Established 1998
Portland | Los Angeles | Westport
Management
Nels Paine – Managing Director
Nels founded Paine Pacific in 1998 to apply his personal experience in operations, management, fundraising, and M&A transactions to the underserved emerging growth and middle market companies. Nels has a strong family background in investment banking and venture capital. Growing up around the venture capital business (his father was one of the first venture capitalists to break ground on Sand Hill Road in Northern California in 1962) laid the groundwork for his interest and subsequent career in small to mid-size businesses. He has proven success in building, managing and achieving product, marketing and financial goals of small businesses, start ups, and turnarounds with twelve years experience in the technology and high technology industries for medical and computer products.
Nels spent the first part of his career in the computer technology and software businesses at the Bank of Boston and at Software Developers Company in Boston, MA. Following the decline in the market in Boston, he relocated with his family to Oregon, joining a turn-around team for a software development company in 1991. After rebuilding and selling this business, he co-founded a spin-off software publishing business that he sold two years later. In 1994, Nels co-founded a medical device company, which he sold in 1997. Taking this broad experience, Nels founded Paine Pacific in 1998 to provide M&A services to a broad range of companies within the technology and services markets. Today this has evolved to a broad suite of strategic services around company growth objectives.
Nels graduated from SMU in 1988 and is an avid outdoorsman and cyclist living in Portland with his wife and six children.
Tara Gordon – Director of Client Services
Tara joined Paine Pacific in early 2012 bringing her experience in sales management and customer service for manufacturing, distribution and retail. She has direct experience in long term client relationships for contractional and manufacturing sales and the management of financials, training and growth. She managed wide territories in the NW including Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, North Dakota and Kansas. She understands business to business relationships and the components that make them successful.
Tara was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She left Oregon to study marketing and play volleyball on a full scholarship at the University of Montana. Since her return to Portland she has married and recently added to her family of six.
Darsh Mariyappa
Darsh has 30+ years experience with global financial institutions in Foreign Exchange (FX )and interest rates markets. Following completion of his MBA at Columbia University, Darsh started his career trading currencies at Chase Manhattan Bank on Wall Street. Eventually he moved to building and and managing small global markets teams across various international markets where he lived including Southeast Asia, London, Brazil and North America.
In 2008 he became the Head of Global Markets US for Bank of Ireland, including the launch of www.boiglobalpayments.com and leveraged this experience to grow an FX and international payments advisory platform called Global Payments Partners merging the gap between Banking and FinTech.