Vinnie Lauria

Vinnie is an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. In 2011 Vinnie co-founded Golden Gate Ventures, an early-stage VC firm in Southeast Asia with US$250M AUM, 70+ companies, and 9 unicorns in the portfolio. He is a Kauffman Fellow, a Tsinghua University EMBA candidate, and a guest lecturer at the National University of Singapore. Vinnie was awarded Top Startup Mentor by the Founder Institute, from a pool of 2,500 mentors.

Prior to setting up Golden Gate Ventures, Vinnie built two startups in Silicon Valley: Meetro, a location-based chat service which was dissolved with many lessons learned in 2007; and Lefora, a forum hosting platform which grew to over 100,000 communities and was acquired by CrowdGather in 2010. He founded the Silicon Valley NewTech meetup, featuring hundreds of startups to a monthly audience w/ more than 10,000 members.

Earlier in his career, Vinnie spent four years within IBM, helping to shape how IBM was approaching social software for the enterprise. Vinnie is a graduate of Boston University’s College of Engineering. Vinnie is passionate about building startup ecosystems and joined his first startup while still in high school.

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