Paul Bragiel

Early life

Bragiel, the oldest child of Mary and Walter Bragiel, was raised in Mt. Prospect and South Barrington, Illinois. In the late 1990s, he was involved in the demoscene.

Ventures

Bragiel graduated from University of Illinois in 1999. Shortly after graduating he founded his first company, Paragon 5, with offices in Chicago and Poland. In 2004, he founded the first location-based social network, Meetro. In 2008, he founded Lefora. which was sold to Crowdgather in the summer of 2010.

In 2010, he launched i/o Ventures, a seed fund and accelerator based in San Francisco. Mentors include the founders of companies such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Zynga, Bittorrent, Paypal, Myspace, WordPress, Yelp and Trulia.

In 2012, he launched three more technology-focused seed funds. Savannah Fund (Sub-Saharan Africa) and Golden Gate Ventures (Southeast Asia) were created to foster entrepreneurship in those regions. Gamefounders (Eastern Europe) invests in companies building gaming-related products.

In 2015, he launched Presence Capital, a $10m venture fund investing in early-stage virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) companies.

Collectively, he has invested or advised more than 100 companies, which have raised over $1.5b in follow-on financing. Companies include Uber, Zappos and Unity.

He travels around the world to give lectures on startups and is an advisor to governments on their technology and entrepreneurship policy including Colombia, Singapore, Estonia and Tanzania.

Olympics

In 2013, Bragiel trained in cross country skiing in Finland with a view to competing in the 2014 Sochi Olympics under the Colombian flag. In order to participate, Bragiel obtained Colombian citizenship by presidential decree and was soon globally addressed as the man who was hacking his way into the Olympics.

For the 2016 Summer Olympics, Bragiel joined the Tonga delegation as team attaché.