Nico S.’s story moves like a thriller—fast, edgy, high-stakes—but with the soul of a redemption arc that could only be written in the aftermath of survival. He is quiet, calm, reserved, confident, and quite honestly, a genius. But behind these grounded qualities resides a man who has lived many lives, worn many hats, and battled many demons — literally, he has at one point in time in fact had demons exercised from his body at the whim of his father and stepmom.
Born in Costa Rica, raised between continents, and fluent in four languages by the time most kids were still learning their times tables, he was always a chameleon, blending in wherever life dropped him. But beneath the surface of Nico’s adaptability lives a deeper story—of disconnection, identity confusion, ambition, and the long, winding road back to himself.
“My name’s Nico—short for Nicholas, but without the H.” That distinction matters. Everything about Nico hints at reinvention.
His childhood unfolded across cultures and continents—He spoke German with his grandmother, French with his parents, and Spanish with friends. Things were peaceful growing up in Costa Rica, until, at the young age of seven, his parents moved to the U.S. and shortly after soon separated. His father remarried his mother’s friend in a complicated split. Nico was only eleven, dealing with a new country, a new family dynamic, a new life. Shortly after this difficult shift in his home life and environment, alcohol seeped its way into his world. By twelve, Nico was already drinking.
By 10th grade, he was deep into weed, drinking, and the identity that came with it. “By high school, I was the stoner kid. I sold it, smoked it—it became the center of my life.”
When the weed became a problem, and he started getting into trouble at school, his mom sent him to Texas to live with his dad. It backfired spectacularly. Three expulsions later, Nico was facing juvie. Instead, he got his first taste of rehab at 16, “It was mostly for weed,” he says. The strange thing was, Nico was years ahead of his peers and taking AP classes, a true scholar, yet struggling to avoid getting in trouble at school. Unfortunately, his genius wasn’t enough. His path didn’t straighten. He dropped out of high school and used college as a cover to chase money, music, and drugs.
By 19, Nico was fully immersed in the trap music scene—Codeine, roxies, studio sessions in smoke-filled rooms, and a tech hustle on the side. One day, two guys came into the smoke shop owned by someone he worked with. They were gang members acting like they were looking at bongs—then pulled out guns. It was an armed robbery. His friend, the owner of the shop, pulled a knife. They laughed, one of them saying, ‘You’re bringing a knife to a gunfight?’”. Nico recalls bongs falling from shelves and shattering all over the floor amidst the ensuing scuffle, the robbers ultimately beating his friend until he was unconscious, while Nico and his other friends lay face down on their stomachs. The violence was real. The assailants had dried blood on their shoes. This was something they were doing regularly. The consequences, worse. He remembers lying on the floor thinking, “This doesn’t happen in tech.” In the following weeks, the darknet market he’d been using with his crew was seized by the DOJ. He lost $50K in escrow. “That was it for me.”
Soon after brushing so close to serious harm in both the physical and legal sense, Nico made his escape to live with his mother in the Bay Area and tried sobriety. Here he had his first awakening to A.A., step work, and the idea of recovery. He found a coding boot camp, smashed his burner phone with his sponsor, and co-founded a startup—Zodaka, “like PayPal for weed.” He led engineering teams, pitched investors, and built real tech. Nico committed years of his life to this project, trying to get away from the drug dealing and studio lifestyle, but the sobriety didn’t hold.
Nico relapsed—hard. The burnout hit like gravity, “I started smoking weed again. Drinking. Then roxies.” When Zodaka folded, he eventually moved to San Diego for a new startup, “that’s where fentanyl came in, I wasn’t even dealing anymore.” He and his partner set up another music studio in LA, and he was constantly back and forth between the two cities, “I was trying to work while using every day.” He moved back to Texas, got sober, lived with his father, and relapsed immediately on his arrival back to Los Angeles.
For two years, Nico nodded out in studios, passed out in bathrooms, at one point took a spill in his apartment, and crash-landed into his toilet, waking up to water spraying in the air, having completely shattered the porcelain.
Despite destroying bathrooms, on the outside, Nico seemed to be maintaining. In the confines of his own home and personal life, things were a little more complicated. While struggling through the internal battle with his drug addiction, he still managed to land a corporate job at Warner Bros. and tried marijuana maintenance to “keep it chill.” It wasn’t chill.
The spiral was vicious. Twelve rehabs in three years. He’d leave from rehab to go handle things at Warner Bros. when they needed him, “I had money, an apartment, my Frenchie, Ralphie,…but I was alone and slowly killing myself.” At some point, his job finally let him go. He relapsed again, got kicked out of his apartment, couch-surfed, detoxed in various homes, and eventually ended up living in his car—one time waking up having passed out naked in the vehicle. When the cops found him, “I told them, ‘Hold on, officer—I’m naked, I’m just high on fentanyl.” A scene of pure insanity.
Nico was on the fringes of madness, and at one point found himself sipping high noon tea at the Biltmore surrounded by violinists, finger sandwiches, a stripper, and a drug dealer. Somehow, these were the people who convinced him he needed to get help. Next, a detox in his porn star girlfriend’s apartment. It didn’t last—both the relationship and the sobriety. He was visited in his car by the same paramedics who had come to his aid on multiple occasions. All the cops knew him by then—a downward spiral so surreal it bordered on satire. But underneath it, a slow flicker of clarity was brewing, though it would take a brush so close to death that it could only be deemed a miracle he survived.
By summer 2024, he was done. “I moved into a new apartment and thought to myself, ‘I’m going to die here.’” Two weeks later, he developed sepsis. He couldn’t walk. A friend randomly dropped by to see if he was alright and found him disoriented and bleeding, closer to death than he could have ever fathomed. The video his friend took the day his life was saved is scary. Sores all over his body, sitting in a daze on the bathroom floor, unable to walk, and clueless that he was a day from death.
His friend took him to a detox, but upon arrival, Nico was rushed to Cedars-Sinai. The doctors discovered he had sepsis, his kidneys and liver failing, “doctors told me if I had waited one more day, I wouldn’t have made it.” He came out of the ICU after a month of round-the-clock antibiotics and a PICC line in his chest; the infection was so close to his heart that the doctors were considering open heart surgery.
Nico still went out and relapsed after this. Hell bent on dying, an intervention orchestrated by his girlfriend and his mom brought him back to rehabilitation. The last conversation he had with his girlfriend led him to see the other side of the picture and not take life for granted. He found himself wishing she could have the same opportunity and support and realized he has to do whatever it takes to take advantage of the life and support he has around him. That moment of clarity changed his life and started with him showing up to rehab at 2AM wearing a sombrero, completely wrecked. But this time, something shifted, “I told myself I’d do everything differently. This was life or death now.”
He leaned in. Step work. Family immersion. Amends. He arrived at Beit T’Shuvah with 45 days sober and a new kind of hunger—not just to stay clean, but to come alive.
At BTS, he found his rhythm again—volunteering with CGA, and reconnecting with old tech collaborators. He’s now founded a brand new startup and is building a revolutionary blockchain-based mobile app—one that’s rooted in innovation, not escape.
He has friends in recovery. A deepening relationship with himself and a higher power. A mother and father who have witnessed the worst and now get to see the recreation, “I smoked fentanyl in front of my mom once. That was one of the lowest points. But now…she gets to see me try.”
Nico’s life today is still being rebuilt—but it’s real this time. It’s honest. It’s alive. He’s no longer hiding behind drug-induced code or clouded highs, chasing a lifestyle that doesn’t stimulate his genius. He’s building a life that’s earned, not escaped. And as for the chaos? He’s harnessing it. Remixing it. Channeling it into something greater.
Nico doesn’t just survive anymore. He creates. He rises above. He innovates—both in the tech space and in his recovery. “From Rehab to Silicon Valley,” he says with a smile. He’s cleared his cache, debugged his system, and his bandwidth is at an all-time high. In his time at Beit T’Shuvah, Nico has transformed from someone who was nervous to have anyone glance in his direction to someone willing to let us write a spotlight on them. He shares his story with the community and puts himself out there. No longer living in the black and white binary, Nico grinds on the right actions for the right reasons—and it’s by design. Nico gives his heart and soul to every person he helps, every smile he inspires, and every line he codes.
<passion status=“recovered” purpose status=“discovered” />