Terpli Inc. (acquired by AIQ)

- AI-powered product recommendation engine for cannabis e-commerce, designed to personalize and optimize the dispensary shopping experience.
- Advised Terpli from inception—supporting fundraising, GTM strategy, key hires, and a major pivot that fueled scale and profitability.
- Acquired by AIQ, June 2025.

Investor/Advisor

SmartWork Media

- A global media platform focused on elevating the cannabis industry through journalism, storytelling, and insights on policy, business, and culture. 
- Editorial features spotlighting emerging trends, regulatory shifts, and market innovation. 
- Shaped content strategy to engage founders and expand cross-channel audience reach.

Editorial Board- Global Cannabis Times

FlowerHire

- Talent and strategic advisory firm serving the high-growth and regulated cannabis industry.
- Founding Member & Managing Partner — Scaled firm and revenue across 30 states. 
- Led organizational design, exec comp strategy, and advisory for hundreds of companies from startup to IPO. Built compensation models, board dashboards, and operational systems that shaped hiring, budgeting, and growth.

Managing Partner

engin sciences inc

- AI-powered platform transforming recruiting workflows with voice tech and intelligent automation.
- Founding team member and board advisor—supported product direction, early adoption strategy, and go-to-market partnerships.
- Driving 2–3x recruiter productivity and faster, smarter hiring at scale.

Board Member

Fortis Partners

- Executive search and advisory for venture-backed tech firms.
- Partner  — Advised Series A-C companies on org design, hiring roadmaps, and compensation frameworks.
- Created lightweight leveling structures, functional org maps, and hiring systems aligned to scaling plans.

Partner

Team(You), Inc.

- Digital incentive platform advancing student learning outcomes through gamified engagement and curriculum integration.
- Led go-to-market expansion into major school systems across LA and NY, scaling usage from hundreds to 5,000+ students in under two months. Managed offshore development team to implement UX and data architecture upgrades. 
- Built strategic partnerships with education authorities and delivered talks nationwide on the future of edtech innovation.

Managing Director

The Big Apple Pie Baking Co., S'more Bakery

- Premium CPG dessert brand scaling into national distribution.
- Co-Founder, COO & CSO (2016–2018) — Bootstrapped to 7-figure revenue. Led sourcing, logistics, fulfillment, and CX.
- Secured enterprise clients (Spotify, BuzzFeed), built scalable systems.

Co-Founder, Chief Operating Officer

Quantum Designs, LLC

Senior Associate for Domestic Distribution, Sales Operation Coordinator 

Goldcrest Films

Assistant to COO, Junior Production Coordinator

Board Member at engin sciences inc

I work where business gets built from scratch: new markets, unfamiliar rules, scaling teams, tight margins. Cannabis. Tech. Talent. CPG. Startups to public companies. One-location founders to domestic operators. I’ve seen exits and I’ve seen flameouts. Both teach you something.

My focus is on organizational design, compensation architecture, and operational alignment. I help companies translate complexity into forward motion and build structures that don’t collapse under growth.

The industries change. The tension doesn’t. How do you build something sustainable inside systems that weren’t designed for you to win? What should scale, and what shouldn’t? Where’s the real leverage and who benefits from it?

Strategy is often just interpretation. Business competition isn’t just strength or stamina. It’s a competition over insights and competencies. You need models that match the moment, not just what worked last time.

My role isn’t to predict the future. It’s to prepare for it. I work with teams to acquire new salience, raise their perspective, and make decisions they’ll still believe in under pressure.

AI is leverage, not liberation. Scale is not strategy. And being underestimated is a valuable thing. I’ve built a career making the most of it.

I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Advisor at Kria!

Mike Siebold

Structure and scale | Systems that endure | From startup grit to public complexity | Designing teams that work and last

Vocational stereotypes in cannabis are mostly wrong and mostly useful.

Every industry develops its characters. Finance has quants and cowboys, Tech has its founders and forum trolls. Cannabis is a fascination, still small enough that personalities don’t dissolve into abstraction. The space is intimate, verging on incestuous. Everyone knows everyone, or at least thinks they do. Both rumor and echo chamber. What follows is a narrow cross-section of recurring stereotypes, incomplete by design and broad by necessity.

Growers, traditional and nontraditional, whatever that means. They measure time in harvests, not quarters. Their authority comes from placing literal hands on literal living things. They trust plants and are right to be suspicious of people.

Geeks, self-declared and closeted. They relish the ability to trace market cycles back three regimes, and enjoy telling you which state made the same mistake twice. Occasionally, they’re correct, which is not the same thing as being influential.

Suits, numerate, not native. Spreadsheet literate. Fluent in formulas and weighted averages. They are often right about the math and often accused of not understanding “the culture.”

Virgins, necessary, naive. They ask obvious questions everyone else stopped asking. They don’t know what’s “impossible,” which makes them dangerous in useful ways, and have a firm belief that rules are rational. They give and also sap people of hope.

Chads, a mild derogatory shorthand that, in my view, applies to a large swath of all of the above and more. Strong belief that momentum is the only relevant strategy. Over-indexed on vibes. Viewed as incapable of sincerity.

The mistake is thinking any one of these archetypes can run the table. Cannabis punishes monoculture, and it’s strange, debilitating even, how much energy is spent pretending these groups are incompatible. In reality, they are symbiotic, whether they want that or not.

Ultimately, the people and companies that last aren’t purists or pure types. They absorb traits from the others without fully surrendering their core. Like most plants in this space, eventually you end up a hybrid.

#jobsandpersonalities #cannabis #sweepinggeneralization

What if cannabis had always been the baseline and alcohol the insurgent category we were still debating?

Imagine an America where cannabis never carried stigma, was folded into routine commerce, treated as a consumer good with risk, but not existential risk. The public health conversation is clinical, not moral. Intoxication is acknowledged, studied, priced, and largely unremarkable. The culture long ago metabolized it. 

Now introduce alcohol.

A brackish and bitter substance, a chemical companion and byproduct of agriculture itself. Historically ceremonial, it has only ever been a liquid, and in this parallel universe, it's made by hobbyists creating cheap hooch sold locally but almost impossible to traffic. Here, it is newly industrialized.

It works fast. It escalates. Consumption concentrates inside locations engineered for velocity. There is mass and rapid impairment. People get louder. Coordination degrades in real time. Fights become statistically predictable. Sexual performance is significantly downgraded. 

Hospitals notice. Insurance companies notice. Zoning boards definitely notice.

Should this substance be taxed at punitive levels? Restricted to private consumption? Banned from sidewalks? Limited to certain hours so citizens don’t wander into daylight chemically rearranged?

Advocates argue for liberty, critics cite health risk. Bankers hesitate. Municipalities host emergency hearings about whether concentrated public impairment is a feature or a flaw.

If alcohol were the newcomer, its business model likely would be framed as corrosive. Its distribution would be debated. Its lobbyists would be profiled like antagonists.

But, alas, it predates our arguments. History does not eliminate contradiction. Rather, it normalizes it. And normalcy is a controversy that survived long enough to become boring.

Long before it was a line item in a contract, royalty was a practical solution to scale.

It surfaced the moment power, medieval at the time, stopped pretending it was omnipresent. Land, trade, and production kept expanding outward, and supervision lagged. The solution lay in predictable bookkeeping, the least imaginative response, and the most effective. If something could occur repeatedly, far from the center, it could be taxed without being touched. That became the trade: autonomy in exchange for a slice.

Then the American remix started. We took an old idea about control at a distance and stripped it of crowns and sermons, providing patents instead of favors, franchises, licensing instead of ownership, all to provide a dynamic of protection and production to make 'the thing' if you own the instructions for making the thing. You didn’t need omnipresence if you had symbol dominance. The royalty as we know it became the quiet infrastructure underneath it all, an unseen toll taken not only on movement but also repetition. 

To cannabis.

For most of its existence, the industry couldn’t participate in royalty logic because repetition itself was the crime. Processes were intimate and regional. Permission was negotiated face-to-face. Anything that looked remotely involved in scale was suspicious. You can’t license what’s forced to 'stay still.'

That restriction is loosening now, not evenly mind you, but clearly enough to notice. Cultivars, brands, all hopping state lines ahead of the people who made them. SOPs are getting photocopied, polished, and reused. IP is starting to outrank geography. Supposedly, the numbers finally add up, which is the part everyone nods at and nobody fully believes yet.

It’s a change. Not a revolution. Not a great awakening. An old American mechanism doing what it’s always done. The notable thing is that it’s occurring at all.

#franchiseboof #cannabis

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