Nicolas GenestC-Suite Technologist | Founder | Builder of Bold Digital Futures
Nicolas Genest is a visionary business and technology leader whose work sits at the intersection of #innovation, transformation, and impact. Across a 25-year international career, Nicolas has launched, scaled, and led high-growth companies—serving as CEO twice and CTO five times, including for iconic digital brands like The RealReal, ModCloth, vente-privee (Veepee), and GoodwillFinds.
A founder at heart and operator by trade, Nicolas built the engineering foundations behind multiple $500M+ digital commerce engines, including the IPO-bound resale pioneer The RealReal. As the founding CTO of Vente-Privee USA, he launched one of the earliest U.S. joint ventures with American Express in luxury e-commerce. At ModCloth, he was instrumental in architecting the replatforming that positioned the brand for acquisition by Walmart, where he later authored the global digital commerce blueprint for Walmart’s DNVB portfolio.
In 2018, Nicolas answered a deeper calling and founded CodeBoxx Technology, an accelerated tech academy and consulting group designed to democratize access to technology careers. CodeBoxx trained hundreds of individuals across North America—many from underserved backgrounds—into pragmatic, AI-first software developers, while simultaneously delivering large-scale transformation projects for enterprise clients. The company scaled to three campuses, 94 employees, and was valued at $22M within three years.
More recently, he spearheaded the creation of GoodwillFinds.com, a nationally scaled e-commerce platform uniting hundreds of nonprofit retail stores into a single AI-powered marketplace. In its first 14 months, it generated $30M in revenue and deployed a GPT-4o generative AI agent for merchandising and customer service—earning the 2025 World’s Retail Chatbot Solution of the Year.
Nicolas’s work blends deep technical fluency—ranging from AI and cloud architecture to enterprise platforms—with an unwavering belief in technology as a force for good. A graduate of Harvard’s Business Analytics Program and a recipient of the EB-1A U.S. Green Card for Extraordinary Ability, he is also a former radio tech correspondent, a startup mentor, and a relentless advocate for inclusive innovation.
From scaling metaverse ventures like Zelig to fighting food waste with Full Harvest, Nicolas leads with vision, builds with pragmatism, and delivers with impact.
- 15 years of experience managing technology in all kinds of industries, contexts and cultures in Canada, France and the United States.
- Strong track record at building and empowering extraordinary teams leading them to delivering long lasting value within a powerful culture
- Successful in small and huge projects within small constrained structures or heavy and complex organizations. Experienced in local, off-shore, near-shore and split-team projects.
- Successful in managing annual IT budgets ranging from $1MM to $25MM and in managing teams of 15 or 120 collaborators.
- Engineering for Major-league E-Commerce (Heavy traffic, high-availability, Security) with solutions generating yearly revenue over 1B$ and handling 2.5 million unique daily visitors.
- End to End Business Intelligence Solutions, Advanced Decision-making on Big Data
- Sustained Startup Rhythm by leveraging cloud-based technologies
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