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Last summer, when I met Daniel Dart for the fourth or fifth time, he told me he’d just finished getting two master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and was at the MIT Sloan School of Management to get an MBA. He was also starting a venture capital fund backed by some prominent investors and getting informal advice from titans of finance including Josh Friedman, John Arnold, Jack Selby, and Gary Cohn.
It’s unusual to come across these types of high-achieving people at financial events like the one I attended, a convention in northern Maine sponsored by David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors, to get storytelling ideas from corporate executives and financial executives.
Except for one thing: Daniel Dart is an ex-con who spent roughly four years in prison for shoplifting, car theft, and carjacking, and never earned a high school diploma or bachelor’s degree. He was also homeless for more than a year, and could easily have ended up dead on the streets, a bleak and ultimately forgotten statistic.
I asked Daniel Dart to tell me his story. We sat on a rustic terrace overlooking West Grand Lake, 24 kilometers from the Canadian border. He was dressed in distressed hip-hop pants and an MIT T-shirt. I had a beer. He drank mineral water. Dardo can be an awe-inspiring, even smiling sight. He’s tall and stocky, with tattoos on his hands, arms, and neck, and an iconic beanie that is usually placed over his shaved head. He’d look menacing like a hell’s angel if he didn’t laugh at parts of his narrative that seem ridiculous and it’s crazy for him, even for him, when he looks back. Plus, it’s a hug.
Dart speaks temporarily and freely, his speech peppered with normal F-bombs. There’s another crazy story you forgot to mention. He shortly declared his criminal sentence, but then moved on to his role of helping lead the successful band Weezer and other prominent bands. Musicians. He has met celebrities such as actor Mark Duplass and Tom Colicchio from Top Chef. He collaborated with the Obama White House. He was in Gaza, then in Saudi Arabia, then at the London School of Economics, then at MIT. Oh, and Gary Cohn, vice president at IBM and former chairman of Goldman Sachs, helped him break free. A venture capital fund.
It was either the craziest good luck story of all time or an elaborate scam. We were interrupted and at other times dominated the rest of the meeting. But I took note to dig deeper to see if Daniel Dart was on his way to becoming one of the most unlikely players in the sweltering world of finance.
He had invited me to MIT, so in November I went to Cambridge. I attended a few occasions and recorded several hours of interviews. Then I checked what I could do and tried to explain the facts.
This is the saga of Daniel Dart, 42 years old.
Growing up in the East Bay, California domain is tough. He doesn’t need to talk publicly about the main points, as his dates with his parents, who have been married for 52 years, are improving. Here’s the sanitized version: “It’s a very tumultuous house,” says Dart. “He is the youngest of three brothers, his mother worked in a barbershop and his father ran a building materials store, a part of which is known as” the stone patio “.
Remember feeling unwanted. There were suicidal thoughts as early as the age of 5. He tried to run away. As he approached adolescence, Dart rarely went to class. At age 13, his parents sent him to a military school, which he describes as “just a show” where “everybody’s in trouble. “, his GPA went up to 4. 1. Se he went home after two years and his GPA dropped to 0. His parents then sent him to Provo Canyon School, which was then exposed as a hotbed of abuse for decades. “I would be stripped naked for 3 days for misconduct,” Dart recalled. “At the time, I didn’t belong anywhere. It was a feather in the wind.
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By the time Dart graduated from Provo, he was using drugs — heroin, cocaine, crack, marijuana, large amounts of alcohol — and hanging out with like-minded rebels, adding a few he’d met in military school, where almost all belonged to one gang or another. Other. He didn’t communicate with his parents and couldn’t return home. He knew other people in San Diepass and enrolled at San Diepass State University (SDSU), which accepted him.
Shortly before the start of the school year in the fall of 1999, I was at a party and selling beer to get by. He saw the keys on a counter, picked them up, handed them out and clicked on the key fob until he discovered the Al Honda Accord they belonged to. A few other guys went with him. Dart returned to the party with the beer, but the other boys went for a walk and crashed. They told police that Dart had helped them borrow the car and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Two weeks later, Dart needed money and got caught stealing an MP3 player at Fry’s Electronics. Authorities charged him with both crimes—car theft and shoplifting—and an apathetic public defender told him to plead guilty to two felonies, in exchange for a reduced sentence of about six months. “SDSU was out the window,” Dart says. “Within two months of turning 18, I was in jail.”
After graduating in 2000, he had nowhere to go and the opportunity to move on to school passed. “It’s so dysfunctional,” Dart says, laughing at his own situation. “I floated near the beach. I asked for change. I slept on the beach, I knew where I could eat pasta on Wednesdays. I had a kind of routine.
Around this time, a childhood friend heard from another friend who had run into Dart in San Diego. “She told me he looked like he was gonna die,” the childhood friend recounted in a phone interview. “He was skinny, with his eyes popped out. This was probably when he was heaviest into drug use.”
Friends convinced him that it was better to be homeless in Los Angeles than in San Diego, so he left. He found work: in a coffee shop, in a substore, in a telemarketing company. I had a run-down apartment with three other guys, no refrigerator and only an outlet on. He reconnected with other people in the reformatory and took over the gang affiliations that had started there. He got tattoos, much of the ink drawn through amateurs in someone’s living room.
In 2002, a friend, Steven, got into an argument with a rival gang and ended up getting shot. Another night, someone fired shots at Dart’s building. Anticipating a gang war, Dart began using a gun. One night I was drinking and something else. A friend called him to get him out of the bar for anything he thought was urgent. “I’m beaten, I get crushed, the police stop me, they ask me if I have a gun, and I tell them no, I don’t have a gun. Then the gun slides down my pants, like in a movie, and I’m like, “Oh, you mean that gun?He laughed at how ridiculous it seemed now.
The cops arrested him, but there was a bigger problem than the gun. He had never checked in with his parole officer after getting out of prison, which added up to two no-bail felony warrants. The courts extradited him to San Diego, where the public defender recommended he plead guilty and serve six years, as an alternative to the 10 years he could get if found guilty at trial. In court, Dart, enraged, erupted at the judge. Bailiffs removed him. The judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation.
As a teenager, Good Will Hunting, one of Dart’s favorite movies, as he knew it, was the tough guy from Boston played by Matt Damon, who cleans the floors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and eventually gets in. Maybe it’s just me, Dart thought.
He calls the psychiatric evaluation his “goodwill-seeking” moment. “I fell in love with the psychiatric type,” Dart says. I felt like I was in a void that I might not be able to get out of. I told him, man, my life is so fucked up. If I had another chance, I would do things very differently. The psychiatric judge informed the judge, who spoke with the prosecutor and told Dart that instead of going to jail, he could simply enroll in a 180-day residential reparation program.
“I followed this program and it saved my life,” Dart says.
There are still many problems to come. But she began to feel the concept of goal. A counselor named Les Lazerus, who had spent time in the infamous Folsom Prison, asked Dart: If you could do anything, what would you do? The answer: I need to be a rock star. “So why don’t you start a band?” Lazerus said. That’s what he did.
Dart didn’t play any instruments. But he wrote some songs and figured out some guys to play with. For their first concert, they played 3 songs at the Cat Club in Los Angeles on October 1, 2004. It was already late and the waiter was telling them to hurry up so he could close. But Dart began to demonstrate a relentless entrepreneurial spirit by handing out flyers to the band to advertise their gigs at any and all venues he could reach, opening doors until the maximum of the clubs emptied around 2 a. m. in the morning. People in the Los Angeles music scene began hearing about the ruffled maniac, mohawk hair and neck tattoos who fronted a punk band.
The band Circle Jerks plans an outing and looks for an opening act. Someone talked about the young flyer. The Circle Jerks discovered Dart’s band, Time Again, and signed them up. “We went from betting in front of 10 other people to, a few months later, in front of another 2,000 people,” Dart says. “The first excursion went by so quickly that we didn’t even have a full set of originals. “
Daniel Dart literally has a rock star who travels the world with other bands, adding Aquabats, The Unseen, Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly and Offspring. In 2008 and 2009, Time Again performed about two hundred concerts a year around the world. The band’s own music has become popular. One of the most popular songs, “The Stories Are True,” currently has 1. 9 million streams on Spotify.
Dart went far beyond the reintegration program that had sustained him after a second stint in prison. He got married and put cash in the bank for the first time. He stopped drinking, which is his worst addiction. It may have simply been a storybook good luck story.
But that’s not the case. ” I never knew where it belonged,” Dart says. “It’s so tacky. I enjoyed the artistic part, but it only accounts for 5% of my career. He didn’t need to hike anymore, so “He stopped. Then her marriage broke down and she divorced him. “I became very depressed and relapsed. Life is a mess.
That’s how Dart ended up in prison again.
By 2011, Time Again had stopped touring and Dart started hanging out with his old crowd in L.A., amid the gang economy. He was dating somebody in what he describes as a “disaster relationship.” They were on the verge of breaking up. One night they were drinking, fighting, talking trash to each other. The woman threatened to tell the cops about whatever gang activity he was involved with. He blew it off. Dart had a recording studio and wanted to go there. She had a car. He drove and she came along to drive the car back. But the arguing continued and at one point she demanded he stop and let her out. They were on a highway, so he pulled off at the next exit and she got out. Then he drove to the studio.
A few days later, on Sept. 2, 2011, he was back at the studio, and when he walked out, a swarm of cops arrested him for kidnapping and carjacking. “When they first pulled their guns on me, I thought I was getting shot by a gang,” Dart says. Then the cops started asking what he knew about gangs. He pieced it together. The woman he was dating must have followed through on her threat, and reported his gang involvement to the police. The cops were trying to use the kidnapping and carjacking charges as leverage for prying out intel about gangs. But Dart didn’t have much to offer. “There could be 2,000 members in a gang but only about three you have to worry about,” Dart says. “I wasn’t one of them.”
Dart and his lawyer thought he would win the charges, but it didn’t work out and the court sentenced him to six years in prison. However, he appealed the sentence and won the appeal, based on a ruling that there were errors. in your plea agreement and your upcoming sentencing. By the time he was finally released, he had spent another three years in prison, devoting his time to reading books and newspapers, estimating that he had read 400,000 pages.
Daniel Dart left prison for the second time on Sept. 5, 2014. He reconnected with his L.A. crowd and went drinking his first night out. Some people got arrested right around the corner from where he was hanging out, and he knew it could just as easily have been him, heading back to prison. He went to AA and finally got sober. I asked him how hard that was. “Getting sober was not really that hard,” he says. “It was either do this program, or go back to prison.”
Once sober, Dart discovered a job turning sheets into Airbnb rentals. He then helped a friend rent his own on-site apartment, earning a few dollars in the process. In late 2014, Dart was having coffee at a Hollywood coffee shop when a frifinish came in who fronted bands, including Weezer guitarist Brian Bell. He proposed to Dart a task, to help him manage Bell and a separate band called The Relationship. Dart was quick to do so. He proved to be smart in team management and signed a few titles himself.
Then Daniel Dart started his own management company, DEC Artists, which later became DEC Projects as he branched out beyond music. Relentless networking helped him land the Crash Kings, who had a couple of hit songs. He represented the musician Seal in a book and film deal. Then he got interested in social justice issues including gun violence, homelessness, and immigration. Through DEC, Dart handled public awareness campaigns for clients including actor Mark Duplass; the Wounded Warrior Project; Tom Colicchio of Top Chef and his anti-hunger foundation; and the Bezos Family Foundation, run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s parents.
Paintings about social justice took off, and CED began to benefit from a kind of guidewheel effect as one task led to another. You’ve gotten into the habit of disclosing your criminal history early on. When the Bezos Foundation contacted him for an assignment, he asked if they knew he had been in pretrial detention and was still on parole. The answer is no. They asked him if he threatened to become a criminal again. He said no. They asked him if he could do the job and he said yes. The task was successful.
As his reputation for social justice work grew, Dart worked on campaigns for the Obama White House, the AFL-CIO, and other organizations. He hired people to help staff the projects. The United Nations and other international organizations hired him to work on development and refugee issues in Algeria, Ghana, Uganda, Gaza, the West Bank, and other parts of the Middle East. “The refugee stuff resonated with me, because growing up I felt like a refugee, like somebody who never had a home, who was always moving,” Dart says.
He also began to realize that mobilizing capital was essential to improving people’s lives. At an event in Washington, D.C., Dart met Günther Schönleitner, who was executive director of the World Bank at the time. They kept in touch, and Schönleitner, a graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE), eventually suggested that Dart apply to the graduate program there. Dart had a high school equivalency certificate and no college education, but he had taught himself to write research papers he presented at academic conferences. He decided to give it a shot while working on a project for the Saudi Arabian government in Riyadh. Schönleitner wrote a recommendation letter.
LSE said no. Dart had become so fixated on the idea of attending LSE that he wrote a dozen department heads and other administrators asking them to reconsider, arguing that a traditional educational background wasn’t the only path to success anymore. He’s not sure exactly what happened, but it worked. LSE reversed itself and admitted him to its master’s program, making Dart the first student known to matriculate at the storied school without an undergraduate degree.
This was in 2020. La COVID pandemic hit and stranded Dart in Saudi Arabia. The LSE went remote and ended the first term without even setting foot on campus. But everything worked out and he had to do a second master’s program. He now holds two master’s degrees from the LSE, one in foreign relations and the other in social business and entrepreneurship.
Dart was considering getting a Ph. D. , but a friend remarked that he seemed more interested in managing things in the box than in educational theory. He implemented several MBA programs, but MIT’s Sloan School of Management was his main target, due to Good Will Hunting. .
Dart passed the frontal examination, but the vetting procedure was tortuous, with MIT checking as much as possible on Dart’s legal background and making sure there were no hidden liabilities. Finally, MIT admitted him to its Executive MBA program that will begin in the fall of 2022. He will finish it next year.
Along the way, Dart starting doing some work at private equity and venture capital firms to learn how to acquire companies, structure deals, and make money for investors. Inveterate networking opened some doors, but others remained closed to him. One employer withdrew a job offer upon learning about his criminal history. At another firm, he learned that he earned significantly less than others doing the same work. He confronted the boss, who pinned the lower pay on his background. “He was like, ‘Well, we’re trying to give you an opportunity,’” Dart recalls. “’You have a background and we’re letting you in.’ It was horrible. I was so pissed.”
Those types of experiences convinced him to start his own venture capital firm, which is just getting off the ground. It’s called Rock Yard Ventures, after the informal name for part of his father’s business. His focus is funding tech startups in industries that build things, such as construction, manufacturing, and logistics. He’s starting with $10 million in funding, which is small, but his goal is to grow Rock Yard into the VC equivalent of Josh Friedman’s hugely successful investing firm, Canyon Partners.
Over the past decade, Daniel Dart has built an elite network of contacts and followers that completely transcends his rocky beginnings. He asks other successful people to consult him and makes sure to stay in touch. I reached out to some of his followers.
Gary Cohn, vice chairman of IBM and former chairman of Goldman Sachs, said in an email that “Daniel overcame many obstacles in his life. We all pay tribute to him for his determination. Cohn is an investor in Rock Yard Ventures.
Billionaire investor John Arnold told me in an interview that “a lot of other people were successful, given that I had a different life trajectory than a popular user in finance. “I asked him how tattoos were doing in the positive world of investing. They’re obviously an initiator of verbal exchange,” Arnold told me with a laugh. “People know immediately that they are meeting someone who has taken another path in life. He lives it and possesses it.
I asked Jeff Korzenik, lead economist at Fifth Third Bank and private investor at Rock Yard, if he saw a threat in betting on someone with a criminal record. He told me it was the other way around. ” Daniel is not afraid,” Korzenik says. All the things you have triumphed over in life either bring you down or make you immune to defeat. When you think about all the obstacles he’s been through, he’s a committed and resilient person.
The credibility of the street also has value. ” It’s adaptable,” says Johan Bjurman Bergman, who worked with Dart for several months on the Saudi project. “You can go over to Skid Row and engage in a verbal exchange with someone. who has been homeless for 10 years, and then heads to the rooms where you met him. “Like probably everyone else, Bergman met Dart at a conference, where he stood out among the world’s laid-back entrepreneurs thanks to his iconic beanie and tattoos.
Dart insists he was innocent of the kidnapping and carjacking charges he spent three years in prison for. Yet he recognizes value in the experience. “I can make the case that going to prison is the very best thing that happened to me,” he says. “If there were no repercussions, I’d be dead. I’m glad I got to a place where I got to clean up and reset.”
Scars remain, due to the trauma of the years of training and the surprise of the criminal. After being cleared of crime for the second time, Dart suffered from normal panic attacks for a few years. He still suffers from anxiety and he told me that is the theme of this story. He has abundant anxiety.
So I asked why he agreed to cooperate with me in the first place. “I’m really proud of what I achieved,” he explained. “For many years I just thought I’d never get out of the hole. I remember eating raw potatoes and living weeks and months eating nothing but ramen. Now I feel like it’s bigger than me. For everyone trying to rebuild their life, I want the chance to show people we’re redeemable and worth backing.”
It’s been less than 10 years since Daniel Dart left prison, got sober, and started building a unique, multipronged career. Once he finishes at MIT, he plans to dive full time into his VC firm, maintain his advocacy for “second chance” hiring of former convicts, and maybe teach at MIT or another university on topics related to criminal justice and entrepreneurship. He’s written several new songs and might get his band back together.
Beyond that, how far will it go? I asked who has invested in Dart where they are most likely to end up. “He’s a special user who knew how to build relationships at the highest levels of finance, government, and foreign affairs,” the investor told me. “He’s in this kind of emptiness up. I’m sure there’s a ceiling somewhere, but I don’t see anything I can’t do.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
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