Lorien Gabel
Lorien Gabel is Co-Founder of Figment Networks, a wannabe polymath who was born in Malaysia while his dad was curing tropical diseases with the Peace Corps. Off to a cool start, he spent the next few years of his life in Hawaii, San Diego, India…before settling into the much more exciting, colorful and exceedingly polite land of Canada. In 1994, at the age of 24, when Lorien’s younger brother Matt asked him to run his bourgeoning internet company, Lorien did what any self-respecting lawyer of 6 months would do--he quit. He moved the company from their parent’s basement and over the next four years managed the growth of Interlog, one of Canada’s first commercial ISP’s, to over 150 employees, 65,000 customers and profitability. The company was then acquired by a large multinational telecommunications provider. Determined not to be one hit wonders. Lorien and Matt teamed up again and co-founded Bird on a Wire Networks - a managed web hosting and data-center provider which was one of the first of its kind in Canada. Within two years, the company was acquired by AT&T Canada. Their third start-up, pingg.com, based in New York City, was recently acquired by 1800-Flowers. Lorien has also been known to run divisions of Fortune 500 companies (Micron), spearhead the exponential U.S. growth of a UK based tech company (MessageLabs) as Global VP Business Development, serve on the advisory board of a number of start-ups and whip up a mean breakfast of Spanish eggs. Lorien has a LLB from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School and is a member in good standing with the Ontario Bar. He splits time between NYC where he can be seen running along the west side highway listening to the latest DJ mix and Jackson Hole WY, where he owns a sporting good store and chases powder, obviously....