About: High Sierra Technologies, Inc. (“HSTI”) was founded with the intent of leveraging its unique substantially odorless cannabis technology to become an industry leader in the recreational cannabis, medicinal cannabis and industrial hemp industries. Our management team will utilize their combined 100+ years of scientific, investment and business experience to market our state-of-the-art intellectual property portfolio.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS:
WSA: Good day from Wall Street, this is Juan Costello, Senior Analyst with the Wall Street Analyzer. Joining us today is Vince Lombardi, CEO at High Sierra Technologies Incorporated. The company trades on the OTCQB, ticker symbol is HSTI. Thanks for joining us today there,Vince?
Vincent C Lombardi: A pleasure to be here, the pleasure’s all mine.
WSA: Certainly, yeah. So, please start off there by providing us with an intro and overview of the company.
Vincent C Lombardi: Sure, happy to do it, so High Sierra Technologies is basically — right now, it’s an IP company. We focused our IP on development of low odor hemp and marijuana, and basically anything that’s made with the product. So, currently we have a number of different patents on the technology. And, right now, we’re basically in the next phase of our company to diversify a little bit, raised more money and with the ultimate goal of getting our company on NASDAQ, so, that’s where we’re today.
WSA: Yeah. So, can you bring us up to speed on some of the most recent news and activity there in the market as you executed LOI for the HT Global acquisition.
Vincent C Lombardi: You bet. So, starting — to start off with, I think it’s important to say that, I believe it’s important for a company to be diversified and not have all of your eggs in one basket, no matter how wonderful that basket may be. So, our recent acquisition target is likely to be one of several synergistic products that will make our company completely translational from seed to final finished product sales. The letter of intent that we’ve put out is the acquisition of HT Global.
HT Global, we’ve targeted because the members of HT Global have years of success in the cannabis and hemp industry. And in a developing industry like the cannabis and hemp industry, it’s not easy to find people at this level of experience. And that was one of the prime reasons why we’re focusing on HT Global.
WSA: What are the key trends that you are focusing on right now in the sector and what makes the company uniquely position to capitalize?
Vincent C Lombardi: Sure. Well, most companies, they focus on marijuana or hemp. However, our IP allows us to capitalize on both, because hemp can be transported across state lines, we can actually make hemp products ourselves. However, we can also license IP to the marijuana industry without any issues or restrictions on the interstate transportation of marijuana, or we’re not even restricted by any banking issues.
I mean, there are no banking or licensing issues for IP with respect to the actual cannabis material. So, we have that advantage over other companies. Also, I think it’s important to point out that what makes us kind of a leverage to take advantage of this current situation is there’s a current opioid crisis going on and finding alternatives for pain management is critical.
So, however, there are a lot of people who would like to use cannabis to treat things like neuropathic pain, or maybe things like epilepsy. And they would like to smoke marijuana to treat their pain or whichever ailment they have, but they don’t want to smell like, you know, lack of a better term pothead, so, they don’t use it. But our product technology fixes this problem.
So, we’re also targeting the smoking cessation market. So, the smoking cessation market is a $13 billion a year market. And it’s our goal to conduct a clinical trial for using our patented products in the smoking cessation program. So, lastly, I would say that, I think that with the current financial situation caused by the COVID pandemic, there’s a bit of an opportunity here. There’s definitely going to be a push to legalize marijuana at the federal level. Federal legalization of marijuana will make it a lot easier for states to tax the sales of marijuana.
And we all know that all the states are starving for money because of the cost to pandemic. So, I think once this happens, there’ll probably be a big push for big tobacco to jump into the market with both feet. And I intend to position our company to be a prime acquisition target when this happens.
WSA: Yeah, great. And so, as far as the main goals here for the first half of 2022, what are the key milestones that investors should look out for?
Vincent C Lombardi: Well, right now, we’re doing a couple of things. So, we intend to diversify our company a little bit, so, that’s ongoing. We’re also in the process of raising more money to do some of these acquisitions. We are in the process of talking to several different companies about licensing our technology. So, you can expect to see some of those things come out in the next few weeks.
And basically, obviously, we’re trying to target specific companies, which are going to give us the most presence for our IP.So, with that said, I think that’s kind of where we are really going right now, so, literally trying to take our company to the next level. We’ve spent all of our effort, and showing up our IP portfolio and now it’s time to operationalize that portfolio.
WSA: And perhaps you can talk about your background experience Vince, and who the key management team there is, what’s your skin in the game?
Vincent C Lombardi: Absolutely. So, let’s see. To start off with, how the company was founded, I think that’s actually kind of a good story. So, several years ago, a friend of mine who lived outside the United States, he actually lived in Vietnam. He was ex-Vietnam vet and he got full medical disability for PTSD, decided to move there and help the people. And so, he’s been living in Vietnam for several years.
He called me one day via Skype actually, and said that he met a guy who had a cannabis business a dispensary as well as the growing facility and he needed a chemist to help him with some processing technology. So, at the time he said they were making extracts for marijuana cigarettes, e-cigarettes, vaping things like that. They told me that during the processing, they retained the cannabinoids, which was obviously the part of the goal, but they lost the smell part. And as he put it, some of the marijuanaaficionados liked the smell.
So, he asked me if I come up with a way to do the extractions without losing the smell, so, I said, “yeah I can do that.” So, I showed him how to do it. And through this process, it involves basically isolating the smell part and then isolating the cannabinoids and then recombining the two. But during this, I realized after I did the first step, which is, you know, isolating the smell part, it left me with the cannabis product which had no smell. And so, I thought, well, there’s going to be a market for this someday and that’s actually I think turning out to be true. So, at that point, I filed a bunch of intellectual property around the whole idea. I initially hired a small patent firm to do the initial provisional applications.
Once you file a provisional application, you have a full, you have a year to file a full utility application. So, once our year was coming around, I hired one of the biggest patent firms in the country to file the full utility applications. And so, basically the patents cover, basically anything you — basically covers the process as well as the product and anything you make with the product.
You know, so, for instance, if you were to make, say like, menthol flavored marijuana, you can’t just add the menthol on top of the marijuana, because it’ll smell like stinky menthol. And so, you start with a clean slate by using our product. Because it’s important to understand that, you know that cigarette tobacco sales, 30% of all of them are menthol cigarettes, so, there’s a potential market for this. And so, basically our company has two issue patents.
One is basically the product and the process. And the second patent is anything you do with that product. Now, moving on to the management. Okay. Well, I’ll start with me I guess. So, I’m the President and the CEO. I received my PhD in biochemistry in 2006. Prior to that, I was a self-employed investment banker. And before that, if you go way back to the late 80s, I was the Executive Vice President of OTC brokerage firm and a securities trader as well as a stock broker.
So, our CFO, our Chief Financial Officer and our General Counsel is Gregg Koechlein. Gregg has over 33 years of legal experience and 45 years of business experience. Relevant to our operation for eight years, Gregg ran a chain of automotive performance parts stores called Super Shops. If you’re old enough, you might remember those. He took Super Shops from 53 stores to 165 stores and from annual revenue from $80 million to $250 million. So, he has a lot of experience in the retail sector and running large corporations.
Last, I’ll tell you about my Chief Scientific Officer, Glenn Miller. Glennis an excellent chemist as well as an environmental scientist. He was a professor emeritus at University of Nevada. And he also serves, I think he still serves, or at least served on the state of Nevada’s Medical Marijuana Independent Laboratory Advisory Committee. So, Glenn has always had an interest in the hemp and marijuana arena. And we also have several other scientists and business specialists involved in our company, but it’s a pretty well rounded team.
WSA: So, as far as investors in the financial community, what are the main drivers that you share with them and, you know, what do you wish perhaps they better understood about you guys?
Vincent C Lombardi: Well, I think from an investment standpoint we are a development stage company that in my opinion has some incredibly valuable intellectual property, which, you know, we will leverage to hopefully build a monster company. As a person who is an inventor scientist, and who thinks like an investment banker, because since I have that in my background, to me, it’s all about building shareholder value and the price of our stock. So, I mean, I won’t stop until our company is absolutely successful.
WSA: So, yeah, before we conclude here, why do you believe investors should consider the company as a good investment opportunity today?
Vincent C Lombardi: Well, first of all, let’s say that the marijuana-hemp arena has been kind of like a gold rush or like the wild-west. People that got in early made a lot of money. But unless you got in early, there aren’t a lot of great opportunities. I mean, you know, people who got in early, maybe they financed a dispensary whatever. I mean, those licenses are all used up.
The players have kind of already been set in stone. And so, there’s not a huge amount of opportunities at least to get in the ground level of anything. But our company is unusual and that we have technology that wouldn’t necessarily compete with existing consumers, but has unique advantage of being able to create new users for an established industry. And as far as I know, nobody has that. So, we’re positioned well. We have the experience. We have the know-how, we have a team. So, I think we’re ready to go. I mean, we’re an existing public company. And the fact that we’re a public company, we did it all on our own it says something. And so, yeah, I expect HSTI to be a force to be reckoned with in the future.
WSA: Well, we certainly look forward to continue to track the company’s growth and report on your upcoming progress. And we’d like to thank you for taking the time to join us today Vince and introduce our investor audience to High Sierra Technologies. It was great having you on.
Vincent C Lombardi: Thank you very much. It was a real privilege being on your program.
