Matthew Alpert’s Transformation from 'Diligent Engineer' to Founder and CTO
What one fellow’s experience says about the power of the Activate Fellowship.
If you had told Matthew Alpert when he started graduate school at the University of Virginia that he would end up launching a startup to commercialize his Ph.D. research, he might have given you a dubious look.
Matthew Alpert in his University of Virginia Lab in 2018.
“I did not see myself as anything but a good, diligent engineer,” he says, from his home office in Boston.
But in late 2019, he decided to apply to be part of our inaugural community of Activate Fellows in Boston, pitching his idea to build a company to turn Novskite, a new material he helped develop in grad school, into a high-accuracy, and high-resolution scintillation detector for radioactive material.
“Back when I mentored undergrads, I’d tell them ‘Think about how a carpenter walks around with a toolbox. As an engineer you walk around with a toolbox in your head. So any time you have the opportunity to add a new tool, do it.’”
So by taking his own advice, Alpert became an Activate Fellow and founded Transpectum Technologies, launching into a major life and career transition. And just weeks before Cohort 2020’s orientation was to begin, the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered all plans for in-person gatherings. Being part of a brand new Activate Fellow community—and yet being physically isolated—was tough on all the fellows. And the job fell to Activate Boston’s managing director Aimee Rose to build this new community through Zoom windows.
In Alpert, she found a person determined to squeeze every drop out of the fellowship—and someone motivated to learn and grow as a CEO as quickly as possible.
Rose says that as an applicant, Alpert had a compelling vision on how to translate his technology into impact, and the support of the fellowship has allowed him to refine that thinking and quantify the specifications that would attract first customers. “I watched Matt’s transformation from scientist to business leader, mapping hundreds of conversations to a market landscape and a pipeline of initial partnerships,” she says. “As a solo founder and his company’s only employee, Matt’s ability to drive these outcomes was particularly impressive.”
“Finding Leslie and having her come aboard was the most transformative moment.”
By month 12 of his fellowship, and thanks to his willingness to learn and grow, Alpert had already made three major pivots. He transitioned from chief executive officer to chief technology officer, brought on Leslie Dewan as CEO, and repositioned his startup around a different product and wider customer base.
Foundational Changes
“Finding Leslie and having her come aboard was the most transformative moment,” says Alpert. “Having her expertise and having someone to plan with has been huge, and it has really changed our direction in a business sense.”
That’s not to say it was an easy process. Alpert admits that he was hesitant to change roles after spending five years solely focused on the technology and, more recently, its commercialization. “This was my baby—I created the technology, did all the initial research before applying for the fellowship, and then spent the first months of the fellowship focused on market and customer discovery,” he says.
But it was clear that Dewan would bring tremendous value. “She has some of the skill sets that I was really trying to work on, myself,” Alpert says.
RadiantNano co-founders Leslie Dewan, CEO, and Matthew Alpert, CTO.
Alpert kept in focus what was best for the company and the technology. “As much as it is ‘my’ creation, I do what I can to remove personal gain and inward-facing motivations from the decision making process,” he says. And it was clear that bringing her on and putting his trust in her could be transformative.
“There is only so much analysis you can do,” he adds. “Eventually you have to go with your gut.”
Activate’s Role
With the onset of COVID slowing down lab work, Rose suggested that Alpert focus on business development—in order to better map what to focus on back in the lab. So he doubled down on defining his beachhead market.
“It was actually really valuable to not touch a single thing in the lab,” says Alpert, who thinks putting all his time into learning about the business side of technology commercialization, and toward meetings and strategy development, paid dividends. “You can have five Zoom calls in a row and make more connections than would ever be possible in person. You could never have that many in-person meetings, and certainly not with people in other cities. If virtual meetings were not the default, I might not have met Leslie, who is based in California.”
Of course, the flip side is that Alpert is now catching up with a backlog of lab work. But with Dewan at the helm as CEO, business development is keeping pace.
“There is only so much analysis you can do. Eventually you have to go with your gut.”
“One of the biggest benefits have been the connections I’ve made with people—what Ilan [Gur, Activate’s CEO] calls collisions. I would not have been able to have even 20 percent of the collisions I’ve had without this fellowship,” he says.
Alpert did his research and participated in some entrepreneurship training before joining Activate, he says, but “nothing has been as immersive or transformative as the fellowship. I don’t think my business would exist without it.”
And through it all, Activate Boston’s managing director Aimee Rose has been at Alpert’s side. Plus, there are some parallels between their early paths—Rose developed sensor technology during her Ph.D. research that she also ended up commercializing for security applications. (FLIR Systems later acquired the technology.)
“I couldn’t wish for any other mentor, and there is a shared experience in terms of the general direction I want to go in and how she commercialized her research,” he says.
He thinks back to when his sights were set on career as a “good, diligent engineer,” and ahead to working with Dewan to realize the mission behind RadiantNano—to make nuclear energy safer, decrease risk to radiation workers and medical patients, and increase global nuclear security and nonproliferation—and says the fellowship has shown him that anything is possible. “It is truly amazing to think about. I am on a path to have a positive impact on people’s lives.”