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Hexo co-founder Adam Miron launches new advisory firm with former business partner

October 29, 2024

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After his four-year tenure as CEO of Ottawa-based digital-asset custodian Brane Trust ended when the company was acquired in late 2023, Adam Miron found himself with time on his hands. As it turned out, his sabbatical from the business world was short-lived. Within a few months, the serial entrepreneur was back in the fray, doing what he says he loves best: helping other founders make their own dreams a reality. In June, Miron and former Brane Trust president Matt Pierce quietly incorporated a new consulting venture called Founded Partners. Miron says the new enterprise – which he officially “introduced” in a LinkedIn post last week – gives him and Pierce a chance to tap into their own unique strengths, offering entrepreneurs strategic advice for the long term as well as immediate, practical assistance with tasks that need to be done now. “I’ve done a lot of things with a lot of different companies, and this is sort of the help that I always wanted,” says Miron, who’s probably best-known for being one of the founders of Gatineau-based cannabis producer Hexo. “Advising businesses is what I think I was born to do, and this is the perfect vehicle for me to do that.” As chief advisor, Miron describes his new role as offering business leaders “strategic guidance … and frankly a little bit of companionship, because particularly for founder-led companies, it’s pretty lonely at the top. Sometimes when you’ve got these issues and these concerns, you don’t really have anyone to talk to about it.” Miron says that while he focuses on “big-picture” issues such as helping founders chart an exit strategy, Pierce helps clients address more immediate concerns, whether it’s creating the right pitch deck to attract investors or calculating quarterly sales forecasts. So far, Miron says, it’s been a happy marriage. “We get along very well because we’re very different people,” he explains, noting that while he tends to gravitate toward the “human capital” side of business, Pierce is “very analytical and has a natural tendency to dive very deeply into the details” of a particular problem. “We complement each other very nicely in that regard.” Miron jokes that 20 per cent of what he now does is therapeutic for entrepreneurs, and the other 80 per cent is dispensing practical business advice. “And some days,” he adds, “that ratio is switched.” Indeed, Miron says his clients can expect to find a sympathetic ear from a man who’s been through the entrepreneurial wars and has the scars to prove it.

Pot peaks and valleys

After earning a biology degree from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., in 2007, Miron spent a couple of years as a Liberal Party staffer before transitioning to the business world. Since then, his ventures have spanned industries from media to cryptocurrency. But it’s in cannabis where he made his biggest mark. After helping get digital news site iPolitics off the ground in 2010, Miron co-founded Hexo, then known as Hydropothecary, with business partner Sebastien St-Louis in 2013. Miron and St-Louis boldly declared their intention to build the “Coca-Cola of cannabis,” and for a time the company did hold a position of dominance in Canada’s fledgling legalized pot industry. Hexo eventually went public on the Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange, reaching a peak valuation of nearly $3 billion. But a series of acquisitions left the company heavily in debt, and Hexo struggled to stay above water in the highly competitive cannabis space as it racked up losses and cycled through a series of CEOs following St-Louis’s departure in 2021. By the time it was acquired by competitor Tilray Brands for US$56 million in 2023, Hexo’s accumulated losses surpassed $2 billion. By then, Miron had moved on to Brane Trust. Founded in 2017, the company was launched with the aim of becoming Canada’s first qualified crypto custodian and later sought to go public on the TSX Venture Exchange via a reverse takeover of Timeless Capital Corp., a capital pool company. Those plans ultimately never materialized, and Toronto’s Wellfield Technologies acquired Brane Trust in a deal that closed late last year. Miron still sits on Brane Trust’s board of directors. It’s one of many advisory positions he holds, which also include being co-chair of Invest Ottawa, the National Capital Region’s main economic development organization, and serving as entrepreneur-in-residence at his alma mater. Miron wears many hats, giving him a broad view of Ottawa’s business community. Overall, he seems to like what he sees. “We are a global tech leader, and I think we will continue to see all sorts of new, emerging companies in a multitude of industries come out,” he says. “That’s what makes it so exciting for Matt and I, is that we can be here to help build some of these companies up. It’s a very exciting time.” Like a lot of entrepreneurs, Miron’s career has had its ups and downs. But he’s proud of his accomplishments and believes he has something to offer the city’s next generation of business-builders. “Having that lived experience and bringing it to these new companies that are just going through these things for the first time I think makes a world of difference. We are able to shine a light in often very dark, unknown areas for a lot of these companies because we’ve done it before.”