Alumni profile: Michael Mancinelli, S.B. '15, MS/MBA '21

What should’ve been a routine physical changed Michael Mancinelli’s life. Just six months after finishing his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Mancinelli was working at Ball Aerospace in Colorado when he was diagnosed with stage 4 Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Though he responded well to his initial treatment, he eventually relapsed, and it’d be a full two years until he was finally declared cancer-free.

“It's one of those tricky cancers in that usually they're pretty aggressive, which can mean that it can go bad really quickly, but it also means that they can be fairly treatable or curable,” said Mancinelli, S.B. '15, MS/MBA '21. “That experience made me realize I didn't want to just sit around and wait. It was time for me to go back to school, shake up my career and try to do some riskier things now, because I don't know if I'm going to make it to 60 or 70 and retire at that point.”

Already possessing a strong engineering background, Mancinelli wanted to supplement it with entrepreneurship. So he returned to Harvard for the MS/MBA program co-run by SEAS and Harvard Business School. 

“The MS/MBA was a miracle,” he said. “I thought, if I do the MBA and I hate it, I'm also getting a master's in engineering, which is fantastic. I could go back and continue my career as an engineer without really missing a step. It was a beautiful surprise that it was so focused on entrepreneurship.”

The MS/MBA provided exactly what Mancinelli needed. He co-founded his first company while he was still in the program. When that ended, he co-founded his current one, Tully, which is developing a software platform to help athletic programs with limited resources track their players’ improvement. Though still in its pre-seed fundraising stages, Tully is already being used at 150 campuses across the country.

“By this time next year, we want to be close to 100,000 athletes on the product,” said Mancinelli, who is president of the company. “There's so much cool tech out there, but all these experiences that I've accumulated both in academia and industry taught me we could either serve a couple hundred of the top programs that have the budgets and the team and the staff to run wearable devices and camera systems and lasers, or we could potentially serve tens of thousands of less sophisticated organizations that really need a lot of help through this software solution.”

Co-founding a software company geared towards athletic programs is the perfect combination of everything Mancinelli cares about. A state-champion high school football player in Colorado, Mancinelli also liked science and engineering. He didn’t want to sacrifice an education for college football, so his coach steered him towards the Ivy League. Recruited by several universities, he eventually chose Harvard, where he helped the Crimson win multiple league championships. While here, he concentrated in electrical engineering, with a secondary in astrophysics.

“I love seeing the practical applications of mathematical and physics concepts, and that's what engineering is,” he said. “It's the manifestation in the real world of these awesome concepts that we learn in physics and math. I always loved getting my hands on things. I also loved computer programming, but I usually liked it when I was controlling something in real life or taking data in from sensors in real life and then using that in the digital domain.”

Mancinelli interned at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory one summer as an undergraduate. Wanting to stay in the aerospace industry but be closer to home after graduating, he joined Ball Aerospace, where he spent four years as a tactical mission analyst and lead analyst and systems engineer. 

“I got to work on a lot of communication systems for fighter jets used by the U.S. Air Force,” he said. “They have in-depth RF radio frequency and electrical engineering systems that would then feed into the radio and into the digital domain. My group worked on making those digital signal processing connections more reliable.”

Once he returned to graduate school, Mancinelli shifted to starting companies of his own. His first was Human Dynamics, which aimed to build drones that could take on some of the more dangerous tasks of working at great heights, such as roof inspection or skyscraper construction. Mancinelli and his co-founders developed the idea throughout his second year in the MS/MBA, but with several of his co-founders not from the U.S., the venture had to close when their academic visas expired and they returned home.

“One of the biggest takeaways from Human Dynamics was understanding the kind of magnitude of the capital involved to get a certain idea off the ground,” he said. “When we started Tully in 2022, we wanted to be very capital efficient, start a business that didn't require a lot of money to grow, so that we could be in control and learn as we go. And I wanted to do it with someone that I've been in the trenches with that I just know, without a doubt, will go through the highs and lows with me.”

That person was Adam Redmond, who’d played football with Mancinelli at Harvard. Redmond played in the National Football League from 2016-21, retired and joined Mancinelli as a co-founder and CEO at Tully.

“Another lesson that I learned in the MS/MBA and was reinforced by my Human Dynamics experience was that starting any business is going to be hard, so why don't we pick something that we have a unique advantage in,” he said. “For us it was taking Adam's immediate credibility and network in athletics, and my background building technical solutions. We tried to the best of our ability to take the academic approach to entrepreneurship that I learned in the MS/MBA: test and learn and discover a problem, and then build your business. This wasn’t the sitcom version of entrepreneurship where you wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea.”

Tully itself changed multiple times before reaching its current form. At first, they wanted to create a wearable device like a Fitbit or Apple Watch. They also looked at some of the camera-based assessment programs on the market, where athletes would be recorded and analyzed based on footage. But then they realized that not only would those products be much tougher to bring to market – they would also be more expensive to purchase, limiting who could use them.

“There's this massive market of middle-school to college-aged athletes that are training for competition, they’re hungry for data, but because of the age that they're at and the teams that they play on, all their training is coach-led,” he said. “It's coordinated through athletic organizations, whether it's a school or a club team. Because of that, there are not very many teams that can buy 250 wearable devices for everybody.”

Mancinelli continues to use his SEAS education to this day. Sometimes that’s his engineering degree, such as whenever he has to debug the software or prototype a new feature, and sometimes that’s the entrepreneurial side, such as finding new clients. But between the education and the people he met, Harvard has been critical to Mancinelli building a company that taps into everything he cares about.

“This is my baby,” he said. “It's something that I have complete co-ownership over with Adam, so of course it's going to be a collection of all the things that I love to do and all the things that I've experienced.”