Nicolas Mendiharat — CEO

I founded and led 7 consumer tech startups around my lifestyle & passions and am now gathering all my knowledge developing an exciting new private equity firm. I started with Ski Tour Operating for students at 22 yo - because I didn’t want to leave the student life too early and I’m a mountain fan - sold that company 5 years later to the largest French travel business at the time, Nouvelles Frontières. To keep myself busy, I geeked out meanwhile coding a bus transportation software (Busresa), profitable on day 1, which eventually became a startup on its own and sold it later in 2004. When the internet became a big thing in 1999, I created the largest booking website for ski vacations. I lead skihorizon.com as the CEO for more than 10 years and made it the industry leader with 300k customers and close to $100m in annual sales. My biggest takeaway was the amazing people I worked with, what a journey. My larger ambitions took me from France to San Francisco with Recommend, a recommendation app which won several awards, was featured twice in Apple's "Best New Apps" section, got strong initial traction, but eventually failed raising enough money. I learnt a lesson (or two) and decided to combine all my prior skills to build the next generation of tech enabled wine businesses, another of my passions. I created Palate Club in 2018, which is the most advanced taste matching engine using AI optimizing wine selections & educate your personal taste, even beyond wine. In the meantime, I ventured a bit into Real Estate and co-developed a 4* residences in the 3 Vallées, a $25m successful development. After AI, it was blockchain which attracted me as one of the most promising technologies, so I co-founded Winechain, a new marketplace for fine wine using blockchain. After 2 fantastic years of building something really disruptive across the US & Europe, the wine market unfortunately entered its biggest turmoil in decades (still is, anchored in the past). During those 30 years as a serial founder & CEO operating in different cultures, industries and organization sizes, I had many wins, and losses, and so many learnings! But I also missed out on so many interesting opportunities (because of a CEO's dedication). So it was about time to spread my wings. With the best partners, advisors and operators I met on my journey, Permanium Capital was born. Permanium is a Private Equity hybrid focused on the $10T luxury services & assets markets. Mixing asset management, roll-up strategies and incubations, leveraging AI, Blockchain and customer cross pollination.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a B2C SaaS entrepreneur with expertise in luxury services and technology integration.

Location: New York City, United States

Experience: 31 yrs 9 mos