Founder & CEO

Nikita Khandheria

A global perspective on hospitality

Founder & CEO

About Nikita Khandheria

Nikita Khandheria is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of ERIA, a hospitality company redefining how people gather through events, experiences, and destination venues.

Her approach to hospitality has been shaped as much by where she has lived as by the businesses she has built. Raised between the United States and India before attending university in Scotland, she grew up surrounded by three very different cultures, each with its own perspective on generosity, design, business, and service. Those experiences continue to influence the way ERIA approaches every event, from intimate private dinners to large-scale corporate experiences.

Over the past decade, she has travelled to more than sixty countries, studying the world's best hotels, restaurants, venues, and luxury brands with the curiosity of both a business owner and a guest. Every trip became an education in what makes people feel welcome, what creates lasting memories, and why some places remain unforgettable long after the visit ends. Rather than following trends, she has built ERIA around lessons gathered from hundreds of remarkable experiences across the world.

Before founding ERIA, Nikita operated a waterfront restaurant in Sausalito. While hosting private dinners and celebrations, she discovered that clients were not simply looking for beautiful spaces. They wanted a partner who could make ambitious ideas happen. Too often, those ideas were limited by venues that had been designed to protect a building rather than support an event.

Instead of accepting those limitations, she converted the restaurant into an event venue. That decision became the foundation of ERIA.

The company grew almost entirely through referrals. Wedding clients returned for corporate retreats. Corporate clients came back for birthdays, fundraising galas, executive dinners, and product launches. What began as event planning evolved into long-term partnerships, with many companies asking ERIA to manage their annual event calendars rather than individual celebrations.

Today, ERIA works with founders, technology companies, venture capital firms, global brands, families, and nonprofit organizations to produce experiences that range from executive retreats and product launches to weddings and destination celebrations. The company has expanded from its original Sausalito venue to additional locations, including ERIA Marina in San Francisco, while continuing to invest in immersive technology, experiential marketing, and destination hospitality.

Nikita believes that events have become one of the most important forms of communication a company has. A thoughtfully designed gathering strengthens relationships, shapes culture, introduces ideas, and creates opportunities that rarely happen over email or video calls. That belief has led ERIA to expand beyond traditional event planning into annual corporate partnerships, where the company serves as an extension of a client's marketing and leadership teams.

Despite the company's growth, her philosophy has remained remarkably consistent. Every event is planned with the assumption that it is the beginning of a relationship rather than a transaction. That mindset influences every decision ERIA makes, from the way the team communicates with clients to the way new venues are designed.

Nikita is known for an unusually hands-on approach to leadership. She remains deeply involved in the creative and strategic direction of every project while continuing to study hospitality, travel extensively, and learn from businesses both inside and outside the events industry. She believes excellence is not a destination but a discipline, and that every event should leave a client with complete confidence that they have found the team they will trust for years to come.

She wants ERIA to become the company people think of first whenever something worth celebrating happens, anywhere in the world.

Her Story

The Making of Nikita Khandheria

People often assume that an entrepreneur's story begins with their first company.

Mine started much earlier.

As a child, I was diagnosed with dyscalculia, a learning difference that affects mathematical reasoning. At first glance, it seemed like an unusual challenge for someone who would eventually spend her career building businesses. My parents took a different view. They taught me that a difficult starting point was never an excuse to lower the standard. It was simply a reason to work differently.

Not long afterwards, I represented my school at the Chinese Mathematics Olympiad. The experience had very little to do with mathematics itself. It taught me that ability is rarely fixed, and that persistence often matters more than the way someone performs on paper.

That lesson has stayed with me ever since.

As a teenager, I became fascinated by the law. I worked in dependency law, where the decisions being made carried real consequences for children and families. At fifteen, I argued my first case in court before I was even old enough to begin a law degree. The experience taught me how to think under pressure, build an argument, negotiate, and communicate clearly when the outcome mattered.

Those skills would later become some of the most valuable tools I brought into business.

Before turning eighteen, I had also founded two nonprofit organisations. Building them required raising money, earning trust, and persuading people to support an idea that existed only on paper. Those experiences eventually helped me secure funding to open my first restaurant while I was still a teenager.

The restaurant became my first real business.

It also became my first lesson in turnaround strategy.

Not long afterwards, I acquired a distressed food business with the belief that it could become something much larger. Over time, we expanded distribution nationally and ultimately generated enough value to buy out our original investors. Looking back, that business was less important than the lessons it taught me. I learned how to build teams, negotiate, make decisions with incomplete information, and keep moving when the outcome was uncertain.

Those experiences shaped the way I approach every business today.

People sometimes ask where my work ethic comes from.

The answer is that I have never believed talent is enough.

There will always be people who are more experienced, better connected, or naturally gifted. The one variable I have always been able to control is the amount of effort I am willing to invest. I have built my career on the belief that consistency compounds, and that showing up every day with the same level of curiosity and discipline eventually produces extraordinary results.

Hospitality became the place where all of those experiences came together.

Planning an event requires strategy, negotiation, logistics, creativity, leadership, and an ability to remain calm when everything around you is moving at once. It demands commercial thinking alongside emotional intelligence. Few industries require so many different disciplines to work together at the same time.

That complexity is exactly what attracted me to it.

I still feel the same excitement today that I felt planning my first event. Every larger project presents a more interesting problem to solve. Every new venue creates opportunities that did not exist before. Every client arrives with a different objective, and every successful event raises the standard for the next one.

That constant pursuit of improvement is what continues to drive me.

My ambition has never been to organise the most events.

It has always been to build the company that raises the standard for what an event can be.

If we succeed, it will not be because we worked harder for one weekend than everyone else. It will be because we spent years building a team, a culture, and a business that refuses to believe exceptional is exceptional. It should simply be the standard.

Leadership

How Involved Is Nikita Khandheria?

This is probably one of the questions we are asked most often, and it is an important one.

The answer is that every client relationship begins with me and every event carries my approval.

The reason is simple.

My name is on the front door.

Every event we produce becomes part of our reputation. That opinion determines whether they recommend us to a friend, trust us with their own event, or become a client years later. I take that responsibility seriously because our reputation is the business we are building.

For that reason, every new client begins with me.

Our first meeting is rarely about choosing menus or reviewing floor plans. It is about understanding why the event exists in the first place. I want to understand what success looks like, who is coming, what the event needs to accomplish, and what people should remember when they leave. Once we have answered those questions, everything else becomes much easier because every decision has a clear purpose behind it.

From there, I build the strategy for the event and introduce the members of our team who are best suited to bring it to life. Every planner at ERIA works to the same standard because we all begin with the same plan.

People sometimes assume that as a company grows, the founder naturally becomes less involved. I have never believed that.

If I have one hundred leads on my desk, I will still take one hundred conversations.

We will not grow faster than our ability to maintain the standard that built this company in the first place. There is no ambition worth pursuing if it comes at the expense of the client experience. I would rather grow more deliberately than allow our name to represent something I would not be proud of.

That philosophy has shaped every decision we have made since the beginning.

I remain involved in the creative direction of every event, major budget decisions, venue recommendations, key presentations, and the overall strategy behind each project. My role is not to manage every timeline or confirm every vendor arrival. My role is to make sure every event reflects the standard our clients expect when they choose ERIA.

The team around me is exceptional, and I trust them completely. They are specialists in planning, production, logistics, hospitality, and execution. The reason that works is because every project begins with the same foundation. We all understand what we are trying to achieve before the planning ever begins.

People often ask what makes ERIA different.

I think the answer is consistency.

Clients should have the same experience whether they are planning their first event with us or their fifteenth. They should feel the same level of care, responsiveness, creativity, and attention to detail regardless of the size of the event or the number of projects we are managing at any given time.

That consistency does not happen by accident.

It happens because I remain personally invested in protecting the reputation we have spent years building.

At the end of the day, our venues are beautiful, our team is experienced, and our portfolio speaks for itself. None of those things matter if people do not trust our name. Every conversation I have, every decision I make, and every event we produce is ultimately in service of protecting that trust.

I have always believed that if we continue making decisions that strengthen our reputation, growth will follow naturally. The goal has never been to become the fastest-growing event company. The goal is to become the company people trust most. I believe those are two very different ambitions, and they require two very different ways of building a business.

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