MANUEL “MANNY” VAZQUEZ
Product-focused builder working across AI, robotics, customer discovery, and go-to-market strategy. I enjoy taking ambiguous problems, understanding the people behind them, and turning those insights into products people actually want to use.
About · My Story
I’m a Bay Area college student who got pulled into technology because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Somewhere between my first case competition and my first real customer call, I figured out that my favorite part of building isn’t the code or the pitch. It’s the moment you finally understand why someone actually needs the thing.
That curiosity has taken me through a pretty unusual mix of rooms: small business sales and operations, supporting founders at entrepreneurship centers, a Goldman Sachs development program, early product work at BuilderFlow, a Google case competition where our team made the podium, and now operating robots at Physical Intelligence.
None of it was a straight line, and that’s kind of the point. Every stop taught me a different piece of the same craft: understand people, make good bets, ship, and pay attention to what happens next. Product is the direction I’m heading, but what I really care about is being close to hard problems and good teams, wherever that takes me.
AI + Product
Primary Focus
Bay Area
Home Base
Builder
Mindset
Customer First
Product Philosophy
“The products I find most interesting aren’t just technically impressive. They make someone’s life meaningfully easier.”
Experience · My Journey
2024 to now: business, operations, sales, and entrepreneurship, then the shift into AI, product, and robotics.
2024
High School Graduate
East Palo Alto, CA
Graduated from Eastside College Prep and started building experience across business, sales, operations, entrepreneurship, and technology. Eastside pushed me toward opportunities beyond the classroom and toward a career built on learning by doing.
Sales & Operations Intern → Specialist
My first look at how a small business actually runs behind the scenes. Started as an intern across property operations, customer communication, marketing, sales, and invoicing, then earned a specialist role where I analyzed rental properties, prepared renovation estimates, and built Excel systems for tracking and invoicing.
Progression
What it taught me: How sales, operations, finance, customer experience, and technology come together inside a real business.
Apprenticeship / Professional Development Program
Remote
A year-long program focused on professional development, leadership, financial markets, and business strategy. It showed me how a global financial institution approaches decisions and what it expects from the people making them.
What it taught me: How large organizations approach business strategy, financial decision-making, and professional development.
Sales & Service Associate
Weekend front desk and membership work while juggling school and everything else. Lots of face time with customers, which taught me to figure out what someone needs quickly and communicate value without wasting their time.
What it taught me: How to listen, communicate value, and understand customer motivation.
2025
Business & Entrepreneurship
Learning how businesses operate → learning how entrepreneurs build them.
Program Support Intern
Stepped away from Property Force to support entrepreneurs through the Small Business Development Center: program operations, client support, funding resources, CRM management, reporting, and events. Instead of operating inside one company, I was seeing the challenges of many different founders at once.
What it taught me: Small businesses face very different problems, but the biggest ones come back to access, operations, customers, capital, and time.
Program Support Intern → Program Assistant
Helped entrepreneurs and small business owners access programs, resources, and opportunities. My work covered client outreach, program administration, events, marketing, and data. As I took on more, I was promoted to Program Assistant and helped improve internal reporting along the way.
Promotion
What it taught me: Supporting entrepreneurs requires understanding both the customer-facing experience and the systems operating behind it.
Sales & Operations Specialist
Returned to Property Force with a broader lens from Renaissance and the SBDC, and a more analytical approach to pricing, renovation expenses, property performance, invoicing, owner communication, and customer acquisition.
Full arc
What it taught me: Leaving and returning to the same company showed me how quickly outside experiences can change the way you approach familiar problems.
2026
The Shift Into Tech
From selling products → to helping build them.
Sales & Service Expert
Moved into consultative sales: outbound prospecting, qualifying leads, discovery conversations, objection handling, and helping people commit to their goals. Nothing has taught me more about how people actually make decisions, or about asking the question behind the question.
Sales taught me something I still use in product: don’t assume what the customer needs. Ask. Listen. Understand why.
AI Product Management Intern
My first big step into technology. Worked alongside early-stage AI companies on product strategy, customer discovery, competitive research, go-to-market, usability analysis, and MVP planning. I learned to keep asking who the customer is, how painful the problem really is, and what should get built first.
What it taught me: Technology becomes valuable when technical capabilities are translated into a product that solves a meaningful customer problem.
Founding Product Manager
Joined BuilderFlow at an early stage to help shape an AI platform for general contractors and specialty trades. I talk with contractors about how they handle quoting, invoicing, materials, and project admin, then translate those conversations into product decisions, requirements, AI workflow concepts, pricing, demos, and pilot onboarding.
From Feedback → Product
What it taught me: Product management isn’t about collecting feature requests. It’s about understanding the problem underneath them.
Robot Operator
San Francisco, CA
Entered the robotics industry to work with intelligent systems directly, not just through software. I operate and teleoperate robots across real-world tasks to generate high-quality demonstration data for robot learning. Day to day that means watching robot behavior closely, troubleshooting sensors, grippers, and controls, and documenting what actually improves performance.
The stack I get to see
What it taught me: In robotics, product decisions eventually have to survive contact with the physical world.
Present Day
2024 → Now
I didn’t start my career knowing exactly where I would end up. Each experience helped narrow the direction.
Where I’m headed
Building products at the intersection of AI, robotics, and people.
Still early. Still learning. Still building.
Featured Work
I care less about having the idea and more about understanding the problem, testing assumptions, and figuring out what should actually be built.
Product Thinking
Before talking about features, understand the person experiencing the problem and why the problem matters.
Customer feedback should influence the roadmap, but good product work means understanding the problem behind the requested feature.
Products get better through iteration. Ship thoughtfully, observe behavior, collect feedback, and improve.
Skills · Toolkit
Figma
Design & prototyping
Notion
Docs & planning
Linear
Issues & roadmaps
Firebase
App backend
Vertex AI
AI platform
Sheets / SQL
Analysis
Experience across
Beyond the Work
Work is a big part of my life. It isn’t the whole thing.
Endurance
Fitness is one of the biggest parts of my life. Running, swimming, and triathlon training are where my discipline comes from, and honestly, training is what dug me out of one of the biggest holes I’ve ever been in.
Hobbymaxing
My favorite hobby is collecting hobbies. Getting out of my comfort zone: new activities, new food, new anything.
Adventure
Travel, hiking, cliff jumping, fishing. New places on purpose.
Sports
Basketball, soccer, track, swimming. The constants since I was a kid.
Movies & Shows
Tap for the listMy running list of favorites, sorted the way my brain sorts them. Recommendations welcome.
Working on
AI + Product
Learning about
Robotics & intelligent systems
Training for
My next endurance challenge
Contact
Whether you’re recruiting, building something ambitious, or just want to talk product, AI, robotics, startups, or technology, I’d love to connect.