Marijuana Business Magazine February 2020

Marijuana Business Magazine | February 2020 100 Industry Players | New Hires & Promotions A look at some recent hiring moves in the marijuana industry Supreme Taps Ex-Starbucks Head as Interim CEO The board of directors of the Supreme Cannabis Co., a license holder in Ontario, Canada, appointed former Starbucks Canada President Colin Moore as interim CEO. Moore replaces Navdeep Dhaliwal , whose “effective immediately” departure was announced in early January. Dhaliwal became Supreme CEO in September 2018. Supreme engaged an executive search firm to find a permanent CEO, but as of press time, none had been announced. Moore served as president of Starbucks Canada from 2002 to 2011 and, before that, was president at the Mosaic Group, a marketing services company that trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange. He also spent 22 years with PepsiCo and its successor restaurant company, Tricon Global Restaurants, now Yum! Brands. Moore’s immediate priorities include “rightsizing” Supreme’s pro- duction footprint. The company also announced that Dan Sippel has joined Supreme Cannabis as the general manager of its flagship brand, 7Acres. Sippel has served as a plant manager at Natra Chocolate America, Export Packers Seafood Limited and Sofina Foods, as well as operations manager for Conestoga Meat Packers and production manager for Maple Leaf Foods. Current General Manager Ram Davloor will transition to senior vice president of quality and operations improvements. By Omar Sacirbey W hen Ashesh Shah , head of early stage investment group The London Fund and CEO of Boston-based Solo Sciences, an anti-counterfeiting technology business, sat down for a coffee with Jessica Billingsley, CEO of Akerna, a Denver-based regulatory compliance technology company, it didn’t take long for the two to see how they could help each other. The London Fund was the lead investor in Akerna’s Nasdaq initial public offering in June 2019, while Akerna drafted Shah as the tech adviser for its board of directors. In November 2019, Akerna acquired a majority stake in Solo and tapped Shah, 49, as chief technology officer. Under terms of Akerna’s acquisition, Shah stayed on as Solo’s CEO. “Solo is a deep technology company, and we felt that between the technology we had and the market footprint that Akerna had, we could really help drive technology improvements and start to upgrade the entire technology stack and the robustness of how the tracking and everything else works across the board,” explained Shah, who also once headed R&D for Razorfish, an interactive marketing and technology company headquartered in Seattle. He added: “I see us taking Solo and propagating it across the thousands of venues and millions of products that Akerna already has through its system.” How has Shah spent his time with Akerna so far? “The biggest thing is figuring out how to create a unified product strategy: how to create a road map between all the different pieces that already exist and that we are now bringing into the fold … and find a way so we can continuously upgrade the service that we provide to customers.” He’s also looking at how to capture new market segments, making new hires and integrating with Ample Organics, a Canadian seed-to-sale tracking company Akerna announced it had acquired in December. Akerna also appointed John Fowle as chief financial officer. Before joining Akerna, Fowle served as chief financial officer for Rev360, a software and business services company in Madison, Wisconsin, and as vice president and controller for Welltok, a health-care data firm in Denver, where he oversaw the integration of six acquisitions valued at more than $230 million. Akerna Appoints Solo Sciences Executive to Chief Technology Officer Ashesh Shah