Mainul Mondal has a useful way of describing the first step into unfamiliar territory. Imagine being handed an instrument you have never played. Or being given a prompt and asked to improvise. There is no finished performance to consult, no comfortable memory of having done it before. Someone still has to begin. For the founder and CEO of Ellipsis Health, the interesting part is how a person turns that uncertainty into something they can work with.
His question is simple: “How do you transfer an unknown to a known?” It has the advantage of sounding equally reasonable in a rehearsal room and a business meeting. Mondal has spent time thinking about both. His college studies included economics and theater design. Later came management consulting, work across institutional boundaries, and the decision to establish a company in 2017. The route has enough turns to make a straight career ladder look rather underemployed.
There is a temptation, with any founder, to arrange the early years into a procession of clues. Every interest becomes preparation; every detour becomes strategy. Mondal offers a less polished recollection. He has described himself as lost in college. Economics and theater design coexisted with uncertainty about where he was going. That admission gives the subsequent career some welcome room to breathe. A person can be curious before becoming purposeful. The business card generally arrives later.
What connects those interests is a willingness to work through a problem with other people. A design has to survive a production. An economic argument has to reckon with incentives. A company has to do both sorts of work, while remembering to pay the bills. Mondal’s account of his own development keeps returning to the distance between understanding an idea and making it happen.
“How do you transfer an unknown to a known?”
Mainul Mondal
The consultant who wanted to stay for the doing
His first jobs after college were in management consulting. He valued the training: breaking a large problem into smaller pieces, putting a framework around it, and helping a leadership team decide what should happen next. There is satisfaction in making a complicated situation legible. There is also a point at which the presentation ends and somebody else inherits the consequences.
Mondal wanted to cross that boundary. Advising a chief executive about the next move left him wanting to take part in the move itself. That is a revealing explanation for becoming a founder. It begins with an appetite for responsibility. The analysis remains useful, but now the person explaining the plan must also help recruit the people, assemble the resources, and stay when the first version needs repair.
Before Ellipsis, he helped launch ClearStreme with Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute. The initiative brought together private industry, research institutions, development banks, and governments around cleaner combustion technologies. Such a list can look tidy on paper. In practice, it describes parties with different priorities and different reasons to say yes. It is a useful setting in which to learn that technical promise and institutional cooperation are separate pieces of work.
His earlier professional life also included a Rockefeller fellowship. Across those experiences, the recurring activity was bringing knowledge into contact with organizations that might use it. The founder’s job would concentrate that work into one enterprise. He could no longer leave the implementation question at the end of somebody else’s agenda.
A childhood bigger than a career plan
Mondal grew up in Bangladesh, in a family that valued public service and innovation intended for many people. That background supplies context for the scale of his ambitions. His interest in building a business sits alongside a longstanding interest in who gets to benefit from an idea. He talks about service as something that belongs in the work, rather than an activity waiting politely outside office hours.
The civic side of his career has taken several forms. He has served on the board of Super Stars Literacy, supporting reading and writing for children in underserved Bay Area communities. His international activities have included the Australian American Leadership Delegation and service as a trustee of the World Affairs Council. These are different settings, but each involves making an institution useful to people beyond its immediate staff.
His relationship with creativity has continued, too. Mondal paints as an amateur, an interest he describes as a way to recharge his creativity. Alongside the theater studies, it gives his biography an appealing practical texture. Making something requires decisions that cannot all be settled in advance. At some point a person has to choose a color, move a piece, try a version, and see what the choice has done.
That does not turn a painting into a business manual. It does make his instrument-and-improvisation analogy feel less like an ornamental quotation. He has made room for creative work while pursuing an executive career. The willingness to enter an unfamiliar task appears in how he talks about learning, as well as in the range of things he has chosen to do.
Hire beyond your own answers
Ask Mondal about entrepreneurial mistakes and his answer is brief: loss of focus. Ask about lessons, and he turns quickly toward the people doing the work. His advice is to hire people with greater expertise than your own, give others the benefit of positive intent, and take failures seriously as opportunities to learn. The founder who follows that advice has to tolerate being corrected.
There is a small but consequential surrender involved. Hiring capable people means allowing their knowledge to change the plan. Assuming positive intent means leaving room for a disagreement to contain useful information. Learning from a failure means examining what happened closely enough to find your own contribution. None of this gives a chief executive an especially glamorous afternoon. It does give a team a chance to improve.
By 2023, Mondal was speaking about belonging and the value of people trained in different disciplines working on the same problem. He also spoke about helping others and letting go of people who are unkind. Taken together, those concerns suggest a view of culture with both generosity and boundaries. Welcoming people into a company does not remove the responsibility to consider how they treat one another.
The distinction matters for a founder whose preferred unit of achievement is a group. Different professional backgrounds can enlarge the range of possible answers. They can also make communication harder. A sense of belonging is useful precisely when the discussion becomes difficult, when the team encounters an obstacle and people need a reason to keep contributing. In Mondal’s telling, community is part of how the work gets done.
When the address was the problem
For all that attention to people, one early introduction went memorably wrong. In summer 2017, Ellipsis sent its first employee an offer letter carrying an obsolete office address. The company had moved a week earlier. Mondal had reviewed the terms closely and missed the letterhead. When the new hire visited before starting, she found an abandoned office and called to ask whether the company was real.
The lesson was uncomfortably literal: a carefully considered offer can still send someone to the wrong place. It is an excellent founding anecdote because the mistake is both ordinary and consequential. Nobody needs a complicated theory to understand the new employee’s concern. The organization had made a promise, and the first attempt to find it produced an empty office.
Even in a technology company, some persuasive evidence is stubbornly physical. A door opens. A colleague is there. The address on the letter matches the place where the work happens. The episode puts a human scale on the executive’s responsibilities. The person joining has to be able to trust the details through which the organization presents itself.
The years between the idea and the announcement
In fall 2020, Mondal joined the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center’s Milestone Makers cohort. The program offered individual mentorship, executive coaching, and access to a network of industry experts. It is a useful marker in his career: three years after starting Ellipsis, he was still putting himself in a setting designed for founders to learn and work toward a specific milestone.
He has also taken his experience into university lectures and workshops, including appearances at Stanford, the University of California, and the Indian Institutes of Technology. The movement between learner and speaker suits the rest of his story. He can explain how he approaches a problem while continuing to seek people whose knowledge exceeds his own.
June 2025 brought a larger corporate milestone: Ellipsis announced a $45 million financing round led by Salesforce, Khosla Ventures, and CVS Health Ventures. The figure belongs to the company. For Mondal’s career, its significance is the new set of commitments that comes with having outside institutions back the work. An announcement compresses years of effort into a number; the work after it immediately expands again.
There is continuity beneath those changes in scale. The consulting graduate wanted to participate in implementation. The founder wanted colleagues with different kinds of expertise. The executive sought mentorship after the company was already running. His public account keeps making space for the contribution of other people, even as his own responsibilities grow.
Making room for the next attempt
One of the more telling details about Mondal is the combination of broad interests and insistence on focus. Painting, theater design, economics, civic boards, and technology do not fit neatly into one professional drawer. Yet he is clear about the cost of a company losing direction. Curiosity can supply possibilities. Running an organization requires choosing which possibility deserves the next day’s work.
That tension gives his story its shape. He has moved from examining choices to being answerable for them, while retaining the habit of looking across disciplines. His ambition is to build something useful to many people, with a team capable of more than any individual member. Those aims are demanding enough without pretending that the path toward them was obvious from the beginning.
The unfamiliar instrument remains a good place to leave him. You can study its construction, gather experienced players, and agree on what you hope to make. Eventually somebody must try a note. Mondal’s career has been a series of increasingly consequential attempts to make that first uncertain action lead somewhere other people can follow.