Building Daring Entrepreneurs: My Approach to Guiding Activate Fellows
By Dan Recht, Managing Director of the Activate Boston Community
At Activate we help scientists turn their passion and ideas into large-scale positive impact by empowering them to commercialize their inventions. Although Activate is not the only program with these goals, we stand out because of our long-term commitment to our fellows as people. This leads us to fund fellows to pursue their ventures full-time for two years and to deliver intensive coaching and educational programming over that entire period. As Managing Director of Activate Boston, I personally deliver that coaching–making my work a critical link in our chain of impact.
“To make a dent in global challenges, our fellows need to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in the scale of their impact. Seen this way, our fellows’ work sounds impossible, but recasting it as making ten winning bets to double their impact lays out an achievable roadmap.”
Because of this, reflecting in-depth on how my mentorship affects our fellows’ lives and businesses is a crucial part of my routine. It’s my responsibility to figure out which of my interventions are helping and then update my behavior accordingly. Here, in the spirit of full transparency and building in public, I’m opening up my notebook to shed some light on how I think about advising science entrepreneurs.
Activate Fellows are already brilliant and motivated. If I were merely picking the best people, drawing bullseyes around them, and then bragging about my aim, the outside world might not know the difference. Indeed, many impactful programs give entrepreneurs money without providing support from someone like me. This means it’s my responsibility to prove that my coaching leads our fellows to have more impact on global challenges than they would without me.
Dan Recht
Managing Director, Activate Boston
How do I coach with impact in mind? I focus on helping our fellows build entrepreneurial mindsets that support their personal success. I think about it like this: Impact requires risk and execution, and the entrepreneurial mindset I most associate with that combination is daring. I believe that when I teach our fellows to be more daring, I’m helping them succeed and increasing their impact on the world.
To make a dent in global challenges, our fellows need to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in the scale of their impact. Seen this way, our fellows’ work sounds impossible, but recasting it as making ten winning bets to double their impact lays out an achievable roadmap. That’s why “double ten times” is the framework I use to coach fellows through the reality that every route to massive impact passes through a gauntlet of risks. These can be external risks for a fellow’s company or, perhaps more importantly, the personal risks associated with entering a period of intense, uncomfortable growth. Within this framework, Activate’s role is clear: We can help our fellows by teaching them how to aim for larger prizes (risk) with greater odds of success (execution). We can help fellows be more daring.
“The act of being daring scales individuals’ potential so that their future endeavors can be more ambitious, grow faster, and have a greater chance of success.”
One of our fellow teams in the Activate Boston Community recently made a big bet to increase their impact by moving directly to manufacturing their product for customers despite having a small staff and relatively little external investment. Daring to close sales, commit to deliveries, and set up a manufacturing facility as a tiny team was beyond uncomfortable. However, now that they’ve pulled it off, the team can see how the core narrative of their company has changed. The difference between “we’re a startup developing…” and “we operate a factory that produces….” cannot be overstated.
To make a daring leap you need to feel secure where you are standing, commit wholly to the direction you are going, and trust that you will land on your feet. The Activate Fellowship is designed to address all three of these points.
Our program provides a foundation of financial, community, and personal support to increase our fellows’ sense of safety and security.
Managing directors in each community guide our fellows and connect them to advisors, including Activate Fellowship alumni, who help them build strategies they’re passionate about.
The Activate team models openness and vulnerability and encourages those traits in our communities and our broader ecosystem. This shows our fellows that we’re equally ready to help them prepare for the next leap if they land—or pick themselves up if they stumble.
This is why I intentionally don’t push every fellow to chart a direct course to double ten times. It is only by supporting each fellow on their unique path that I can create an environment and community where those who choose to take on big risks in pursuit of big impact can flourish.
Another reason to meet our fellows where they are is that I can’t predict the course of their lives. Some Activate Fellows prioritize achieving financial security, for example by bootstrapping to profitability or selling their company while it’s small, and this may be an important step on their path to impact. Early success can give fellows a safety net for taking larger risks later and a reputational platform that lets them expand their reach.
Other fellows will prioritize impact but miss on too many bets and lead their companies to failure. Nevertheless, the act of being daring scales individuals’ potential so that their future endeavors can be more ambitious, grow faster, and have a greater chance of success. My work to make fellows more daring can become self-reinforcing as they learn the habit of taking calculated risks and see the benefits of doing so. The key to this is Activate’s focus on fellows as people, which helps them grow along with their companies and retain their increased skill, confidence, and reputation regardless of the company’s fate. If a fellow’s third company changes the world, that’s no less of a success for them and for Activate.
“The key to this is Activate’s focus on fellows as people, which helps them grow along with their companies and retain their increased skill, confidence, and reputation regardless of the company’s fate. If a fellow’s third company changes the world, that’s no less of a success for them and for Activate.”
In the Activate Boston Community, we’re starting to see fellows who had chosen to leave or close their companies now establish themselves as leaders in other spaces including venture capital, government, and university technology transfer. Watching those fellows break barriers and create positive change despite the constraints of the organizations they’ve joined reinforces my belief in the value of daring and the power of science entrepreneurs.
When Activate Boston’s selection committee builds a case for each applicant, one key question is always “What would happen without us?” Nearly all positive answers boil down to “the applicant would sacrifice impact to play it safe.” Funding a fellow buys two years to take a brilliant and motivated person and guide them to become more daring, growing both their appetite for risk and their ability to stack the odds in their favor with good execution. Sometimes this means being their partner as they reach for the stars; other times it means helping them develop the confidence to have a company at all.
Over the years, several of our scientist fellows have applied for the fellowship with an MBA student “co-founder” who then ran away to a traditional job shortly after winning the fellowship. This usually triggers a crisis of confidence in the scientist and an opportunity for coaching to have an outsized impact. In the end, all of those fellows made the daring choice to become the CEOs of their companies and, to my knowledge, none have regretted that choice, even years later.
When I talk about my job, I occasionally get the question, “Sure, but what do you actually do?” Because the impact of coaching is indirect, it’s a fair and tough question. Here’s my answer:
I know from hard-won experience that bringing an invention to market as a technical founder is desperately lonely and back-breakingly difficult. The only way to succeed is to bet on yourself and your team again and again and to do everything you can to make those bets into winners. I can’t carry the load for our fellows, but I can listen when they need it, tell them with certainty that they are not alone and not impostors, and occasionally see into the distance through the telescope of my own mistakes to deliver a timely hint or warning. If I do my job well I can help each fellow know where they stand, commit to where they’re going, and trust that they’ll land on their feet. I can help them dare.
That’s what I do.
