Patrick DeNeale

Patrick DeNeale died on January 9, 2022, at the age of 50 surrounded by his family and loved ones after a two-year battle with cancer. A loving father and husband, expert roboticist, citizen of multiple continents, amateur Russian paratrooper, and wizened observer of the human condition, Patrick had too many gifts to count. He was wickedly smart as well as wickedly funny, and considerate to a fault. A renaissance man for the 21st century, he could reference obscure philosophers and 80’s movies in the same breath. Patrick, a natural introvert who would become a master of extroversion, made people feel genuinely special, delving into their experiences and perspectives, and always keeping the focus on the other.

Patrick’s passing leaves an irreplaceable void. At the same time, those who had the good fortune of knowing Patrick have lives that are indelibly richer despite the short time he was given.

Patrick Lee DeNeale was born on September 15, 1971, in Columbus, Ohio, where his parents, Richard (Dick) DeNeale and Leanna (Baldwin) DeNeale, had completed pharmacy school at the Ohio State University. Patrick soon moved with his parents and older brother to Plattsburgh, New York, and ultimately to Willsboro, New York, a small town on Lake Champlain, where his parents became the owners and operators of the local pharmacy and drugstore. As a boy, Patrick spent time helping his parents fix up the family farm property, amassing practical skills like electrical and carpentry that would come in handy throughout his life. Patrick also spent a good deal of time in the pharmacy, working the register after school. He was valedictorian of his class at Willsboro Senior High School where he earned a variety of honors and participated in a host of clubs and excelled at soccer and skiing. For fun, Patrick would cross into Canada to see concerts in Montreal, one of his favorites being David Bowie.

In his senior year of high school, Patrick applied to just one school, Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, where he would earn a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. At Cornell, Patrick graduated Cum Laude, was a champion fencer for Cornell’s Varsity Fencing team and spent a semester helping construct a post office near Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

Always seeking out a new challenge and never afraid of walking through what he would describe as a “weird door”, yearning for a change of scenery and temperature Patrick moved from Ithaca to the Bay Area in 1993 to pursue a master’s degree in civil engineering and fluid mechanics at UC Berkeley. After finishing his degree, he worked as a geotechnical engineer for longtime San Francisco firm Treadwell & Rollo. His seminal project was managing the construction of a massive retaining wall for the City & County of San Francisco’s electrical substation on the banks of the Tuolumne River, below the Hetch Hetchy Dam. Of “the wall,” as he would call it, Patrick would often say it was so well built that it would still be standing in thousands of years, long past all of us.

Save for some trips with his parents and his occasional high school forays into Canada, Patrick travelled little during his youth, but made up for it starting in his early 20’s, plunging headlong into what would become a life-long passion for travel and global connection. His trips included humanitarian medical excursions to Cuba, a project in Bangladesh during business school and a unique long weekend in Pyongyang, North Korea. Patrick also obtained Italian citizenship via his maternal lineage and was excited to spend more time in Europe.

At 23, Patrick embarked on his first solo international trip and ended up travelling to Kenya and Tanzania by way of an unexpected layover in Yemen, where he was forced to surrender his passport and spend an incredibly hot night in an airplane hangar on a bombed-out runway. Almost immediately into his trip and typical of his personable nature, he would befriend a fellow traveler in Nairobi with whom he would trek to Lamu as well as climb Mount Kilimanjaro. As a testament not only to his intrepid drive for adventure but also his deep sense of humanitarianism, Patrick later volunteered to travel to Bosnia as part of an engineering mission sponsored by the Catholic Charities to help restore the city of Mostar. In Mostar, a place severely damaged during the bombings of the 1990 Balkan Wars and still “a bit of a warzone” in 1995, Patrick worked tirelessly to bring clean water to the city while developing a deep admiration for Eastern Europe. Of those early travel days, Patrick would often replay his encounter with a soldier who, in a tense moment, told him, “I don’t know if you are someone who is very lucky or if you are someone who is hard to kill,” words Patrick would later find highly ironic and about which he would quip, “I wish he’d been right about at least one of those.”

Having fallen in love with the Bay Area and particularly Cal Berkeley, Patrick would return to the school to pursue an MBA at the Haas School of Business. He would use the combination of degrees to parlay his engineering mind into a business career focused on technology and robotics. At Haas, he became a very popular and beloved classmate, and was renowned for his friendly and inclusive nature, the digital camera hanging around his shoulder, and his end-of-year slide shows and engaging presentations. He would give the class address at graduation, having been chosen by his classmates, a move the school administration famously described as “a reasonable choice out of left field.”

In addition to the wonderful and numerous friends Patrick made at Haas, he would meet and fall in love with fellow classmate Emily Miller during their second year. The two quickly hit it off over their similar senses of humor, shared interest in Cold War-era movies and World War II history, love of good food and penchant for travel. After graduating from business school in 2001, Patrick and Emily took jobs with Samsung in Seoul, South Korea, during which time they shared an apartment in Shindang 2-dong and took many excursions throughout Asia Pacific with friends and colleagues, including some very special trips to Harbin, China, and Vladivostok, Russia. While overseas, the pair would adopt their first baby, a Pomeranian they named Kosmo (short for Kosmonaut), who became their consummate companion.

Patrick and Emily would return to his beloved Eastern Europe in 2003 to marry. They held a small marriage ceremony in the city of Prague with friends and family from across the globe and honeymooned in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia.

In November 2004, Patrick and Emily left Samsung and South Korea to return to the Bay Area, where they bought their house on Sonia Street in Oakland. Sonia Street became the home into which they would welcome a second dog, an oddball Papillon named Ziggy, and then their twin girls, Lucy and Bodie, in February 2011. The house was the site for many festive holiday dinners and anniversary parties and would also become a major renovation project overseen by Patrick, guided by his engineering expertise and design aesthetic.

In addition to Patrick’s devotion to his wife and children, he was a massive exercise enthusiast, at one point consistently logging either an eight-mile run or a 10,0000-meter row each day for a stretch of over 900 days. He had the body of an elite athlete. Patrick also had a deep artistic streak, with a particular flare for fashion and the digital arts. He amassed a collection of over 2,000 fonts, which he peppered generously into the family’s epic and often hilarious Christmas cards.

Throughout his life and career, Patrick was always intrigued by robotics and what it held for the future. He began working in the robotics field with Samsung in 2003 and by the age of forty-seven, he had helped launch two companies focused on cutting-edge robotics, Neato Robotics and Anki, Inc. While working on product development for Neato, he spent seven weeks in the Shenzhen area of China, meeting with engineers and befriending many hotel staff who helped him learn Chinese. Later Patrick joined Anki as its very first hire, just months after the birth of Bodie and Lucy. He was the “adult supervision” to a group of fresh robotics PhD’s and would become a good part of the glue that tied everyone together as the company grew. At Anki, he wore almost every hat in the company and was crucial to developing the business plan, raising capital, and managing many parts of the company, from finance to operations to strategy. Patrick loved being part of a team that was creating something new for the world, and he took considerable pride in the company’s most successful product, Cozmo – the little robotic friend named after that little Pomeranian fluffball.

Over the last two years, Patrick heroically fought a battle against cancer while continuing to be a loyal friend, devoted father and loving husband and always considering the bigger picture. He would conclude that perhaps there is some good that would come of this tragedy. He wrote a moving eulogy where he eloquently – as always – analyzed the meaning of his life and how it was ending. In it, Patrick wrote:

I remember reading an interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov in an October 1987 issue of Rolling Stone … the Russian drew me in. At one point in the interview [Baryshnikov] reflected, ‘I remember the past, all the sad and beautiful moments. I dream of the future; it’s an uncomplicated illusion.’ That thought lodged itself into my 16-year-old psyche where it assumed permanent residence. In the years since, it’s been difficult for me to imagine a statement that could more tightly circumscribe the human condition.

Even in the midst of incredible pain, Patrick never ceased to amaze friends and strangers alike with these poignant insights, not to mention his ridiculously sharp wit, intelligence, and bafflingly accurate memory, which could conjure up book passages, movie dialogue and other people’s stories, making all of them better in the telling than the original. He was hospitable to a fault and always managed to summon his genuine curiosity and concern for other people; one could imagine him saying “yes, I may have cancer and be in horrible pain, but forget about me: what about you?” Despite his extreme intelligence and many, many talents, Patrick inexplicably thought of himself as not that special – but in that he was wrong, because if you had the honor of knowing Patrick, you would realize that he was one of the most special people you might ever meet.

Patrick leaves a family team consisting of his wife Emily and their twin daughters, Boden (Bodie) Sophia DeNeale and Lucia (Lucy) Sabine DeNeale and two insane Pomeranians whom he both loved and tolerated named Kevin and Oliver. Patrick is also survived by his father and mother, his brother, his father-, sister- and brother-in-law and a loving extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews in addition to many, many dear friends in the Bay Area as well as from around the world.

In honor of Patrick, friends have established a fund for those who would like to contribute to Bodie and Lucy’s education and other expenses. For more information, please contact Tanja Vujic at tvujic@hotmail.com.

A memorial service in celebration of Patrick’s life will be held at 9:30am on Friday, April 29, 2022, on the flight deck of the USS Hornet in Alameda, CA. Please RSVP using this link: https://forms.gle/S5VjsCbbJJo3Vk8fA as we will have a reception following the service at a beer garden, where we will toast his memory.

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