Vinnie Lauria

Vinnie is a Tsinghua University EMBA candidate in their BRI Finance program. Vinnie graduated from Boston University's College of Engineering. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering and a minor in business development. Vinnie spent 2010-11 traveling around Asia, immersing himself in different cultures. Some adventures included: spending two weeks living at a Buddhist monastery studying Kung Fu under Shaolin monks, ten days driving an auto-rickshaw (tuk tuk) over 1,000km across India for charity, venturing 4,014km high to the tallest city in the world (Litang, China), scooting around the entire island of Taiwan, exploring the jungles of Borneo and Laos, and taking a 10-day vow of silence for Vipassana meditation.

Vinnie is an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. He is a founding partner of Golden Gate Ventures, an early-stage VC firm in Southeast Asia with US$250M AUM and 70+ 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 the 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 that was dissolved with many lessons learned in 2007; and Lefora, a forum hosting platform that 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.

As a member of Class 17, Vinnie served his fellowship as a Founding Partner of Golden Gate Ventures under the mentorship of Paul Bragiel. He also served as a mentor to Justin Hall (Class 20).