From @Elizabeth Reynolds:
We launched a company to manufacture and distribute ventilator splitters to address the critical shortage of ventilators nationally and globally.
My best friend and I were in the early planning phase for a think tank/consulting/contracting business when this pandemic started. I have been starting to shift my focus from doing work to seeing problems in the world and helping, and I was devouring all the COVID news and looking for where I could add value... Another friend sent me the YouTube video of the doctor demonstrating how one could split ventilators, and I looked at that and knew I had a solution. Occam's Razor: it's essentially plumbing. And though it can be done with existing supplies, supplies of everything run short in a pandemic, and having something that is clearly designed for and labeled as a solution to a problem is valuable in times of mental/emotional exhaustion. I started doing research, and I reached out to my uncle who works in injection molding....he got me a CAD design that night (a Saturday), and he had his whole company onboard, and I had my company paperwork filed by Monday. I called my best friend and said, I did something crazy... and she said, I'm with you.
And here we are, three weeks later. We have a company, a website, insurance, accountants, a law firm, marketing materials, a PR firm, mold in hand, our first samples, a hospital doing the FDA tests we need, and an EUA in process... And all these people have said, how can I help? I have two other close friends all in on this project with us: an old friend from Reed with a background in communications and project management, and another friend who did medical device sales for 20 years before she got into the medical cannabis space. Our racially diverse, all female team makes super happy too. Teddy is my mentor–my ballast–in this, and we have a medical advisor as of yesterday!
We are doing good work. Work in the deep, personal sense, not the sort of work one does for a payment. But we have reached the limits on what we can build with sweat and love and support from our personal communities and need some money to scale production. So...if you could help me get traction on that GoFundMe, it would help us help the world.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/ayama/