Manny Medina grew up in Ecuador. His parents had planned for him to study engineering in East Germany, but after the Berlin Wall fell he asked his father to let him study software engineering. His father agreed if he earned a graduate degree.
He left for the United States at 20. His English was weak at first and building a social life in New Jersey took about a year. He earned a computer engineering degree at Stevens Institute of Technology and a master's at the University of Pennsylvania.
He was the third employee on the AWS team at Amazon and later spent about six years at Microsoft. Around age 40 he left Microsoft with no concrete plan, saying he wanted to contribute something meaningful and have control over outcomes.
Outreach was founded in Seattle in 2014. It raised $65 million in 2018, and a round in June 2021 valued the company at $4.4 billion.