How Outreach's CEO Went From Selling PCs to Building a $4.4B Sales AI Powerhouse

Manny Medina had $1 million in investment capital left and was selling office computers to pay outstanding bills. His first startup, GroupTalent, was two months away from shutting down. Today, he's built Outreach along with Wes Hather, Gordon Hempton, and Andrew Kinzer into a $4.4 billion company that processes over 33 million sales interactions weekly and serves more than 6,000 customers including Zoom, Twilio, and McKesson.

Breaking Family Traditions

Born to engineer parents in Ecuador, Medina's childhood blended hard work on his stepmother's shrimp farm with mandatory summer reading. "My family was well-educated but we didn't have a lot of money. I was sent to private schools and there wasn't money left to buy a computer," he shares.

Like many teenagers, he rebelled against his parents' career plans. "I told them that I didn't want to be an engineer. I told them that I wanted to be an economist," Medina recalls. "Of course, my parents completely ignored me."

His decision to study in America rather than Europe came from a similar spirit of defiance. "The original plan was to go to Germany. My parents put a higher value on the education you could get in Europe when it came to engineering. I think that I came to the US mostly because I was fighting with my dad."