Victoria Isabel Santiago Yap was born May 23, 1990 in Manila in the Philippines and grew up in Quezon City. She attended Ateneo de Manila University for her first two years of undergrad, then moved to the US, where she earned a BS in Marketing from Santa Clara University in 2013. That summer she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 she has served as secretary for the Clarion Foundation. She worked in the tech industry in the Bay Area and in London before completing an MBA at Harvard Business School, and is currently a product manager at an early-stage startup.