Meet Dan Recht, Activate Boston’s New Managing Director
We are excited to welcome Dan Recht as managing director of the Activate Boston Community, where he will use his technical and business expertise to mentor fellows.
Dan is passionate about nurturing people and cutting-edge technology, and his superpower is moving smoothly between the highly technical and the business-oriented. Moreover, he is driven by a deep-seated feeling that we’re all in this together, he says, “at every scale—from all of humanity all the way down to any team that I’m on.”
Dan brings broad experience with high-impact startups to Activate. He’s been a startup co-founder, worked in big corporations interacting with startups, and led teams at various growth stages.
Dan Recht speaking to fellows, alumni, and staff at the 2023 Activate retreat in June.
“As a hard-tech CEO, Dan navigated so many of the challenges that face his fellows daily,” says Activate executive managing director Aimee Rose. “He also brings later-stage growth experiences that will help his fellows see around corners.”
The Path to Activate
“One organizing principle for me is that I feel like I have an infinite debt to pay forward,” Dan says about the opportunities that shaped his career.
Dan attended Princeton University, where he earned a B.A. in physics, and then gained business experience as a management consultant. He then pursued a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University, where he focused on materials science. “That’s where I got the clean-tech bug,” he says. For the past decade, he worked as an executive at several startups bringing technologies to market, including hydrogen storage, deep learning, and 3D printing.
Coincidentally, Dan has been in Activate’s orbit for years. At the time of Activate’s inception in 2015, he was working at Otherlab, an independent research lab in San Francisco, and leading Volute, a spinout making alternative fuel tanks for cars. Otherlab and Activate had multiple connections as mission-driven organizations. “I was privileged to have a front-row seat for Activate’s development from pretty much the beginning,” Dan says.
As part of his role with Otherlab, Dan also worked with Vince Romanin (Cohort 2017) on some early proposals for what would become Gradient, a company rethinking air conditioning—and an Activate Fellow success story.
Another memorable collision with Activate happened in 2018, when Dan gave a founder talk to the Activate Berkeley Community after a successful exit with Volute. “I could see Activate’s value of ‘people first’ super clearly during that visit,” he says. “Instead of the conversation being about ‘how do I sell my startup?’, it was ‘how do I build an effective team with a good culture?’... It was clear to me at that moment that Activate had crystallized around a well-defined set of values that I found really compelling.”
“I was privileged to have a front-row seat for Activate’s development from pretty much the beginning.”
When Dan moved from San Francisco to Cambridge in 2019, he crossed paths with Activate again, watching Activate Boston launch and flourish, and getting more involved in the community. He says his impression of Activate went from “this is a really cool bubble in one place that has made a little bit of magic happen” to “this is a thing that can scale.”
Leading with Community and Authenticity
Now as managing director of the Activate Boston Community, Dan is determined to tap into that magic and carry out a vision centered on community and authenticity.
“It was clear to me at that moment that Activate had crystallized around a well-defined set of values that I found really compelling.”
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“It's clear every time we ask the fellows that the biggest impact of the fellowship program is their interactions with each other,” he says. “I want to orient our Boston programming toward maximizing the opportunities that fellows have to learn from each other.”
“If we have a really tight-knit core of fellows, that can become something compelling for the larger community,” Dan says. “I think we can be a key part of the overall Boston ecosystem—which I might add is crowded as heck. I think Activate’s unique place can be in its authenticity and the energy of collaboration as opposed to competition.”
Indeed, Dan aims to reject the notions of competition, comparison, and isolation through his leadership. “One of the things that's really hard as an early-stage founder is the pressure [that comes from] comparison. You look around, and essentially all you see are the PR pieces on other startups,” he says. “When I think about the intentional design of the Activate Boston Community, one of my guiding principles is to be the opposite of that—to be a community that talks openly about challenges and that celebrates small wins.”
“I think Activate’s unique place can be in its authenticity and the energy of collaboration as opposed to competition.”
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Dan also brings a passion for mentorship to his new role. “The progress that people I've mentored have made is one of the things I'm most proud of,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons why I'm excited to be in this role—because I realized that the people I work with and help are a big motivator for me.”
The Activate Boston Community—Cohort 2022, Cohort 2023, and the Activate Boston team—at the 2023 Activate retreat in June.
