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SendSquared

Before SendSquared

The LeMond Days

Before hospitality software, there was carbon fiber. Nicolas spent those years as COO and board member at LeMond Companies, co-founded with three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond, working on a way to make carbon fiber cheap enough to put in ordinary cars, wind turbines, and bridges rather than only in racing bikes and aircraft.

He negotiated both of the company's technology licenses: Oak Ridge National Laboratory's low-cost carbon fiber process in 2016, and a $44 million, twenty-year exclusive global agreement with Deakin University in 2017. The photographs below are from those years, from labs in Tennessee to plants in Jilin.

Nicolas Wegener riding with Greg LeMond and a teammate on a road in autumn
Riding with Greg. Some of the best conversations about the business happened at 20 miles an hour.
Nicolas Wegener with the group touring the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2015
The first tour of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2015, inside the Spallation Neutron Source. Protons are accelerated to 90% the speed of light and slammed into a tank of liquid mercury, knocking about 25 neutrons loose apiece. Those neutrons are then aimed at materials to map how they are put together, atom by atom.
Nicolas Wegener and colleagues beside the 3D-printed carbon fiber Shelby Cobra at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2015
The 3D-printed Shelby Cobra, built at the lab’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility from carbon-fiber-reinforced ABS. Not a show car: a rolling testbed for battery, hybrid, and wireless-charging research.
Greg LeMond and Nicolas Wegener beside the signed Cray X1E supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Greg and Nicolas beside the signed Cray X1E at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which ran the largest unclassified X1 system in the world. Senators, congressmen, energy secretaries, and an astronaut have all put their names on it.
Nicolas Wegener and Greg LeMond with colleagues after the Deakin University licensing agreement, Australia, 2017
Australia, 2017. The day the twenty-year exclusive global license came together.
Nicolas Wegener and Greg LeMond with the team outside the Jilin Carbon Valley carbon fiber plant in China, August 2017
Jilin Carbon Valley, August 2017. Carbon fiber manufacturing, seen up close.
Nicolas Wegener, Greg LeMond and hosts raising a toast at a dinner in the Sinopec tower, China, August 2017
Dinner in the Sinopec tower, one of the largest companies in the world. The toast that closes every good day of negotiating.

What carried over into SendSquared was less about materials than about people: that the hard part of any deal is trust, and the hard part of any business is staying in the room long enough to earn it. More on his background, or the story of what came right after these years.

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