Inside The Top Cannabis Business Conference In America: High Expectations For Reform, The Future Of Banking And Taxes
This is an excerpt from Todd Harrison‘s Cannabis Confidential newsletter, published on April 17. Click here to get Cannabis Confidential delivered to your inbox daily.
I’ve been working with the Benzinga Cannabis team for the last few years to help layer experiences atop their biannual cannabis conferences, which have emerged from the once-littered canna landscape as the last must-attend industry event standing.
Gatherings like this have long been a part of my DNA. Back in the Minyanville days, we had a robust digital community that navigated financial markets in real-time and we hosted Minyans in the Mountains and Festivus events to bring those pixels to life.
In October 2021, we took the same model and applied it to the cannabis industry. It was a fairly simple recipe:
Identify your silos: for canna, those were operators, investors, bankers, analysts.
Seed each silo with critical mass; thought-leaders + decision-makers.
Use that critical mass as the genesis for growth and create scarcity value.
Fill (don’t overfill) silos with quality > quantity with a strict ‘no asshole’ policy.
At the event, lift the lids off the silos and watch the entourage effect go nuts.
Benzinga is a different animal, of course. With over 2000 attendees in Florida, Patrick Lane told me that this was the highest attendance ever for a BZ Canna show, which was somewhat surprising given the price degradation and prolonged bear market.
I arrived at The Diplomat Sunday night as I wanted to avoid TSA during trading hours, particularly given the proximity to the 4/20 holiday, where observers are curious if an announcement on/ near that day is so cringe that it just might happen.
Monday April 15th
There was no news, of course, just another volatile session and a late-day kick-save, so I jockeyed bw trading, writing, meetings—including QT with Big Brady Cobb, who kindly handed me some Sunburn flower to sample—before a quick shower and dinner with a local buddy/ 40-year friend/ investor who I hadn’t seen in ages.
As I turned on some tunes and began to shave, I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated that my shaving cream wouldn’t lather, and as I rubbed harder, my mind began to think about what the average expiration date on shaving cream might be, and then I realized—I wasn’t using shaving cream, I was using aftershave.
I had two epiphanies at that moment: 1. It’s prolly not a good idea to enjoy cannabis prior to putting a razor against your neck and 2. Holy fuck Sunburn cannabis 🔥
After dinner, where I spent most of it openly wondering how a guy like Paul could get a gal like Kira—I’ll tell ya, it almost bends the laws of physics—I met up with another pal of 35 years (also an …