🧡 Favorites
- 🌮Fav lunch spot: The Salad Corner @ Tanjong Pagar Plaza
- 🍻Fav night spot: The Guild (because chef Vinny Lauria)
- 🦖Fav animal to live with: 🐶
- 🤽♀️Fav thing to do on weekend: Hang with the family and kids, maybe hit up Sentosa for some paddling boarding
- 🏙Fav spot to show 1st time visitors: Newton Circus
- 🏋️♀️Fav exercise: F45
- 👶Kids & Pets names: 👶Rocco, Beatrix, Oscar | 🐶Lucy & Buster
📺 Bio
I grew up on Long Island (suburbs of NYC) and always like building or breaking things. I worked in my dad's glass shop every summer since elementary school and took my first programming class in junior high. My first computer was a 486SX and my first experience with the internet was modem dial-up into BBSs. The world web web kinda came into the public while I was still in high school, and I loved writing silly html pages. I had my first computer job as an 11th-grader in high school - networking offices with ISDN lines, then expanding into web development for a company that was public in the dot-com craze.
I went to Boston University, started in Mechanical Engineering as 'computers' were just a hobby for me. By my junior year, the math got above my head and I flunked out one semester!! So I switched into 'computer engineering' as that felt easy to me. I was hired right out of school to join IBM's business consulting services where I basically wrote SQL code for different clients with huge data warehouses. After 3 years, I had enough and quit my job to move out to San Francisco. I had no idea where I would live or what I would do. I had met Paul Bragiel before that move (he was one of the inspiring voices to quit IBM and travel). So after living in a hostel for a month, I moved in with Paul and his co-founders to work on Meetro, a location-based chat. Meetro never got to scale and was shut down with a bunch of lessons learned ;-/
The team at Meetro started Lefora together and we built a pretty large community/forums platform on a freemium SaaS model (with ads). I headed product and learned a lot of SEO and marketing techniques (email, pr, etc.) from some of the best experts in the valley at the time.
In 2010, Lefora was acquired. As Kristine and I were newly married, we set off for an open-ended round the world trip which took us here to Asia (and we never left). It was an amazing year of experiences, highlighted by Vipassana meditation, racing a tuk-tuk across India, and kung-fu training at a monastery with Shaolin monks!
I met Jeff Paine in Jan 2011 and the rest is history...
Fun / unique fact
✈️I've had the opportunity to fly (pilot) two planes. One was literally a homemade biplane, made by a friend's dad. I'm talking old-school double wings made of wood and covered in fabric!. Side fact - according to tripit, I've flown over 4.5 million km since 2008!!
📣 Socials
- Whatsapp +65 9025 7006
- Wechat/Line/Kakao: vlauria
- Insta/FB/Twitter: vlauria