Billion Dollar Start-up

Adam Miron

Description

Billion Dollar Start-Up is the story of how two 29-year-old brothers-in-law took a [35,000 investment and turned it into a billion-dollar cannabis company in five years. From early roadblocks and devastating personal and financial setbacks to explosive growth and some of the biggest cannabis deals in global history, Billion Dollar Start-Up not only recounts the HEXO story but the history of Canada's momentous road to legalization. In this part fast-paced memoir, part high-octane business book, writer and journalist Julie Beun gives us an intimate look at the life of a start-up and the ferocious entrepreneurial drive it takes to succeed - written in real time, as the story unfolded. Throughout history, there have been fewer than 100 Canadians who have started a company and lived to see it become worth one billion dollars. Adam Miron and S(c)bastien St-Louis are two of them. This is their story.

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773056470
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Billion Dollar Start-Up The True Story of How a Couple of 29-Year-Olds Turned $35,000 into a $1,000,000,000 Cannabis Company
Adam Miron, Sébastien St-Louis and Julie Beun




Contents Dedications Disclaimer Foreword A Cannabis Timeline: A Potted History Prologue Introduction Part 1 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Part 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Part 3 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Epilogue Photo Section Acknowledgements A Note from Sébastien St-Louis About the Authors Index Copyright


Dedications
Adam: To Sébastien, from whom I learned more about business than from anyone else. Thank you for forever changing my life and for what we did in the last little while of my dad’s life. To Meena — the perfect partner. No matter how good of an idea that was pitched, it could never have been possible without your support, confidence, and love. I’m lucky to have you. Mom, without the confidence you instilled in me, with endless love and support, I neither could nor would have even attempted anything like this company. Michael, Jay, Vincent — thank you for taking a chance on us (and sticking with us). To all the employees — you took this dream and made it real, please be very proud of what you’ve done. To our agent, Lloyd, thank you for making this book a reality. To Julie, you are one of the best writers I know, and it is an honour to have produced this book with you. And to my daughters Iyla, Nalina, and Sohana, you girls are my life.
Seb: To my parents, Lise and Jean, for their unwavering support, guidance, and love. To my business partner, Adam, and to Michael and Vincent, thank you for taking the risk and seeing it through. To Max, this is all your fault, man. To every employee and every single person who’s worked with me to build this thing at HEXO, I thank you for the heart you have put into every hour of this journey. To my beautiful wife and my children, you have all my love.
Julie: To my kids, Jed and Hayley, thanks for understanding when I disappeared into my woman-cave to write. Thanks, too, goes to my faux-bro, Brendan McNally, for being an unflagging supporter and early editor, and to my besties Janet Wilson, Mauri Brown, and Measha Brueggergosman for patiently listening when you could have legitimately zoned out. To Adam and Seb, you goddamn rock stars. What a ride it’s been. Thanks for having me in the passenger seat and trusting me to write about this crazy journey. To my former OG HEXO and Hydro squad, there’ll always be the Taj.


Disclaimer
This account describes events covering HEXO’s early years, between 2013 and 2019. Yet the HEXO story continues to evolve and change, just like the industry it helped create. In fact, even between the end of our story and this book hitting the shelves, anything — literally anything — may have happened. The company could have become the world’s largest cannabis producer. It could have been sold. It could have been taken over by highly evolved, cannabis-consuming sentient beings from another universe whose five-year mission is to chill. Who the hell knows? In the cannabis industry, anything seems to be possible. (Except that last one. Obvi.) The point is, the reader should approach this story as a snapshot in time — in crazy, colourful cannabis years, of course.
In some cases, the names of those involved have been changed. These are denoted with an *.


Foreword
A few years ago, I told Sébastien St-Louis and Adam Miron that they were amongst an elite group of entrepreneurs who’d managed to dramatically turn a start-up into a company with a billion-dollar valuation within their lifetimes. In fact, I added, they were two of only a handful of Canadians who’d ever achieved such success.
It sounds impressive — it IS impressive — but that simple statement of fact doesn’t tell the story of the sacrifices, the enormous personal risks, the roller coaster ride they jumped on when they became cannabis entrepreneurs. It also doesn’t talk about the personalities of these two people, or their deep bond of brotherhood and friendship.
There are millions of entrepreneurs around the world, and in my experience, they all share similar characteristics. They are risk-takers. They are dreamers with a streak of hard-nosed pragmatism. And, when the rest of the world tells them over and over that what they want to do simply can’t be done, they ignore the naysayers and do it anyway .
Sébastien and Adam have all those qualities. They’re also two very innovative leaders who steered HEXO to winning awards for products like Elixir and Decarb and changed the game with large format, value-priced products like Original Stash.
From the moment they incorporated in 2013 to now, they’ve remained committed to each other and their friendship, even when things go very wrong. (Seb told me he once covered payroll on his credit card — talk about commitment and personal risk!)
They took chances and made some wrong turns along the way. But I don’t call that failure. In business, failure leads to gaining experience. If you never try anything, you never fail — but you never do anything important either. A majority of entrepreneurs never get anywhere, but those like Seb and Adam, the ones who stick with their ideas and are flexible enough to adjust when plans don’t go as predicted, often turn out to be winners.
That’s the bottom line in Billion Dollar Start-Up . It’s the story of how a couple of guys with next to nothing put together their own little empire in a brand new and unpredictable industry. It is the North American capitalist dream in action.
For entrepreneurs reaching for this book as you struggle to get your ideas to market or attract financiers, this story should make you feel that anything is possible, and that you, too, can do something out of the ordinary.
Don Wright
Chairman, RF Capital Inc.
(Formerly GMP Capital Inc.)
October 2020


A Cannabis Timeline: A Potted History




Prologue
4:21 p.m., January 22, 2018, Somewhere in Gatineau, Quebec
“Hey. What’s up?”
What is up is that Ottawa is in the depths of one of its hellacious blizzards.
Adam Miron is on the speaker in his car, headed down Autoroute 50 out of the Gatineau farmland around Masson-Angers and back to his home in central Ottawa. But, being Canadian and given that a blizzard is a weekly occurrence from December to March, he is on the phone with his colleague Julie Beun, speeding a little in his clapped-out Mazda 3 and doing business anyway. In this instance, however, there’s something electric in his voice.
“Yeah. How are you? I’m good. You got a minute?”
Small talk is not Adam’s strength when he’s excited, so he blows past waiting for an answer.
“Listen, I just have to tell someone. Today is the day we became a billion-dollar company. Any way you cut it . . . we have 218 million fully diluted shares outstanding at $4.95. That’s $1.08 billion. Today is the day.”
She can tell he is grinning down the phone.
“We did it.”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
While it’s true that day was a banner day, so too was January 18, four days earlier.
That night, in Montreal’s chic Hôtel St-James, Adam and his brother-in-law, Sébastien St-Louis, held their first annual general meeting as a publicly traded company named Hydropothecary. Standing together, greeting investors with boyish grins and manly slaps on the back in the lush surrounds of XO Le Restaurant, with its grand staircase and thick white pillars, they looked nothing alike. (Their wives, on the other hand, are sisters who share the same perfect complexion, bright-eyed curiosity, and insightful wit that make them near replicas of each other.)
Admirers often describe Sébastien as a “young Tom Cruise” — or at least, the marquee Tom Cruise. Broad-shouldered, devastatingly intelligent, at turns affable and charming, steely-eyed and blunt, he moves between conversations quickly, the look on his face saying that he is anticipating most of what the speaker has to say before they’ve thought of it. But he lets them say it anyway.
Standing at Sébastien’s side was Adam, his eyes darting around the room. A master of a quiet word in the right ear, Adam is Seb’s perfect foil: a brilliant tactician who learned the fine art of getting into the right rooms at the right times through his work in politics. He is the ebullient and visionary architect of the company’s brand. Where Seb almost exclusively wears athleisure wear and flip-flops, Adam pulls from his collection of ascots, tailored suits, and the kind of footwear bankers should be compelled to take as collateral. Yet, because they are as close as two brothers-in-law and friends can be, it works. And it works well.
At the appointed time, Seb stepped up on stage with Chief Financial Officer Ed Chaplin and board chair Dr. Michael Munzar. A hush fell over the XO, which had been cleared of tables and set up as an ad-hoc meeting room. It was packed with investors keen to meet the two brash 34-year-old entrepreneurs behind the company. A dozen staff and VPs loitered at the edges, pride and trepidation written all over their faces. Amid the exclusive atmosphere, they and the shareholders listened, rapt, as Sébastien, CEO and co-founder, expounded on the company’s ballsy vision for the future like a seasoned politician rallying the troops.
For this company, he told the mesmerized audience, it will be a case of “Today, Quebec. Tomorrow, Canada. And then the world.” Hydropothecary (later renamed HEXO) was in the midst of building a 250,000-square-foot greenhouse and had just announced plans to add another 1 m