About me

Photo of me smiling

Photo taken by Max Wilkinson in 2024.

My name is Lea[1] Verou[2] and I’ve had a rather unusual career path, but one thing has been constant since childhood: my obsession with making things that make people’s lives easier.

This drive has taken me through product, entrepreneurship, engineering, graphic design, web standards, and a decade of scientific research and teaching at MIT. My career spans 20 years of experience in the tech industry, and for the last 15 I have largely focused around creator tools, or as I like to call it, “making things for making things”.

A few places this has led me to:

While I definitely prefer doing over teaching, I do love sharing knowledge, and have a long track record of doing so:

In the more distant past, I grew up in Lesbos, Greece [3], and started my career at the same time as my studies, in 2005. For the first few years I freelanced across the whole spectrum, from traditional graphic design to full-stack web development. In 2008 I co-founded a startup around a set of communities which organically reached nearly 1% of the country’s population as registered users (and many more as visitors); a level of national penetration rarely achieved without paid acquisition. I left the company in 2011 and it was sold in 2013.

If any of this seems relevant, I am open to particularly interesting consulting opportunities in a limited capacity. Email me for more.


  1. Lea being short for Michaelia, or Μιχαήλια in my native Greek. ↩︎

  2. Until 2013 I officially had both my parents’ surnames (Komvouti-Verou / Κομβούτη-Βέρου) though I had been going by Lea Verou for over a decade, Verou being my mom’s surname. When she died in 2013, I did the paperwork to make it official. I love that my parents left the choice up to me and not the patriarchy, and did the same with my own daughter. ↩︎

  3. I used to joke that this makes me geographically Lesbian. I stopped when I realized that most people had no idea that “Lesbian” literally means “person from Lesbos” and thought I was simply making a pun. 🤦🏽‍♀️ ↩︎