#UCtheGood: Lindner faculty member, students breathe life into ventilator startup

That Boston-based engineer and entrepreneur, Tyler Mantel, is the son of Sue Mantel, PhD ’94 and MBA ’86, marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati Carl H. Lindner College of Business. Within two weeks of its founding, the rest of the Mantel family — sons Ryan and Preston, Sue herself, and her husband, Mike, MBA ’83 — had joined Tyler’s effort and were recruiting likely candidates to join the team ranks or donate what they could to help raise the $2.4 million required to spool up manufacturing within 30 days.

“A ventilator is not really a complicated mechanical design, but it is a very complicated supply chain problem to get 13 million out in a few months,” said Ventilator Project Co-Founder Tyler Mantel. “The only people in the world that can rise to that sort of scale is startups.”

The Ventilator Project’s team consists of 200 multi-disciplinary individuals putting the theories of remote work, iterative product development, agile project management and navigating compressed review and testing processes into practice.

“When Tyler called to tell me he was going to do it, he said, ‘I need people, I need marketing, I need doctors …’ and, you know, we’ve always just kind of pulled together as a family,” said Professor Mantel, who leads e-marketing for The Ventilator Project. “We’re just really proud of all three of our sons and what they do in the real world, as well as coming together on a project like this, bringing their unique qualities to the cause and asking for help.”

The Ventilator Project has become more than a Mantel family affair. Lindner College of Business students who found themselves suddenly available due to cancelled study abroad or co-op experiences started applying for open roles and pivoting their career aspirations and experiential learning pursuits towards the cause.