Manny Vellon was a software engineer and Seattle startup founder legendary among colleagues and customers for his ability to find straightforward solutions to complex problems. His technology career spanned four decades, from early Microsoft programming languages to modern Internet of Things devices.
He was the son of Cuban immigrants, a Princeton University electrical engineering and computer science graduate who stood at least 6-foot-7, and possibly taller, by the best estimates of his friends.
What stood out most, however, wasn’t his height, or his code, but the way he interacted with those around him.
“In the manic highs and lows of the startup world, Manny was always a calm, stabilizing voice,” said Barry Crist, the CEO of Seattle technology company Chef who was the CEO of the former Likewise Software, an identity, security and storage startup where Vellon was CTO and co-founder.
“He was one of the brightest in a field of bright people,” Crist said. “He was a person of incredible personal integrity; Manny never failed to do the right thing. He was a pure delight to hang out with no matter the setting.”
Vellon was “always there to set things in the right direction,” but he wouldn’t try to talk members of his team out of their ideas, even in cases where he had a different opinion, said Glenn Curtis, head of engineering at Seattle-based technology experience design firm Level 11, where Vellon was CTO.
“He wouldn’t foist it on to you or be disappointed that you didn’t follow his direction,” Curtis said. “But you could always go back to him and say, ‘Can you show me the way that you would have done it?’ And he would gladly do that. He had that right balance of leading without dragging.”
Those are some of the memories shared by longtime friends and colleagues, reflecting on Vellon’s life in interviews and messages following his death May 27 in an accident at Peoh Point Lookout near Cle Elum, Wash. He was 60 years old.
An engineer at 15 years old
Manuel Vellon was born on Jan. 17, 1960, in New York City, to Manuel and Amelia Vellon, who had immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba in 1948. Vellon family’s moved to Miami when he was a young child. It was there, as a student at Miami High School, that he met his wife, Sally, his lifelong love.
Miami was also where he was introduced to computer programming. He landed his first job at 15 years old, helping to develop a patient record system for Jacksonville Hospital. By his senior year of high school, it had become a full-time position. Vellon was able to balance work with his studies and still emerge as class valedictorian.
Later, at Princeton, he worked on Exxon’s Management Information Systems team, and as a college student he was promoted to manage a team of engineers, some of them nearly twice his age. After interning at Hewlett Packard, he was recruited to work on its early personal computers, including its first PC with a touch-screen display — a technology in which Vellon was an early believer.
Rob Shurtleff, who helped to recruit Vellon to HP, remembered him in a note to their former colleagues as “the very tall Cuban American wizard developer we hired out of college back in the HP150 days.” Shurtleff, now managing partner at Divergent Ventures, called Vellon “one of the smartest, nicest people you will ever meet.”
After working at HP for five years, Vellon joined Microsoft in 1987, moving with Sally from the Bay Area to the Seattle region. As a development manager, he worked on early versions of technologies including the Windows 1.0 software development kit and the C++ programming language. He was instrumental in the creation of the TIFF image file format, developed by Aldus and Microsoft, and co-founded the Redmond company’s Virtual Worlds Group.
He stood out as a kind-hearted manager in Microsoft’s hard-charging heyday, a leader who opened his home to his colleagues for holiday dinners, and who is still remembered for taking one of his teams to a portrait studio to produce their own spoof of an iconic photo of Bill Gates and Paul Allen with the company’s first employees.
“My most vivid memory of working for Manny was that he fostered an environment of team building,” said Lisa Wissner-Slivka, a philanthropist and community leader who worked for Vellon when she returned to Microsoft after getting her MBA. “Our Program Management team ate lunch together most days; it was an informal opportunity for the group to get to know each other outside of our separate projects and created a culture where we could all learn from each other.”
Vellon liked to read management books and would use them as lighthearted inspiration and motivation for his team.
“He literally would walk around with ‘The One-Minute Manager’ book and stick his face in everybody’s office once a day and give a chuckle and a laugh, and just ask how you’re doing,” said Tom Button, another member of the team in the photo, who is now CEO at migration software technology company Mobilize.Net. “He made the workplace lighter and more fun, every day you could interact with him.”
Not a venture capitalist
After leaving Microsoft, Vellon and his family moved to Spain for two years, and he tried a new career as a venture capitalist — before realizing it wasn’t for him.
It “was not his style to crush the dreams of others,” explained Curtis, who worked with Vellon at Likewise and Level 11, and credits Vellon’s leadership and mentoring as instrumental in his own career growth.
But for all of his success coaching others, Vellon’s happiest days were spent working directly on software, coding up a solution to a complex problem.
You can see the gleam in his eye in this video that Curtis shared of Vellon showing his progress on a “quick and dirty demo” of an Amazon Alexa skill after a day of development. “I’m fast,” he says with a grin.
In 2011, early in his tenure at Level 11, Vellon was lead architect for xConnect, the IoT platform behind Walt Disney World’s MagicBand wearable devices.
The project had been a stumbling block for Disney’s internal teams, so the stakes were high when Level 11 and its partner Synapse converted the entire third floor of a downtown Seattle office building into a prototype and demo area for the MagicBand hardware platform, modeled after Disney’s theme park attractions.
The key use case required the devices to be read from more than 600 feet away during a simulation of a Disney World guest arriving at an attraction, redeeming a FastPass+, and moving through the queue and attraction.
‘The Magic of Manny’
“The MagicBand was read or detected flawlessly through all parts of journey and represented the first time this was a success, a very big deal as Disney had tried internally to develop this system twice before with no success,” explained Mark Hadland, the Level 11 CEO. “Our project sponsors looked at each other with a mix of elation and disbelief … as they literally had witnessed magic.”
If you’ve been to Disney World, Hadland said, “you have experienced a bit of the Magic of Manny.”
Vellon was a champion of Level 11’s philosophy of “spiking the problem,” which refers to taking “a vertical slice through all of the technology layers of the stack and solve what is possible” to understand what is technically feasible before building everything out, as Hadland explained.
In January, for his 60th birthday, Vellon traveled with friends through Iceland on motorcycles, which was notable in part because he hadn’t ridden a motorcycle until a year before.
“He asked me to propose a trip that would be fun, unexpected, and get him out of his comfort zone. I’m pretty sure we did all of that,” said Crist, who remained close with Vellon after working together at Likewise. “And yet Manny was a careful, cautious person. He was not a risk taker. It was one of the best adventures ever.”
Manny Vellon is survived by his wife, Sally Vellon; his children Danielle and Steven Vellon; and his sister, Maria.
