Jon Adams
My Path
My work has taken an unconventional path, but each stage has shaped what I do today.
I began in RF electrical engineering, working with complex physical systems where performance had to hold up outside the lab. That taught me to work within real constraints, diagnose problems at the system level, and understand the difference between something that should work and something that actually does.
From there, I moved deeper into product development and entrepreneurship, learning how ideas become products and how technical, financial, and practical decisions shape what ultimately reaches people.
Later, I founded a mental health nonprofit. That experience introduced an entirely different kind of complexity, one where human behavior, families, institutions, access, incentives, and unintended consequences all interact.
Those experiences eventually brought me full circle to the work I pursue today.
A Different Definition of the Problem
Engineering taught me to ask: How do we make this work?
My experiences outside engineering added another question: What happens to people when it does?
That distinction changed how I think about innovation.
A system can perform exactly as designed and still produce poor outcomes if the original problem was defined too narrowly. Technology can make an existing process faster without making it better. And scaling a flawed system often scales its weaknesses along with its benefits.
Today, I try to understand the larger system before deciding what should be built.
How I Approach Problems
I tend to look beneath the visible problem.
Instead of beginning with a product or predetermined solution, I look for the structures, relationships, constraints, and incentives producing the outcome in the first place.
Sometimes the answer is software. Sometimes it is a physical product, a computational model, a different architecture, or simply a better way of framing the problem.
The form matters less than understanding the system well enough to intervene intelligently.
My engineering background keeps that thinking grounded: assumptions should be testable, constraints are real, tradeoffs matter, and ultimately an idea has to survive contact with the real world.
Principles That Guide My Work
Human impact over novelty
A new idea is valuable because of what it improves, not simply because it is new.
Scale as leverage
Thoughtfully designed systems can turn scale into a powerful advantage. Poorly designed systems can amplify their flaws just as quickly.
Clarity over unnecessary complexity
Complex problems deserve sophisticated thinking, but the resulting systems should remain understandable and purposeful.
Responsibility in deployment
How, where, and when something is introduced can matter as much as the technology itself.
Deliberate pace
Not everything should scale immediately. Understanding, validation, and iteration should come first when the consequences matter.
What I'm Building Today
Today, my work through Reinvent Develop focuses on systems, software, AI, computational models, and intellectual property aimed at difficult problems where engineering and human outcomes intersect.
Some ideas develop into commercial or licensable intellectual property. Others remain exploratory while the underlying problem is tested and better understood. Collaboration makes sense when the right expertise, organization, or perspective can materially improve the work.
The subject matter can vary considerably, but the underlying approach remains consistent:
Understand the system. Challenge the assumptions. Build what the evidence supports. Consider what happens when it reaches people.
I welcome conversations with organizations and individuals who approach difficult problems with the same combination of curiosity, rigor, and responsibility.