Mind The Gap

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Vincent “Vinnie” Lauria

Vinnie Lauria is a two-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. He is the founding partner of Golden Gate Ventures, a global early-stage VC firm launched in 2011 with US$300M in AUM and investments in more than 100 companies across three continents. Over the past 15 years, Vinnie has served on more than a dozen start-up boards, including Asian unicorns like Carro and Carousell. He was an early investor in Stripe and AngelList and helped guide start-ups like Lomotif to a public listing on the NASDAQ.

Vinnie began his career on the technical side. He joined his first start-up as a web developer while still in high school and later worked in IBM Research, helping shape the company’s early thinking around social software. After graduating from Boston University with a degree in computer engineering and a minor in business administration, he co-founded two start-ups in Palo Alto. Meetro, one of the earliest location-based social apps, gave him a firsthand education in the challenges of timing and product adoption. Lefora, a community-platform start-up, grew to more than 100,000 online communities before being acquired in 2010 by a public media company.

Along the way, he founded Silicon Valley NewTech, which became one of the Bay Area’s largest monthly demo events, and later became a Fellow in the Kauffman Fellows Program, Class 17. He has guest-lectured at Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and the National University ...