The Foundation for American Innovation is pleased to welcome three new members to our board of directors: Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute; Meg Reiss, founder and CEO of SolidIntel; and Mark Johnson, CTO of Stand Together. You can read more about them below.
Reihan Salam is the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute, a research and advocacy organization that advances opportunity, individual liberty, and the rule of law in America and its great cities.
Before joining MI in 2019, Reihan served as the executive editor of National Review. Reihan previously worked for The New York Times Op-Ed page and NBC News. He was a 2010 Bernard L. Schwarz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a 2015 Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago, and in 2017, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.
Reihan is the author of Melting Pot or Civil War? (Sentinel, 2018), which makes the case for a skills-based immigration policy. In Grand New Party (Doubleday, 2008), co-authored with Ross Douthat, he offered a vision for an ambitious center-right program to address the growing gap between the Republican Party and its working-class voters.
Reihan is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a contributing editor at National Affairs and National Review, and a political commentator for CNN. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Public Scholars Advisory Committee at the Moynihan Center at The City College of New York and the Advisory Council for The Public Interest Fellowship.
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Dr. Meg Reiss is the founder and CEO of SolidIntel, the first generative AI company focused on de-risking supply chains and intelligence for the US government and the commercial sector. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, a visiting fellow at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School’s National Security Institute. Previously, Reiss was the national security policy advisor for US Senator Mitt Romney. She was also a Schmidt Futures International Strategy Fellow, a senior national security fellow for the R Street Institute, a senior editor of Lawfare, and a senior national security fellow for then US Senator Ben Sasse. Meg has a BA from Stanford University, an LLM from the University of Nottingham School of Law, and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Mark Johnson is CTO of Stand Together, a community of nonprofits tackling society’s biggest problems, from economic opportunity to education to criminal justice reform. Prior to the nonprofit world, he was CEO of GrainBridge, an AgTech joint venture between ADM and Cargill. After releasing a product to farmers, he sold the company to Bushel in October 2021.
Prior to GrainBridge, he cofounded Descartes Labs with a group of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory with the vision of building a digital twin of the Earth to better understand our natural resources. He served as the CEO, leading the company to over 100 employees, $60m in funding, and $20m in revenue. Previously, Mark was CEO of Zite, a wildly popular AI news reader that got smarter as you used it, and sold Zite to CNN in 2011, ran the company for 3 years there, and sold the company again to Flipboard in March 2014.
Before Zite, he was a product manager, trained at SAP and then jumped into 3 successful search startups: SideStep (acquired by Kayak for $180M in December 2007), Kosmix (acquired by Walmart in April 2011), and Powerset (acquired by Microsoft in July 2008). Through the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset, he ran product management for the Powerset office of Bing.
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Additionally, Allison Swope, Kristen Soltis Anderson, and Katie Biber are leaving the board, following their completion of FAI’s staggered board term limits. We are incredibly grateful for their service to FAI.
