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 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 100+ investments. Over the past 15 years, Vinnie has served on more than a dozen startup boards, including unicorns like Carro and Carousell. He was an early investor in Stripe and AngelList, and helped take startups like Lomotif public on the NYSE.

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Vinnie is also the co-author of the forthcoming global business guidebook, Mind the Gap: Scaling Businesses Across Cultures (Wiley, 2026).

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Before founding Golden Gate Ventures, Vinnie built two startups in Silicon Valley: Meetro, a pioneering location-based chat app (shut down with many lessons learned in 2007); and Lefora, a social network platform acquired by a public media company in 2010. He also founded Silicon Valley NewTech, one of the Bay Area’s largest startup demo events at the time.

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Vinnie has been a guest lecturer at Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, and the National University of Singapore, and is a Kauffman Fellow. Earlier in his career, he spent four years at IBM, helping shape the company’s strategy around social software for the enterprise. A lifelong technologist, Vinnie is deeply passionate about building startup ecosystems worldwide and joined his first startup as a developer 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).