Founder Spotlight: Manny Medina, Outreach CEO

Why did you start Outreach?

At the core, I’m an entrepreneur and have always been interested in building my own business. That’s what led me to enroll in TechStars’ 2011 class, along with my three business partners. We founded a company that was essentially a marketplace to connect teams of developers to the companies looking to hire them. But we were struggling to handle the volume of prospecting required to build both sides of that marketplace, so we built our own platform to help our sales team of one operate like a team of 10. The companies we sold to were much more interested in buying that platform than our recruiting service, so we eventually doubled down on building that out. That was the genesis of what has become Outreach.

Why did you choose to work with Founders’ Co-op?

Founders’ Co-op understands the very early stages of a startup. The days when things don’t scale, when product market fit is a moving target and success is unclear. It takes a special kind of partner to ride alongside of you in the early stages and make sure you make it to the next milestone, even if it means doubling down in support of you when things look more uncertain than ever. That’s Founders’ Co-op!

Why Seattle?

Because a combination of cost of living, outdoors, and Microsoft/Amazon/Google/eBay makes it easy to recruit top notch talent and scale out your team efficiently and quickly.
The bay is a quick 1hour and 15 mins away, so its like being local in the entire west coast!

Nugget for founders?

Don’t run your business by pattern matching. Patterns only work until they don’t. Operate out of first principles.