Phil Santoro is an entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Wilbur Labs, a startup studio turning bold ideas into market-leading companies. Wilbur Labs is industry-agnostic and has built companies including VacationRenter, the fastest travel company to reach $1B in gross bookings, Joblist, a personalized job search platform helping millions of candidates, and Barkbus, the largest mobile dog grooming company in the country.

Phil’s passion for supporting entrepreneurs stems from his own experience building companies at a young age. He founded his first major venture at the age of 13. In 2007, while a junior in high school, Phil founded FreeForums.org, a hosting platform that allowed people to create and manage their own online community forums. Phil scaled the platform to 125 million monthly pageviews, making it one of the most visited online destinations at the time. Phil led FreeForums.org to a strategic acquisition by the publicly traded company CrowdGather Inc. in 2010, marking his first major exit. Following the acquisition, he served as a Growth Strategist at Google, helping companies leverage data to scale.

As an expert on building and scaling startups, Phil shares his expertise to help other founders. He is a contributing author for Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur, and answers common questions in the Wilbur Labs Founder FAQ series.

Phil is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati Carl H. Lindner College of Business. He lives in Miami, Florida, with his wife, Rubi, and their son.