Vinnie Lauria

Vinnie is a founding partner of Golden Gate Ventures, an early-stage VC firm in Southeast Asia with over 20 investments to date. He is a Kauffman Fellow, and a guest lecturer at the National University of Singapore. He was rated by the Founder Institute as highest startup mentor in Asia 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 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. He is a graduate of Boston University in Computer Engineering,

Vinnie is passionate about building startup ecosystems. He joined his first startup while still in high school. His latest activities can be followed here: @vlauria