The Greed Rush: Venture Capital Enters Cannabis

[KamaAina]

Last edited Sun Apr 24, 2016, 04:25 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/the-greed-rush-venture-capital-enters-cannabis-news-cannabis-marijuana-marley-natural-harborside-health-center-flow-kana-meadow-peter/Content?oid=4626972

A Bob Marley lyric can serve as a prepackaged nugget of convenient wisdom for just about any situation. On a recent sunny Friday in a South of Market medical marijuana dispensary, Marley's words were coming from the lips of two sharp-dressed and sophisticated women from New York City: Tahira Rehmatullah, a Yale MBA who used to work on the mortgage-backed securities that fueled the subprime crisis, and Berrin Noorata, a 20-something branding- and fashion-industry veteran who lives in a gentrifying area of Brooklyn (and who, if you were not feeling accommodating, you would call a hipster).

Easily the most striking people in the room — where some of the early morning customers standing in line to buy cannabis or sitting on benches taking pulls from vaporizer bags looked as if they stumbled into the shop from one of the surviving SRO hotels in the area — the women were there for the first day of sales in San Francisco for Marley Natural, the official Marley family licensed line of cannabis products, for which they are the general manager and communications and marketing expert, respectively.

Choice Marley words, like "Herb is a plant. Herb is good for everything" are printed on almost everything Marley Natural had for sale at San Francisco Patients and Resource Center, in the running for title of the city's toniest (and best connected) dispensary: the $50 eighths of outdoor cannabis — a 10 to 15 percent premium over the other "sun-grown" offerings on the menu — the $40 vape pen cartridges, the Marley logo-branded rolling trays and bubbler pipes and beauty products.

So far, SPARC is the only San Francisco dispensary lucky enough to strike a deal with Marley Natural, in the running for the cannabis's industry's best-licensed brand and backed by Rehmatullah's private equity firm Privateer Holdings, which announced $75 million in Series B funding — much of it from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and all of it invested in cannabis. In addition to Marley, Privateer invested in Leafly, a web encyclopedia of marijuana strains and information, and Tilray, a Canadian cannabis producer with a license from Health Canada, the country's single-payer healthcare system, to grow and sell cannabis.

Dude, don't bogart that IPO!

[sense]

1. Link doesn't work.

404! Website Error

We're sorry; the page you're looking for does not exist.

As you have undoubtedly noticed, we've been doing some shuffling around here, and the page you're looking for seems to have gone missing. Please use the search field to find what you're looking for.

[KamaAina]

3. Fixed.

Why did they put a ? in the URL? I just assumed that everything after the ? was garbage.

[Warpy]

2. That kind of money will help push legalizaition

and that has been a long time coming. Yes, the tobacco companies registered trademarks decades ago but they never put any cash behind legalizing it. These guys will. Then they'll try to control it.

They'll fail. Pot grows nearly everywhere in the US.

[malaise]

4. And I hope the Marley's the Tosh's etc

get their share. They've been campaigning for close to 50 years.