Kiran Sidhu has the ability to translate creative ideas into cutting edge business ventures. As an Ivy league educated serial entrepreneur, he has branched out in unexpected ways from his traditional early career positions as Strategy Consultant with Price Waterhouse and M&A investment banker with Merrill Lynch. He went on to found and finance Transact Network, a leading EU electronic money institution as its Executive Chairman, lead the NASDAQ IPO of On-Stage Entertainment as its CFO in the late ‘90s, and work the founders of Party Poker to establish their first US payment solutions.
His latest success story is HALO, the vanguard of modern cannabis extraction in the development and manufacture of leading oil and concentrates products. Having produced over 2.7 million grams of oils and concentrates (with an average sell of 100K grams per month), HALO is considered a leader in the cannabis industry.
“We are on the verge of a momentous shift,” Kiran says. “For hundreds of years, the Chinese used cannabis as an aesthetic, while Bhang, a cannabis yogurt drink, has been enjoyed at festivals and is a tenet of many religious rituals in India. At the turn of the century, we lost its cultural importance and now we’ve found it. HALO is helping to lead this reincarnation of cannabis as a modern medicine.”
Kiran shuttles between his facilities in Southern Oregon, Las Vegas and Southern California. Halo’s 12,000 sq. ft. facility (and seven acres of outdoor canopy) has captured +20% share of the Oregon concentrates wholesale market, and its 8,000 sq. ft. Nevada licensed processing facility (located near the Las Vegas Airport) is expected to generate 15,000 grams per day of estimated production capacity with a US$45MM annual potential revenue.
“This business is in my blood- my grandfather worked in the cannabis industry and I naturally followed his lead,” Kiran says. Dr. Gurbash Chopra MD was the deputy general of medicine for the government of India who immigrated from India to the USA in the 1950s and presented substantiated evidence to suggest that cannabis could be used to treat illnesses and alleviate symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. He was awarded an honors degree by the New York Academy of Sciences.
Kiran was born into an entrepreneurial family. His father, Pawitter Sidhu, an Engineer, was a fierce businessman who pioneered the invention of the Floppy Disk Drive during the computer revolution. His mother, Dr. Satwant Sidhu MD MPH, graduated from UCLA and worked for leading scientist, Barbara B. Brown; a research psychologist who popularized biofeedback and neurofeedback in the 1970s and worked with Dr. Timothy Francis Leary, an American psychologist and writer known for advocating the exploration of the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs (LSD).
Kiran grew up in a liberal Southern California during the ‘70s and ‘80s, a time where cannabis was part of the social fabric. From an early age, Kiran was ready to be released into the commercial wild and founded Computing Ahead with Shiv Khemka when they were students at Brown University in the 1980s. Both would attend school four days a week and fly to the West Coast from Rhode Island.
“We had the perfect sales tactic,” Kiran says. “Shiv’s mother was a real Indian Princess, so Shiv fashioned himself as a Prince, with a gold lettered business card to gain entry to PC industry leaders.” While their peers were working in cafes, these college students traveled between India, Silicon Valley and LA with the novel concept that Silicon Valley companies could use Indian IT professionals for hire.
They were the forerunners of a multibillion-dollar industry. They went to computer shows and found two unlikely champions: Chief Apple Executive Jeff Raikes (better known for his time at Microsoft) and Jack Tramiel (best known for founding Commodore International) and were given a contract to write computer programs that would run on PC’s at retail stores to entice buyers .
“We hired programmers in India, which our classmate, Brad Hauser, supervised in a small room in the back of my dad’s disk drive plant in Chatsworth, California.” Kiran graduated from Brown University with Honors in Computer Science and then completed an MBA in Finance at The Wharton School of Business.
One of Kiran’s most notable hallmarks was his role as advisor/ ‘deep business partner’ for PartyGaming, an online poker card room that remains among the largest online poker card rooms. Through his Indian company, Aspen Communications, Kiran handled their principal deposit solutions for the US and back office analytics to insure deposit integrity (approx. $100mm USD in deposits p/m).
“I lived next door to founders Russ DeLeon and Ruth Parasol and worked closely with all the founders in many different areas. The company operated as a close-knit family. We lived, worked and played together,” he says.
In 2006, when the US passed a law prohibiting online gambling, the business crashed and the company’s market capitalization dropped from 20billion GBP to 2billion GBP on the London Stock Exchange. It was time for Kiran to roll… PartyGaming later merged with Bwin to form Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment. It remains one of the largest online gambling companies to date.
In 2007, Kiran launched Transact Network, a European Licensed electronic money institution and full MasterCard and Visa Europe member. This business grew quickly and in 2012, principal assets were sold to the Bancorp, which at the time was the largest pre-paid issuer in the world.
Soon after, Kiran relocated his family to live in Kovalam Beach in Kerala, India, where he had to learn to disconnect and decompress from the daily grind. “I started to see the attraction of isolation,” Kiran says. “I built a house, slept in later than 6am, ate dinner with my family, and removed myself from business. That is, until the hunger for it started to creep back.”
In 2013, he migrated back to the USA and met two young marijuana entrepreneurs, Andy Hartog and Chris Miller, along with their promoter, Jack Schwebel, through an old friend of his (Mark Beychok), who he knew had a penchant for cannabis. The two young, long-time marijuana producers and distributors were using a coffee decaffeinating machine to extract hash oil out of the cannabis flower, and Kiran was immediately hooked- he knew that this technology (now better known as C02 extraction) was the way of the future.
With his close friend, Dave Elzas, the Chairman and co-founder of Geneva Management Group, Kiran arranged the financing for Andy, Chris and Jack’s venture, which today is called Golden Leaf Holdings. It was one the first US cannabis companies to go public in Canada on the CSE.
Not fully impressed with C02 technology, Kiran connected with his old colleague, Dr. Parkash Gill MD, an Endowed Chair Professor of Medicine at the University of Southern California and renowned Physician Scientist who developed novel therapies for certain cancers. He introduced Kiran to volatile extraction using chemical solvents.
According to Kiran, “Halo was started in the backyard chicken coop of experimental volatile extraction; an inherently combustible technique that produces the most potent quality of cannabis.” The company has garnered significant attention and success in the last two years, largely due to their ability to adapt and release new innovative products.
“We are only at the start of an industry boom and will continue to see the integration of oils and concentrates into the mainstream. Cannabis will be mixed with flavors like turmeric and lavender, rose hip or chamomile, and it wouldn’t surprise me if even chains such as Starbucks introduce cannabis cappuccinos to their product offering,” says Kiran.
Kiran ‘leads from the front,’ however, is quick to dismantle underperforming management and rebuild teams. What has won him admiration as a mentor is his habit of tasking junior members of staff to head up projects and encourage them to strike out on their own. “I give my staff a lot of rope but when things go wrong I’ll deep dive into an area,” he says. He has created a hard charging culture where problem solving, precision and smart thinking requires pinpoint perfection.
One way he has tried to cultivate a deeply connected culture is by pairing employees in a hotel room when traveling; a corporate philosophy implemented by Walmart. “If you don’t have a strong team within your business, you will have trouble,” he says.
Kiran devotes ‘his all’ to business. Every day he works ferociously hard for longer than most people could ever tolerate and doesn’t despair in the face of rejection. “The only way to make money consistently is to create something of value. Eat what you kill and never blither about work-life balance,” he says.
For more information about HALO, visit halocanna.com.
