A founder’s name can remain attached to a company long after his job changes. Ed Gaussen’s did. In May 2023, the co-founder of Mantra Health moved from chief executive to president, while his fellow founder Matt Kennedy moved from chief operating officer to CEO. The company called the decision proactive. The two people who had helped build it were changing the way they worked together.
There is a useful story in that exchange of chairs. Founding gives a person a permanent place in a company’s history. Running it is a job with responsibilities that can be reassigned. Those two things often share a business card, which makes them easy to confuse. Gaussen and Kennedy chose to separate them.
Gaussen’s new brief was outward-facing: relationships with partners, investors and industry experts. Kennedy would lead the company’s functions and long-term direction. For a former venture investor who had become a founder, it was another change in vantage point. He would still be involved in the enterprise he had started, with a different set of keys.
The investor crosses the table
Gaussen’s earlier career included growth work at Tinder and an associate role at White Star Capital. He attended McGill University. The sequence matters because investing and operating offer different kinds of proximity to a business. An investor can spend an afternoon questioning a founder’s assumptions. A founder gets to spend the evening discovering which of those assumptions survived the afternoon.
White Star gave him experience inside the venture world before Mantra’s founding in 2018. He arrived at entrepreneurship familiar with the language of capital, the evaluation of young businesses and the people who finance them. Those are useful preparations. They do not make a customer sign a contract.
The attraction of starting a company is that the person asking questions can finally act on the answers. The price is responsibility for what happens next. A market map offers a view of the territory; a company has to make its way across it. In Gaussen’s career, the move from associate to co-founder marks that change from evaluating possibilities to choosing one.
He was joined by Kennedy and Ravi Shah. A company with several founders has several people able to remember its beginnings, and several people with a claim on its future. The arrangement makes the later leadership change especially interesting. Kennedy was already part of the original undertaking. This was a redistribution of responsibility among people who had been there together.
Four desks are an honest beginning
In January 2019, Gaussen moved into a four-desk office in New York’s Flatiron neighborhood. There was pre-seed money in the bank and a visa still to come. The photograph from that period shows him with Kennedy, windows behind them and the unceremonious surroundings of an early office. It has the advantage of looking like somewhere people might actually work.
The office is a useful scale for understanding a beginning. Four desks can hold a team, but very little mythology. There is nowhere for an elaborate hierarchy to sit. The people making decisions are close to the people who have to carry them out, frequently because they are the same people.
New York was a deliberate choice. Gaussen has described selecting the city for its talent, proximity to established industry players and access to capital. Put those reasons together and the city looks less like a backdrop than a set of working relationships. A founder needs people who can join, people who can introduce, and people who might eventually say yes.
Gaussen is Swiss, and his professional home is New York. His LinkedIn profile lists French, English and Spanish at native or bilingual proficiency. That is a concrete personal detail in a career conducted through conversations. Three languages do not settle a negotiation, of course. They do offer three ways to begin one.
The university becomes a relationship
The company built its business around colleges and universities. An early conversation with Gaussen and Kennedy described five school partners, including Penn State and Hamilton. The contrast between those institutions is worth keeping in view: a large public university and a small liberal arts college both require a company to understand the organization sitting across the table.
A campus is a place with its own routines, people and memory. Selling to an institution means entering those existing relationships. The founder’s job includes finding out who will use the work, who will approve it and who will still be answering questions after the initial excitement has worn off. A contract begins a relationship whose practical details arrive later.
By 2023, the company listed Penn State, MIT, Cornell and Miami Dade College among its partners. Those names span public, private and community-college settings. The range is more revealing than a string of familiar logos. It suggests how many different institutional environments the founders had chosen to work within.
This helps explain the importance of Gaussen’s eventual presidential brief. Partner relationships are work in their own right. Someone must keep learning how an institution operates as the company grows. The person who opened a conversation can remain useful years after it has become a recurring appointment, a budget line and a commitment.
Capital brings its own calendar
Mantra announced a $22 million Series A in January 2022, led by VMG Partners. Gaussen and Kennedy appeared together to discuss the financing. A funding announcement gives the public a tidy moment: an amount, an investor and a date. Inside a company, it marks the start of decisions about what the money will make possible.
Gaussen’s fundraising advice was practical. He emphasized selecting investors with a relevant thesis, keeping the process organized and preserving attention for operations. The tension is familiar to anyone who has had to obtain resources while continuing the work those resources are meant to support. Raising money fills a calendar that was already full.
His familiarity with venture capital gave that advice a particular grounding. The founder now seeking a check had previously worked on the investment side. He understood that a conversation with a fund has a purpose and a set of expectations. Choosing whom to approach is itself a decision about how to spend a company’s time.
His hiring plans also allowed for people beyond New York. In 2022, he described a SoHo headquarters alongside a hybrid team and employees working remotely around the United States. The four-desk beginning had given way to a broader question: where could the company find the people it needed? The answer no longer had to fit inside one room.
A title changes; the partnership continues
The handoff came the following year. Gaussen spoke about the integrity, dedication and resilience involved in going through entrepreneurship together. “Matt and I see eye to eye in these values,” he said. The sentence puts the relationship ahead of the organizational chart. There would be a new chart, but the people inside it already knew each other.
It is tempting to read a CEO transition as a verdict on the person leaving the seat. The more useful question here is what responsibilities each founder took on. Gaussen remained president and co-founder. Kennedy became CEO. The publicly stated aim was to accelerate the company through a change they had chosen together.
For readers thinking about their own work, the distinction is concrete. A person can stay committed to an enterprise while changing the job they do within it. Founding history is fixed. Present responsibilities can move. The title on a business card describes the current arrangement; it cannot carry the entire relationship.
Gaussen also appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2023. Recognition and a leadership transition arrived in the same broad chapter of his career. One offered a public acknowledgment of what he had helped create. The other asked what role he would play in its next stage. Neither question is answered permanently by the other.
“Falling in love with the idea instead of the problem.”
Ed Gaussen, on a mistake entrepreneurs make
A Swiss answer to a New York question
Asked for his favorite outdoor dining restaurant in New York, Gaussen chose Cafe Select. His explanation was disarmingly precise: he was Swiss, and the restaurant sat halfway between his office and home. “I’m biased because I’m Swiss,” he admitted. Affection and a convenient journey can make a perfectly respectable selection committee.
The answer is a welcome interruption to the vocabulary of financing and expansion. A founder still has to decide where to eat. The distance between the office and home still exists. When professional biographies turn every ordinary preference into a leadership lesson, a restaurant chosen partly for its location offers some resistance.
In April 2025, Gaussen visited student entrepreneurs at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Its entrepreneurship center welcomed him to its open office hours to share his journey and insights. It is a fitting setting for someone whose own path has included growth work, investing, founding and a change in executive responsibility.
Office hours allow a different kind of encounter from a company announcement. The audience includes people still working out what they intend to build. For them, a founder’s chronology contains more than a result. It contains decisions made before the result was available: a career change, a co-founder, an office and eventually a revised role.
The company keeps moving
By September 2026, Mantra reported a presence across more than 150 colleges and universities. That month it announced a three-year collaboration with Santa Clara University around its Beacon platform. In October, the addition of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College completed its partnerships with all four institutions in an Indiana consortium. These are company milestones, reached by a team larger than its founders.
They give Gaussen’s career its present scale without making him the sole author of the work. His role remains co-founder and president. There are more institutions, more people and more relationships involved than there were at the beginning. A company that keeps growing also keeps acquiring people whose contributions deserve space in the story.
The early office photograph is still worth returning to. It records a beginning before the titles changed and before the organization became harder to fit in a frame. Gaussen helped build something with other people. Years later, he changed his part in it. The keys changed hands; the work continued.