Patrick Manasee was born and raised on the French Riviera. Following in his mother’s footsteps, he took up sailing and skiing and participated in the European J/24 Championships and was even invited to join the Monaco Olympic Ski team. The notion of being able to travel use the world’s natural forces to travel around it has kept him on mountains and in oceans to this day.
At the age of 14 he left his childhood home for boarding school in the United States, first graduating from Eaglebrook then Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. From boarding school Patrick went on to McGill University in Montreal, Canada where he began studying Philosophyand Mathematics before switching to Economics where his focus was on International Trade. He would spend his summers working for a variety of businesses including the Oceanographic Institute, the NBC news desk in London, a Private Subsidiary of Credit Suisse in Lugano Switzerland and the film magazine Hotdog.
After college Patrick took an internship at Lazard Investment Bank in Paris but declined an invitation to stay on deciding instead to follow in his father’s footsteps and enroll in Law School. After travelling the world to find the right place to attend, he settled on Bond University in Australia which offered a two year Juris Doctor program which through an agreement with the American Bar Association would allow him to immediately take the Bar in either New York or California without the need for a Master of Laws required of most other countries.
From Australia Patrick moved to Los Angeles and began working for Spitfire Productions, Guy East and Nigel Sinclair’s new venture created after having floating Intermedia on the German Stock Exchange. During his time there, Spitfire was responsible for the production of a number of films including No Direction Home directed by Martin Scorsese, which won an Emmy, two Grammy Awards, and a Peabody Award.
In the back of his mind though Patrick had always wanted to live in New York City, the place here his parents had met and a city his father still referred to as the modern day Rome, so once again Patrick moved finding a job as a paralegal while preparing for the New York Bar. Wile assisting on a case overseas, he caught the eye of Debra Guzov, a named partner at a New York City based firm who offered him a position at Guzov Ofsink. Patrick joined the firm as an associate in 2008 working for both the Corporate and Commercial Litigation groups. He appeared in a variety of the New York City courts and engaged in international multi-party litigation in a variety of complex commercial matters. During his time at the firm he also negotiated private placements, cross-border transactions, and stock listing processes. Through his exposure to such a wide variety of businesses, Patrick began to wonder if he should go into business for himself. With his global view of the world, he began to seek out business programs in emerging markets where he felt he could learn the most. After a lengthy application process, Patrick was accepted into a highly regarded if somewhat controversial new MBA program based in Moscow Russia. The program had been the product of a collaboration between the Russian President, a group of Russian Oligarchs and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which culminated in the creation of the Moscow School of Management and Skolkovo, For the next two years Patrick would travel between Moscow, New Delhi, India, Beijing, China and MIT in Boston. He would work on a variety of projects including the global expansion strategy of Hero Motocorp (the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer) and the import and logistics of Auchan between Russian and China (one of the world’s principal retailers and distribution groups).
After his MBA program, Patrick decided to move back to New York to focus his attention on his own companies, his first being Valk Cosmetics which he had been involved in for some time. He formed a group with some friends to explore real estate development opportunities. Much of his time however was spent on exploring the emergence and evolution of Bitcoin and Blockchain related technologies which he had been exposed to during a lecture by a visiting professor in Moscow in 2012. After his first few attempts at investing and developing a business in the space, Patrick met with Jesse Chenard, an experienced New York city tech entrepreneur well known as one of the founders of Tremor Media, a company which had listed on the New York Stock Exchange two years before. Together, they founded MonetaGo and began working with banks and companies around the world to render global transactions faster and more efficient.
Patrick Manasse 