The 30-Day Ventilator And Why Most People Will Never Ship Anything That Matters

You want to know the difference between people who say they're going to build something and people who actually build it?

It's not talent. It's not funding. It's not even having the best idea.

It's showing up during the crisis.

I recently talked to Marcel Botha, who—along with a consortium team in New York—designed, built, and shipped 3,000 ventilators in 30 days during the COVID pandemic. Not as a PR stunt. Not as a lab exercise. They actually shipped them to hospitals in New York City where doctors used them to keep people alive.

When I asked him about it, he made a comment that stuck: "We took 15 years of experience and compressed it into 30 days. It was supposed to look like an overnight success, but the overnight part was just the visibility."

That's the part nobody talks about. Everyone loves the glamorous story—built in 30 days, saved lives, got famous. What they don't see is the 15 years of relationships, experience, and preparation that made those 30 days possible.

The Unsexy Part: Years Of Practice

Here's what most people don't understand about experimentation and shipping: The speed doesn't come from working harder. It comes from already knowing how to work.

Marcel didn't just show up in March 2020 with a brilliant idea. He'd spent the previous 15 years working at MIT, starting companies, building products, failing, learning, and building relationships with the exact people he'd need to pull this off.

He'd co-founded Sniff Labs—this crazy company that built a smart dog tag back in 2005. It was ahead of its time by about a decade. The technology was right. The market wasn't ready. They got crushed when Lehman Brothers collapsed and nobody was buying $300 dog tracking systems.

Did he learn something from that failure? Of course. But here's what he learned that mattered: How to work with brilliant engineers. How to navigate supply chains. How to do rapid prototyping. How to keep moving when things aren't working.

Then he worked on medical devices. Diabetes management products. Then he founded 10X Beta, a consulting and design firm that worked on everything from electric wheelchairs to drug delivery systems.

By the time he got the call about the ventilators, he wasn't starting from zero. He had 15 years of knowing how to move fast, how to solve hardware problems, and—critically—who to call when things got hard.

The MVP That Actually Saved Lives

When New York City realized they were going to run out of ventilators, they needed something that could be manufactured at scale, quickly, and reliably.

MIT had been working on a ventilator design based on a resuscitation bag—basically a mechanical squeeze pump. It wasn't revolutionary technology. It was elegant engineering applied to something that worked. But it needed partners to actually build it and get it approved.

Marcel's team came in on day 11. They started working on day one of their involvement.

Here's what they did: They worked with MIT on the design. They created version 1.6 of the ventilator. They got FDA emergency use approval in 30 days. They didn't test it on humans first—they tested it on pig lungs, on dummy bodies, on lung simulators, and on themselves with controlled parameters. Then, once they had approval, real doctors tested it on real patients in actual hospitals.

And here's the part that matters: They actually shipped 3,000 of them.

Other groups said they were going to make ventilators. One team said they'd make 1,000. I think Michigan said something similar. But when you ask "How many actually shipped?"—the number drops dramatically. Because making one prototype and making three thousand units that actually work in hospitals with all the reliability and safety requirements—those are completely different things.

Marcel's team did both.

Why This Matters Beyond The Pandemic

The real insight here isn't "work really hard and you can accomplish anything." That's inspiration-poster garbage that doesn't reflect how the world works.

The real insight is something much darker and much more useful: Most people fundamentally underestimate the work required to ship something. They think "minimum viable product" means "quick and dirty." It doesn't. It means "What's the smallest, most elegant thing we can build that actually proves the idea?"

When you're building a ventilator, "quick and dirty" gets people killed. So they built something that was small but rigorous. Simple but complete. Fast but not reckless.

This is where a lot of corporate innovation teams screw up. They want to move fast, so they cut corners on things that matter. They half-ass the design. They don't test properly. They don't build relationships with the people who can actually help them manufacture at scale.

Then they wonder why their MVP doesn't work or never ships.

Marcel's approach was different. He worked insane hours—100, 120 hour weeks—not because he's superhuman, but because the quality of the work mattered. He brought in people who knew what they were doing. He didn't compromise on the fundamentals even though they were moving at breakneck speed.

And he understood something that most startup founders never quite get: You need suppliers. You need partners. You need people who give a shit about what you're building.

When you're trying to source critical components during a pandemic, you can't just send an email and hope for the best. You need relationships. You need credibility. You need people who know you can deliver on your promises.

The System That Makes Speed Possible

Here's what most people miss when they look at the ventilator story: It only worked because Marcel had already built a system for how he works.

He gets up at 5 AM every morning. He has a call with his business partners at 6 AM. He's ruthlessly protected that routine even with three kids at home. Because when you're balancing multiple projects and trying to move fast on all of them, the only way you survive is systems.

He says yes to fewer things than he used to. He doesn't give answers on the spot anymore. He's learned that most opportunities can wait 24 hours, and by waiting, you make better decisions.

And critically—he picks his projects based on two criteria: relevance and scale. Are we solving something that matters? Can we actually make this impact a lot of people?

That's why he jumped on the ventilator project. It was relevant (pandemic, people dying, New York choking). It was scalable (needed thousands of units, not thousands of people). And it played to his strengths (hardware, design, moving fast).

But it's also why he says no to a lot of other things. Because most opportunities fail the relevance or scale test. They're interesting enough, but they don't matter enough to be worth his time.

This is the discipline that separates people who ship from people who never do.

The Part About Not Being Reckless

One thing that stood out when I talked to Marcel: He was very careful not to claim that they invented something revolutionary. The ventilator they built wasn't based on new principles. It wasn't cutting-edge science.

It was elegant engineering applied to a well-understood problem, executed with discipline and speed.

And honestly? That's harder than inventing something new.

Anyone can come up with an idea. Transforming an idea into something that actually works and that people actually use—that requires solving hundreds of tiny problems that nobody thinks about until you try to manufacture it at scale.

How do you source the components when all the usual suppliers are slammed? How do you train manufacturers to build something that's never been built before? How do you get regulatory approval without cutting corners on safety? How do you handle the inevitable problems that show up the first time you manufacture units at scale?

These aren't sexy problems. They're not the kind of thing you'll read about in Fast Company. But they're the difference between a prototype that works once and a system that works 3,000 times.

Most innovation teams never get this far because they give up before they have to solve these problems. They build the prototype, declare victory, and move on.

But if your goal is actually to impact the world, you have to be willing to sit with the unsexy, painful, iterative work of making something real and making it scale.

Why This Matters (Even If You're Not Building Ventilators)

You're probably not going to manufacture medical devices. Most people won't. But the principles here apply to anything you want to actually ship.

First: A minimum viable product isn't a minimum viable hack. It's the smallest possible version of something that actually works and that you can actually test with real people.

Second: Speed comes from preparation, not panic. Marcel's team moved fast because they'd already spent 15 years learning how to move fast. You don't develop that skill during a crisis. You develop it over years of work.

Third: Ship matters more than perfection. The difference between a ventilator that works 99% of the time and one that works 99.5% of the time is maybe a million dollars in R&D. But it's not what matters. What matters is getting something out the door that helps people right now.

Fourth: Systems beat intensity. You can't work 120-hour weeks forever. But if you build a system that lets you work smartly for most of the year, then you can sprint when you need to.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's what nobody wants to admit about shipping things: It's not actually that hard. What's hard is caring enough. What's hard is saying no to other things. What's hard is putting your reputation on the line and doing the work when you're not sure it's going to work.

Most people don't do that. Most people prefer to talk about innovation than to actually build something.

Marcel built something. In 30 days. During a pandemic. With a team he'd never worked with before. And it actually saved lives.

That's not a feel-good story about working hard. That's a story about what's possible when you're willing to accept the mess, the uncertainty, and the unglamorous work of making something real.

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Want The Full Story?

Listen to Yaniv Corem's full conversation with Marcel Botha on The School of Innovation podcast. It's one of the best interviews I've heard about what actually happens when you try to build something that matters at speed.

Because here's the thing: You don't get to choose whether the world needs you to ship. The world decides that for you. The only choice you get is whether you're ready.