culture that provided the ethos of Greentown. Our motto was kind of for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. And by the time we had 15, companies, we realized, us kind of founders of our day, jobs couldn't really do this on the side. And we brought in Emily, who brought in some corporate partners. And yeah, and now it's a it's a great facility. It's expanding from Boston to Houston, another great ecosystem. We called it clean tech for many years. But under Emily's vision, we decided to double down on climate change is the singular vision that the companies would be tackling. So climate tech is the the new word of the day, and I'm proud board member.
Miles
Yeah, that's very exciting. I love hearing those gritty stories of the beginning. Being scrappy, not paying a lot. We used to have a slogan at the early days of my first startup, which is cheap is good, free is better. And you emphasized a couple times how dirty it was there, I can just imagine. You know, and and something else. And that story i thought was interesting is you were talking about founders building community founders, building that startup ecosystem. And I think it's really important. It's something Brad Feld talks about, in startup communities, ultimately needs to be led and built by founders, not investors. You also touched a little bit in your story about Greentown Altaeros. And I'd love to hear more about that story specifically. I mean, when you look at the pictures, it's like a big blimp. Right? I mean, how would you describe it to people?
Adam
Sure, no, it definitely looks like an industrial strength Goodyear Blimp. And, you know, I'll just caveat this by saying having been in the startup ecosystem, that, you know, we do have this, you know, I've been lucky that I've worked on ventures that, to date have continued to grow and scale. But every every venture I've worked on has had at least two or three moments where we were very close to failing and going under. And so I will say that, you know, whether it's some, you know, some combination of luck or fate or hard work that, you know, there is some success bias in our sector. And, and I'll touch upon some of the successes we've had, but you know, you know, and diving into this journey, everyone needs to be ready to brush brush with failure. And if you fail, you don't take it personal, you learn. You get back on your feet and try to look at the next venture. And I think that's, that's a really important lesson I've taken and, you know, Brad Feld also talks about the psychological challenge of kind of emotionally surviving, you know, years and years of an entrepreneurial journey. And it's something I've learned firsthand. And, and it's important for all of us, and I'm sure you have to Miles, but the number of startups you've been a part of
Miles
Yeah, failure can be painful, personally painful. But one of the strengths of good startup ecosystems is recognizing that failure is the cost of success, like with that volatility, the uncertainty of the outcome that's very deeply connected with the value that's being created. And therefore, if you accept people who have failed in their last venture, and give them another chance, you're gonna have a stronger ecosystem, and you're gonna have more innovation.
Adam
No. So let me let me share a bit about Altaeros. And this was, you know, there's a lot of startup advice blogs and books out there. I think one of the, you know, classic mantras is, you know, the best way to start a company is with a customer with a problem, know that deeply and solve that problem. You know, we Altaeros has been a 10 year journey and in many ways, we broke that rule and that we started with technology, and I pivoted to find the right problem over the years. But the technology was that although most of us know of blimps, you No, you know, filming football and baseball games. There's, for decades been a hidden part of that tech technology, which are big industrial balloons that are tethered to the ground, providing communications or surveillance for governments and militaries. They're called tethered aerostats. There's old as nuclear plants, they've been around forever. But they typically, you know, are, you know, in Afghanistan or over military bases and just on the border, and not not typically known to folks like you and me, because they're very expensive. They have teams of people that man them. And they're kind of this mainly military equipment. And my co founder, Ben had been working with a professor at MIT, who is a former Secretary of the Air Force. And what they realized is that, as decades have gone by the kind of technologies that are enabling autonomous vehicles, actually, or auto pilots on airplanes can be brought in to actually automate fully automate this kind of old school equipment, and bring it from the military world into the industrial world. And that was really the vision behind Altaeros, our original vision was an airborne wind turbine that would be mounted on a tethered balloon, tethered aerostat, which we worked for years put, you know, developing the platform for. And along the way, as we start to build out this really successful technology platform, what started to happen is that oil prices started to drop, if you can go back to maybe five years ago, from being you know, very high to very low. And another part of the market, which was communications, you start to see lots and lots of people in more rural areas, getting smartphones, and all of a sudden wanting, needing lots and lots more data to stream video. And so we pivoted the business about five years ago, from thinking about renewable energy to how could we lift telecommunications equipment, four or five times higher than a cell tower could go to bring really cheap broadband to rural communities, rural businesses, both in the US and internationally. And so we got funded by originally SoftBank, and then some other great investors. And it's been a long journey longer than it should in some sense, but you know, we're finally at the precipice of putting our after first, we did a customer demo, but our first kind of real customer unit out and their hands, the beginning of next year, and, and a peek to the scale of many years of r&d and kind of being in the commercial mode of the business.
Miles
So you were just touching on what I think was a near death experience for the company. You're saying entirely switching business models, even markets in products really mean it was still on a mobile platform, you know, floating in the air, but you're going from energy generation to data services? It seems like a big change. How did you go through that?
Adam
Yeah, so I'd say that the near death experience happened a year earlier, when we basically put up our demonstrate and initial wind turbine demonstration, we had tried to raise some venture capital, we weren't successful, we'd gotten some government funding. And that was starting to dwindle out. And, you know, in terms of fundraising strategy, hindsight, 2020, but the best thing we ever did was put up a YouTube video of this very visible technology that got on the first page of Reddit somehow, and all of a sudden got a half a million views of the YouTube video, which led to a bunch of newspaper reporters reaching out to us see if they could write about it. One of those reporters was in Japan, and put our story and the leading business newspaper in Japan. And that caught the eye of the wife of the founder of SoftBank Masa Son, which led him to send his team to reach out to us. So that's about as convoluted of a fundraising story you can think of but, you know, we had, you know, 100 other fundraising attempts that didn't work. And it kind of taught us that, you know, you never know in this world, what's going to lead to success. So you have to think very probabilistically of by putting many, many balls in the air that you're juggling at once and continue to push forward to one of them comes through and so, you know, but when SoftBank first invested in us, we were down to two or three full time staff, you know, we had all shrunk our salaries and we're just hanging on for dear life. And then after they funded, we collectively decided to make the pivot to telecom but uh, yeah, that was a bit of our story.
Miles
Wow. Imagining founders listening to this writing down, get on Reddit in order to get SoftBank money. And when you say SoftBank these days, people are Like, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, is that the scale that we're talking about here?
Adam
No, no, we so we raise money prior to their vision fund, you know, Soft bank's become that, you know, the largest tech investor, this was in 2014. So our initial check was about $7 million out of out of this corporate group. And we've, you know, they've continued to be our biggest backer and supporter since then. But, yeah, it just and we have other great, you know, before that there were great angel investors, and we've had you know this this collective of other great funders join us. So it hasn't been a single investor effort. But I think it's kind of that test of, you know, in the end, it's perseverance and keep keep, keep trying until you succeed. And we were fortunate enough to make it there.
Miles
What other advice would you offer founders in a similar situation? Where the original market just completely shifts on them? And it no longer makes sense to pursue?
Adam
Yeah, you know, it's a, it's tough. You know, I think, in this case, it was really my co founder, Ben, who pushed the pivot, which was 100%, the right move. I think, having been in many boardrooms, like you have miles, I've seen that businesses and ventures have inertia. And it's always easier to stay the same path than it is to change, right? You have all your materials, you have set expectations of all your employees, your investors, and to do these kind of pivots becomes harder and harder as you become bigger. So I think usually, you have to recognize that you know, the right answer, if there's already an inertia fighting against you, it's probably the wrong move. And that it takes a certain boldness of action, to get to the right point, I think what's hardest for people is that you always have a lack of data or information, you're always in these information asymmetries. So I don't have any magic advice. There are certainly companies that may have pivoted too early, or too soon in the wrong direction and got off track. But I would say that, I would guess that of every hundred companies considering that things aren't working, and I need to pivot. More, the majority are likely to be too conservative and too slow, rather than too fast and too aggressive. And so just understand that you need to be fighting our biases and instincts to get to that right answer.
Miles
And if you would offer some more advice to founders who are working on purpose driven ventures, how should they communicate with investors? How much emphasis do they put on the business for profit case? And how much emphasis to put on the mission?
Adam
Yeah, I think Greentown is a great ecosystem that shares that right now. I think there's about 80 companies all purpose driven in one way or another? I think the answer depends on at you could broadly break up purpose driven companies, between ones where they, their risk return profile is broadly similar to other startups. And that, you know, they clearly have a strong financial case to succeed in. And in some ways, the impact is is just a another really strong benefit of investing. And that case, you tend to find that that kind of story and pitch deck has a lot of purpose that's integrated into the market opportunity, they very much lead like traditional pitch would. And then kind of the scale of the impact happens towards the end is the icing on the cake. And kind of the wrapping of the presentation that says, not only is this a great investment, but you also can change the world. I think there's a second class of companies where the the market seems very uncertain, you oftentimes find this in developing countries, where, you know, a friend of mine from grad school wanted to start a business turn in sanitation and individual latrines and Africa into fertilizers and other agricultural products. In this case, very much they're leading with the impact the business, most traditional investors will look at this business as too high risk for them. So their primary audience is going to be impact focus families, foundations, or other purpose driven funders, and then you flip it, you kind of more lead with purpose. And the financial story becomes kind of the story of how do we get to a path where we can scale this so that we're not just helping, you know, 100 families, but, you know, a million families or 10 million families. And so, you know, I think it's very much tailored to the type of investor audience you're going after.
Miles
That makes sense. Do you have a favorite book or article that you would recommend to founders?
Adam
Um, I think when I am I'm a little dated, but no David Bornstein wrote, you know, a powerful book around social entrepreneur ship called, I think it's called How to change the world or something of that nature. There's also a great primer on impact investing by Jed, Jed Emerson and a couple other authors called, I believe, that's the Impact Investor. And so I think there's some great kind of inspirational stories to help people realize a lot of this is, you know, who are the heroes, you know, nowadays, we have some great entrepreneurial heroes, but they tend to be maybe the the people who have built the most massive financial companies, the Elon Musk's of the world, or the Bill Gates of the world, become the heroes. I think these kind of books open up to maybe that next tier of heroes where, even if you don't become a billionaire, you find these great success stories of people who took risk, created something that seems so unique and powerful and changing the world. And many of them were able to have financial success along the way. I think those kind of stories are very inspirational to this emerging crop of entrepreneurs coming.
Miles
So who are your heroes?
Adam
Yeah, for me, it may sound a little cliche, but Muhammad Yunus was it was kind of inspirational for me and the whole learning about the whole microfinance movement. And it sounds maybe even more bizarre. But when we were back as undergrads 20 years ago, it was Newman's Own salad dressing that really shook me. And I was kind of interested in, you know, social good and nonprofits, I was kind of interested in business, and learning that there was this business that made salad dressing, and they had committed to donating 100% of their profits to charity, kind of inspired me that there was a different way to do things, and maybe traditional business and traditional philanthropy. And so I think, and, and I added, and I know, you remember the story, but Honest Tea, the many folks have see it in the supermarkets now. But 20 years ago, it was a new kind of drinks company that said, we're gonna, you know, kind of embed health into and social get into the values of this, you know, low low sugar tea company. And so, I think all of these kind of sat in the back of my head. And, you know, I went down that traditional strategy consulting path for many years. But you know, I had enough self awareness to realize that this wasn't the path for me in and kind of found found a path much more aligned as quick as I could, which which has been great.
Miles
Thank you for that. I think we'll end with that inspiration. And those heroes. Barry and Seth have been on the show before, so check out that episode, and you can learn more about the story of Honest Tea. Adam, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Adam
No, thank you. And this is a important podcast and look forward to continuing to listen in the future.
Miles
All right, bye.
Adam
Bye.
