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 Partner, Brightpoint Advisory, LLC at Brightpoint, leading our restructuring practice.

After more than a decade building and advising businesses from launch to scale, this chapter is about something different: helping operators and investors navigate inflection points that aren’t always about growth but also clarity and value realization.

Right now, cannabis businesses are facing a structural reckoning. The capital isn’t flowing as it used to; regulatory headwinds remain, and consolidation, reorganization, and liability rationalization are no longer worst-case scenarios but the focus.

At Brightpoint, we help management teams, Boards, equity holders, and lenders assess what’s viable, what’s noise, and what can actually be rebuilt. We’ve been inside these operating systems. We know how to steady the wheel when the map no longer matches the terrain.

I’ll occasionally share updates here: frameworks, field notes, reflections. But mostly, I’m in the weeds doing the work.

If you’re navigating complexity, especially in cannabis, and need real strategic support, reach out: mike@brightpoint.co.

Mike Siebold

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

Cannabis is generally not built by cool kids. It's actually built by geeks. And the role of geeks, nerds, the quiet obsessives, etc., our instincts come from the Urtext of this whole thing. People who grow weed are essentially a guild of geeks. Same with extraction. We've been around from the get-go.

We like learning, improvising, documenting, and sometimes failing. Some of us are OGs, but most aren't, couldn’t be if we wanted to; the weed’s too strong to smoke and breaking the law is something you just don’t do, despite all the obvious benefits. Not OGs, just useful squares.

And we do have a particular kind of vision for the space. It’s not loud and it’s never rushed, more patience than bravado, a strong willingness to sit with complexity long enough for clarity to surface. Most of the national authorities we trust in this space are geeks in this sense: credible, deeply informed, quietly rigorous.

Overall, intelligence in cannabis alone has never been enough. You need a network, not for advantage per se, but for continuity. The work is too intricate, too interdependent, to navigate alone. That’s why geeks find one another. Call on us sometime. We have all the trappings of a cabal, but it’s really just another clique of people who refuse to phone it in.

#cannabis #cannabisgeek

MJBiz, our yearly pilgrimage, a trade show dressed as a homecoming, is upon us.

Vegas never made sense, which is why it does. Fluorescent, allergic to nuance. Maybe that’s exactly why it works. Cannabis has always had to exist in contrast too.

The early years were exuberant. Deals in hallways, no-cover nightclubs, access chips, penthouses, lines. Expansion was the operating word; margin was a small detail. Every direction pointed up and to the right.

MJBiz 2025 won’t be a carnival. It’ll be a checkpoint, more sobering if the AWS showcase and the rodeo didn’t turn the place into an absolute zoo.

I’ll be there attending FlowerHire’s HR Summit (my alma mater), getting the next iteration of entrants and descendants dialed.

If you’re heading in, let’s find a minute.

taplio

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