Vincent 'Vinnie' Lauria is an Internet loving, beer-drinking, Silicon Valley start-up launching, bowling ball throwing and Meetup organizing mad man that has done more before the age of 30 than most set out to do in their entire lives. Oh yeah, and he's done all of this while still managing to have more fun that most frat boys who are in their prime.

The following text, images, video and links will attempt to help you better understand exactly who Vinnie is, where he came from and what all he has been involved in since getting involved in the Silicon Valley tech scene.

Vinnie, who is originally from Port Washington, NY, decided to stay on the East Coast throughout college by deciding to attend Boston University where he received his bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Business Administration. After graduating Vinnie took a summer-long road trip to some of the southern states, such as Texas and North Carolina, and documented it live via a homeade web-steaming setup that he mounted in his car. This was all done in 2005, which should give you all a good idea of how into technology and the web Vinnie really was. Oh, and that was just the beginning.

After his post-college jaunt, Vinnie ended up working for IBM in Chapel Hill, NC where he worked on projects that dealt with customer relationship management, social networks, wikis, blogging, podcasts and other emerging technologies. While living and working in North Carolina he began do document his adventures, thoughts and other what-not via online publishing such as his 231 Erwin Road blog that he updated up until he decided to move to San Francisco in January of 2006.  

After deciding to make his way out to San Francisco, it only took Vinnie a month or so to find himself a new home and that new home was at a location-based IM start-up called Meetro. Meetro was located in Palo Alto, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley, so when Vinnie began working at Meetro headquarters he was also living at Meetro headquarters, which was a house-turned-office for the young start-up. Just like an employee with any other start-up Vinnie wore many hats while working for Meetro, which among other things included him spending the afternoon on Stanford campus handing out free Ramen Noodles with a Meetro flyer attached.

Once Vinnie found his place at Meetro it was time to begin the process of networking, which is definitely one of the things that he seems to do best. As a testament to his social aptitude you will find that even a few things that he started back in 2006 are still continuing on strong today.

At the time that Vinnie was living and working in Silicon Valley an online social revolution known as Web 2.0 was taking place and people were using the web more and more as a way to connect, communicate and meet up with other people in the real world. One of the more popular sites that was doing a majority of this connecting was meetup.com, which is an easy to use online platform for creating events where people with similar interests can connect. They were simply known to the earlier adopters of the site as 'meetups' and in February of 2006 Vinnie created a meetup called The Palo Alto New Tech Meetup. To this date this meetup, which is now called The SiliconValley NewTech Group is still running and with 3000+ members is one of the largest and most active meetups in the area.

Also while at Meetro, Vinnie and the rest of his team created an event called Bowling 2.0 that gave a lot of people a look into the ways that the new breed on Internet entrepreneurs were doing business. Playing golf and setting up stiff lunch meetings were officially out and drinking beer, eating pizza and talking tech was in. Bowling 2.0 was such a hit that even the local media took notice, which ended up getting Vinnie some interview airtime on a local TV station.

In 2008 and after some hard lessons learned the Meetro project officially called it quits, but just as you would expect Vinnie's adventures didn't stop there. The Meetro team didn't miss a beat and quickly switched gears by launching a new online venture, Lefora.com. Lefora is a site that allows you to quickly and easily create an online forum for anything. The site officially launched in April of 2008 and is currently seeing some tremendous growth in it's first few months of operation.

For the time being Vinnie is working hard getting Lefora off of the ground and getting it's name out the world. Other than that he is keeping up with the 2008 elections and constantly keeping up with all of the other latest and greatest technology to hit Silicon Valley. He's a busy guy, but you can always try to catch up with him by checking out the links below.