Happy Birthday Gabriel Vanrenen of Skimble
Yesterday was a very significant day in the Skimble timeline. Why, you may ask? Well, it was the day we celebrated the birth of our somewhat elusive co-founder...
Who is he? Gabriel Vanrenen.
Sure, Gabe doesn't always come out to the startup and tech events but he does jam pack his life with Skimble fun. I (Maria) would like to wish Gabe a happy birthday and share how thankful and grateful I am to have him in my life. He's clever, witty and very, very adventurous:
We've trekked to K2 base camp together. We've slepted along a big-wall rock ledge on the most overhanging wall in North America. We were winners of a tandem bike race in Yangshuo, China. We've spontaneously puledl one-day ski trips to Tahoe. Let's just say we have a shared passion for being nimble, having fun, and building consumer web products that inspire active lifestyles. And that's why we decided to team up as the co-founders of Skimble.
Gabe's also a repeat entrepreneur with a very strong technical background - it doesn't matter if he's developing using Ruby On Rails, Objective C / iPhone, or Java - he can whip up a sophisticated technical solution before most of us can finish doing a jumping jack.
Gabe was born in Boulder, CO, grew up near Boston, MA, and he's pictured here aging like a fine wine in San Francisco:
Here we present Gabe with a homemade, delicious choco-haupia bday pie:
But that certainly wasn't the theme of the night...
If you know Gabe, you know he's serious about dumplings. Fittingly, we threw him a surprise dumpling-dinner bday party last night. The menu consisted of a ton of things in dumpling form including shui jing bao (Chinese steamed dumplings), wontons (Chinese boiled dumplings in soup), sue gow / gyozas / pot stickers (Chinese pan fried dumplings), siu mei (Cantonese / Hong Kong steamed dim sum dumplings), mochi (Japanese rice dessert balls), tangyuan (Chinese gluten rice dessert balls in ginger broth), samosas (Indian-style stuffed dumpling appetizer), and even some Humphry Slocombe ice cream topped with a fortune cookie.
At the end of the night, I think we made sure Gabe had eaten as many dumplings as his was old. His response? One word: 'Stuffed'
