Why You Need To Invest In Cannabis Before It's Too Late With Christine De La Rosa [Ep.04]

Victoria Jenn welcomes the #1 Latina in Cannabis, Christine De La Rosa, the CEO and founder of the People's Ecosystem, a cannabis company in California and New Mexico. Christine is a trailblazer in the industry, serving as the fund manager for the People's Group, a fund that invests in BIPOC and women-led cannabis companies. She shares her remarkable journey into the industry, driven by her personal experience using cannabis to manage her crippling health issues, including lupus. We break down the reasons why you need to seriously consider investing in the cannabis industry before it's too late, how to raise money and manage investors, and uncover the history behind how this plant was used against Latino and Black communities, even though our ancestors used the plant freely as medicine.

In this episode, Victoria Jenn and Christine De La Rosa discuss:

• Christine's entrepreneurial journey, from a tech career to a cannabis industry leader.
• How to assess investors and not get taken advantage as a founder.
• How to start investing in cannabis and let go of cultural stigmas held against the plant
• Key factors for making sound investment choices in the cannabis industry, like recognizing the roles of cultivators and manufacturers in the sector.
• Christine's efficient three-meeting framework for attracting investors.

Learn more about the People's Ecosystem & Invest: https://thepeoplesecosystem.com

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More About Christine De La Rosa:

Christine De La Rosa isn't your typical cannabis entrepreneur. With over 7 years in the game as CEO of The People's Ecosystem, she's redefining the industry, focusing on underserved markets. But that's just the start. She's also a Strategic Advisor at Nourish And Bloom Market, an AI-driven grocery store, and a Founding Member at The People's Group, an investment firm championing BIPOC and women-led cannabis businesses. Christine's advisory roles span Regennabis, Cannabis Doing Good, and Tetragram, and she's a member of the National Cannabis Industry Association, advocating for diversity and inclusion.

Not just a leader, she's an author too, with papers like "Gender Parity in the C-Suite" and "Pathways to Equity Ownership in the Cannabis Industry" challenging the norm. And she's not just advising businesses; she's influencing government policies across the US for social equity in cannabis. Christine De La Rosa's mission? To transform the cannabis industry into an inclusive, diverse, and sustainable space, where marginalized communities, consumers, and entrepreneurs thrive.

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Why You Need To Invest In Cannabis Before It's Too Late With Christine De La Rosa

In this episode, we're going to be talking about everything and anything cannabis. I love that we're having this conversation because I had the pleasure of meeting the top Latina in the Cannabis industry. She's going to break it down for us what's going on in the industry, what's coming down the pipeline, how you can possibly invest and all the bone chain behind the scenes because we got to get the tea and behind the sinks. Without further ado, welcome, Christine De La Rosa to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited for you to be here because we are in the heart of New York City. I got you when you were in town and going on your investment rounds. I'm honored that you are here and give us the opportunity to learn more about you and your incredible story. Introduce yourself to the people.

I'm the CEO and Founder of The People's Ecosystem, which is an operating cannabis company based in California and New Mexico. I'm the fund manager for the People's Group, which is a fund that specifically invests in bipoc and women-led cannabis companies.

You are the only Latina-owned fund owner.

In the Cannabis space.

Getting Into Cannabis

The fact that a Latina owns a fund period is huge in itself, but being the premiere in the Cannabis industry is freaking amazing. Tell us about your story because you didn't start in cannabis. How did you get to cannabis?

I am a database architect by trade. I've worked for all of the major telecoms. I've consulted all over the world. In my last job, I was a manager director at Verizon Wireless. I helped put together the project. Now this is old school because now we have 5G but before 5G, there was LTE. I went to Walnut Creek California to help produce the LTE back-end for the network. That's what. I did I built databases for Cell phone companies.

In 2007, I started to get sick. I was starting to not feel well. I was not myself. At that time I was living in Dallas, Texas. I went to eleven doctors in Dallas. Every one of them is like, “We don't know your joints are swelling. We don't know why this is happening,” and then I got transferred to California. I did a whole other round with another twelve doctors. They're like, “We don't know. Sorry, you feel bad.” I was shocked that nobody could figure out why I felt terrible.

I kept getting sicker and sicker and having to take time off of work and doing short-term disability. It was scary. On Thanksgiving Day. In 2010, I'm driving down the 880 and my California people will know what that is by Oakland. I had a pulmonary embolism while I was driving which is basically a clot left my body and hit my lungs. I remember that clearly because I pulled off to the side of the road and I was like, “What is happening to me?”

An ambulance was called. I went to the hospital for seven days and it was in the hospital that they diagnosed me with lupus. That started my trajectory towards cannabis because in the next five years, I was unable to work. They had me on eleven medications. Five of those were opioids because at the time opioids were the thing. I had in my medicine cabinet Vicodin, Oxycontin, Tramadol, Fentanyl patches, the thing that kills people at any time I could use those for my pain. On top of that, I had a blood clotting disorder. I had neuropathy. I had all these things and I was on Gabapentin, Lyrica and Prednisone, which is a steroid. It's terrible.

For five years, I lived in my house. I couldn't walk. I didn't leave my house. I didn't go grocery shopping. I was a zombie. These are my highest earning years as a person who worked. I didn't work for those five years. I literally was pretty much a prisoner of my home and of the medications I was on. For some reason, holidays are important to me. It's January 1st of 2015. I'm sitting at my desk when I could sit and filling up these huge medicine things. I had eleven pills I took a day's worth of horse pills for some of them. It was awful.

I thought, “There's got to be something else.” I start to look on the internet. I thought I was going to get like Ginseng or green tea, but this thing kept coming up for cannabi,s marijuana and I was like, “Makana.” One of the biggest I think terrible things that's happened to us as a culture. Is that the medicine that our ancestors used Ayahuasca peyote marijuana was taken away from us? Instead, we were told to use opioids. These are natural holistic plants that grow in the ground to synthetic medication that's done in a lab.

I lived in California. Medical marijuana has been legal there for twenty years. It never occurred to me to go to cannabis, to even try cannabis because when I left to go to college, here's what my mom told me and these are her exact words, “Whatever you do, don't get involved with marijuana or they're going to think you're lazy Mexican,” because that is the trope that our parents were taught. It occurred to me. It kept coming up. I was like, “I'm going to try it. I'm on five opioids. How much worse could this be?”

I went to the dispensary that was literally 2 miles from my house, hobbled in with my little cane and I bought a bunch of stuff. I didn't know what to get. I bought smokeables, vapes, edibles and tincture. I got everything and I started taking it. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know what I was doing, but eventually, I found things in the things that I had purchased that worked for me that I was like, “My knees aren't swelling.” I'm using an Indica so I can sleep because I almost started a second time in 2012 for pericarditis. That's a whole different story but it's part of Lupus. I thought my heart was attacking me. it was filling with fluid.

I have just been sick for so long. When I started to feel better I was like, “What's going on here? It's got to be the Cannabis.” I found a regimen that worked for me. What I did is I started to take away one pill a week. For every week, I would take a pill away sometimes two pills away if they were the same pill. By September of 2015, I was no longer taking the 11 medications. I was no longer going to the hospital once a month to get an infusion. I had replaced the entire pharmaceutical regimen with a cannabis regimen and I felt good. I was walking without a cane. I was feeling myself.

I was walking upstairs. I was like, “I can walk upstairs.” I couldn't work in. I was twerking, but I was also going to go back to work because now I feel better. I could go back to Verizon. My job was waiting for me, then I thought I couldn't do that because if anything about lupus, it affects African-American and Latino women the most in the US. I was in mental health groups because I was depressed because. I thought, “I could have had my five years back if I had not had the prohibition of cannabis from my mother who didn't know any better.” I'm not blaming her, but because of that stigma, I didn't try that when it first started for me. It took me five years to find it and I've lost being high on opioids.

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Nobody functions on that. In cannabis, you can totally be functional. I'm functional now.

You take this every day.

Every day since for the last many years. I still have Lupus. Sometimes I'll have a flare, I need to take more cannabis. You learn this about your body. I decided to start a cannabis company, but what we decided to do was open up an underground cannabis company in Oakland because in Oakland they had this something called measure Z which allows you to run a collective privately without having a license. That's what we did. We opened up an underground dispensary behind our t-shirt shop and people would come in. Those who knew would say, “I'd like to see the private gallery.”

When we first started we were in a little closet in the spot and the closet was about 4 inches bigger than my hips. It was tight. It was under the stairs. it was hilarious. We started with three strains that we grew in our backyard and then the people upstairs moved we took over the loft space. It was about 300 square feet. I thought this was something I was doing to help my folks and people I knew. I thought were going to have 50 or 70 people that were part of our collective that had lupus or autoimmune diseases, but by the sixth month, we had 4,500 members and an 82% return rate. People kept coming back 82% of the time every month.

I started to look around and be like, “What is different about us?” There was another measure Z clubs. What about the eight legal dispensaries? Most of the eight legal dispensaries were owned by White folks. We were all people of color. People felt more comfortable coming to us. We had a full dispensary like it was a time of the Wild West over there, even the big legal companies would sell to us. We had all of the vapes that everybody else had. It was cool and then they passed measure 64 which was recreational. We got grandfathered in for another year. That would be 2018 and then we had to become legal.

You credit that 82% rate to the fact that you were of color and people felt like more comfortable coming to you.

Look at the market for cannabis, it comes out of African, American and Latino cultures. We're the ones who used it, made it big and who knew to use it for medicine. We are the largest market, but what happened when recreational came over is and there's no polite way to say this but the White folks came and like, “We're going to make money we put you all in jail, but we're going to make money now.” I don't know about you but got popped for a cannabis charge, are you going to feel comfortable going into a White company that's selling you legal cannabis when you could literally walk out and get arrested if they wanted to? There was a trust issue that was happening.

Where Cannabis Originated

Where does the cannabis originate? Was it Columbia? Where did it come from?

It comes from everywhere. They have artifacts of Chinese cannabis from China in the 1800s. Cannabis was everywhere. It was in Jamaica, Mexico and Colombia. It was used as a medicine. You got high, but not everything makes you high. Some of it was medical. They had rubs for your arthritis or inflammation. It was a plant. It was not native to one place. It was everywhere.

You can look this up on Wikipedia. When the US took over this piece of Mexico where there were a lot of Mexicans living there because it was what Mexico and they were like, “We are Mexicans here,” in their land that they've lived in here since the 1500s. They had to figure out a way to put us in jail or to deport us and they use cannabis. My great-grandmother, whom I would call Chiquita, that's how she cured me was tinctures and cannabis in Ayahuasca. All the stuff was in her own good bag. If I got sick and I lived in Texas, my mother wouldn't take me to the doctor. She would take me across the border to Novelado to see how we did Chiquita. They used that as a way to deport Mexicans, put Mexicans in jail, and then eventually as a pipeline for the African-American population here in the States.

You started this cannabis company as a result of health care, a need and realizing a gap in the market. Since then, you've been able to raise impressively about $5 million and counting. I want to get into all of that. I also want to allow the folks to get to know a different side of you. I want you to give us a piece of bochinche.

The bochinche especially for Latino specifically is if you're not investing in cannabis because you have this framework of stigma, you need to work through that because this is going to be a huge industry that currently we're missing out on because we have that stigma of being not wanting to be seen as lazy or thugs or not wanting to be seen. My bochinches is to find you a good company. It could be mine or someone else's and invest in them because this is a holistic medication that is going to replace a lot of pharmaceuticals. That's the first one bochinches and the more public.

My personal bochinches is that we are doing medical drinks now like we're going to be doing cannabis drinks that help for medical conditions because a lot of times, in my opinion, there is no plus side to alcohol. There's no record of it with the exception of red wine, but cannabis drinks will replace a lot of alcoholic beverages because they are cheaper, medicinal and taste good. It gets you lit faster than the alcohol and you don't have a hangover the next day. You've read it here first.

Why Invest In Cannabis

Let's take a deeper dive into that bochinches. You said Latinos should start investing in the cannabis industry. Why?

It's going to be a huge industry. When you're thinking about what's coming up, you're thinking AI. Yesterday all of the major Banks filed with the SEC to be able to offer cryptocurrency as part of their asset offerings to their investors. Cannabis is still an alternative to the alternative markets because it's not federally legal, but you can invest in it per state but in about 18 to 24 months, it's going to be federally legal.

At that point, all of these big companies, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, big institutional investors and big funds are going to pour money into those companies that are doing well. You want to be part of the investors. You can get in now. It'll be harder to get in later and it is our culture. There's no cannabis culture without Latinos and African-American folks in the US or anywhere. We should be creating generational wealth from the thing that we created the market we created. If we don't invest now, we have a very good chance of not being able to invest later because it will be a much higher price point.

If folks want to get in, where do they go?

There are a lot of places to go, but I would tell you to do your research. You don't have to invest in my company, but we do have fun. What we do is even when people don't invest in me, I'm very passionate about educating our Latino Market on who to look for. There's a ton of great companies in the market. As we were talking about earlier the Latino Market in the US is how?

It’s $2.8 trillion by 2025.

We have brilliant buying power. When you look at cannabis across the US, you can see almost very few companies that are addressing that market share. We're one of those companies there are a few other companies, but the reason that's happening is because Latinos don't have access to Capital. If you're a Latino who has capital, find the group that you feel comfortable with that you want to invest in because there's a huge chance that they're going to be very successful totally.

When you talk about investing, you don't mean $50,000. You don't even come in with $500 or$1,000. You could come in with what you got. At our breakfast earlier, you shared with me that part of your philosophy around raising funds is if you think about where you're parking your money right now, you're getting like 2% or 3% if you're lucky right now, If you park it in a fund, what is the average rate of return for you?

Usually, we're looking for anywhere from a 3X to a 10x. 10x is a high thing mostly around technology. This is important for investors to understand, that cannabis is an agricultural company because you have to grow a plant before you can harvest the plant and make it into products. When you're looking at agriculture versus tech, tech will give you a 10x return agricultural will get you about a 3X return but we're also talking about cannabis. I always tell people it's going to be within that 3x to 10x. It could be 5x or 7x depending on the company, but please don't expect it to be in and out.

It takes time to grow a plant and grow your money in cannabis. I always tell people to give about a 5 to 7 years. You're going to park that money and hope that in 7 to 10 years you're going to get 3X at the very bottom and 10x at the top.  I can foresee that happening at Federal legalization, which an 18 to 24 months. We're going to see a huge hockey stick of the value of companies in the Cannabis space, especially those that have prepared for that. the other thing I would tell investors is like look at the company. What is their strategy to exit? What is their strategy for Federal legalization? These are things that you should be asking.

You've been able to raise $5 million which is insane, especially given the data around the lack of access that we have to capital. I had the pleasure of meeting you in Napa. Shout out to Richard and the Heights and I immediately gravitated towards you because you shared some nuggets and I was like, “She's badass. She knows her shit and she's a Latina and cannabis. I need to learn more” I want to share these nuggets with the audience because they are thinking about financial management, entrepreneurship and where to start and also how to manage yourself in rooms where you are. The only where you are the minority the only woman, the only person of color or only Latino.

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Raising Capital

It's important for you to have these tools in your tool shed in order to show up and show out. Let's talk about raising capital and the story that you had shared around a meeting or something that you went to and there were like these big briefcases that dudes were carrying around. Tell us that story girl.

I want to set the standard because you're like, “$5 million. That's a lot.” This one group raised $500,000. They invested that with a major company in California all owned by White guys. They lost all $500 million because if you're a White guy, they just give you $5 million and you get to burn it. That happened in Canada. $5 million is a lot for us.

They gave him all this money and then they gave him more money.

The fail-up is real. It was 2018 and I was starting to understand fundraising. I got invited to the Grand Caymans for a bunch of family offices that were gathering in the Grand Caymans in the Bahamas. It's a Bahamas in that area. They flew me out. They were starting to think about what it would look like to invest in cannabis. They ask me to come out and give a talk. The person that was hosting me and I was getting ready for our panel and for a bunch of guys with big briefcases. I finally turned to her and I said, “What is in those briefcases?” She's like, “That's money?” I was like, “Cash money?” She's like, “Yeah.” I'm like,  “They just carry around cash money?” “Yeah, they're going to buy Bitcoin,” in 2018 when Bitcoin was $1.

Everybody who invested in Bitcoin in 2018 became millionaires. That's what they had, cash. The Grand Caymans is a place where people go to put their money because they are known for that. Some folks are from Oakland. I met one lady in Oakland who had bought $10,000 in Bitcoin when it was cheap and she's a multi-millionaire now. This is the thing. If you follow what the rich people are doing, you will see where the money is going to be because had I known what Bitcoin was in 2018, I had no idea what that was. I had no idea about cryptocurrency. I was like, “That's weird that you would carry cash to buy Bitcoin. I don't understand it.”

They were depositing their money into the bank to buy the Bitcoin. They became multi-millionaires on buying cryptocurrency. Cannabis is this way. Cannabis is this for us. If we don't invest in it now in about 5 or maybe 10 years when it becomes a major component of your Parkinson's disease medication. They're doing studies on that now. It becomes a major component of your pain management that replaces Oxycontin Tramadol and all that other BS. You're going to be like, “Why did I invest in cannabis?”

I'm going to tell you the reason you don't invest in it is because somewhere in the psyche of our cultura, we were told that it was bad and to not do that. Had I started doing cannabis in 2010 when I first got sick, I would be way further along in my career whether I would be in this career, I might still be as a database architect, but I'd be further along if I had not had that stigma and that belief system based on nothing, just because my mom said it was bad because she was told it was bad.

Also, because they were lacking everybody and their mama up. There's that stigma that exists but there's also a lack of education around how to even penetrate the market, how to invest, how much money, the how, the why, the time horizon, how long you're going to have your money park and all of these things. I think it's a combination of things but you're right, if you're following what the rich are doing with their money. That depends because sometimes they're parking their money somewhere and it doesn't work, then you ask that. In that instance how can you be an educated investor? Using a rule of thumb, “What are the what are the rich people doing?” AKA, “What are people doing with their money? What are they doing?”

I'm going to correct myself because there are a lot of wealthy Latinos out there and people of color. Let me check myself because that is untrue, the wealthy, what they are doing and how they are choosing to invest their money outside of what you find on Google because you can land on Google and you could read this narrative like, “It's amazing. You got to get in right now. Do it now.” You saw some of that in the crypto space. You have some of these coins that were popping because there was like all this momentum happened to me. I invested $2,000 in a coin and then  3 weeks later, I was almost completely asked out because I got caught up in the height. That was a lesson learned that I had. How should you be approaching this if even in your research there could be inaccurate information?

The best way to approach it is to look at what the company is doing. Here's my rule of thumb and I've said this a lot over the last couple of weeks. When you're looking at cannabis companies to invest in a lot of people want to invest in retail shops, that's shiny. It's a sale and customer-facing. I 100% believe in retail shops. However, at Federal Legalization, Amazon gets to ship cannabis across the states.

Imagine you got your Prime delivery. You got your cannabis showing up to the crib.

If you don't think that's not going to happen, you're wrong. They're already preparing for that. While retail shops are good nowadays, are they good investments in 2, 3 or 5 years? Are we going to go the way of Bed Bath & Beyond? I remember going to Bed Bath & Beyond, it used to be one of my favorite things to do After the pandemic, I would go into Bed Bath & Beyond. There was nothing on the shelves because you could buy that on Amazon. I'm not caping for Amazon. I totally am not doing that but you have to be able to read the tea leaves.

I tell people, “If you're going to invest in a real tell shop, make sure that they have a good exit strategy.” I’m talking to Big folks who know the industry is one of the very first things. If you're going to invest in cannabis, schedule a meeting with me, not to just get some information. That's the knowledge that I share. Call other people Go to events. Talk to people about what they think in the industry and then you're going to have to make your own decision.

People are like, “What about distribution?” I'm like, “Do you think that all of the alcohol distributors are not going to distribute? They already have the distribution lines. Why would you invest in distribution?” They already have all the trucks, pallets and everything. You're going to be using one of those distribution channels. Distribution to me is not necessarily a good investment unless there's going to be a huge distribution coming that's doing cannabis, but I don't think that's going to be the case. When I look at that, I'm looking at cultivators who make the plant. None of these other pieces in the supply chain happen without cultivators, the people who grow the plant and grow it well.

I would be investing in cultivators and the people who make the products that go on the shelf. When I started the biz, I had a dispensary and I quickly learned to sell it. I sold it and reinvested it into manufacturing. You might be like, “Why?” It’s because when you're a dispensary, you have to buy 750 products to fill your store. I'd rather be the manufacturer who's selling 7850 products to 750 stores. When you're looking at investment, those are the two places. People always like, “Cultivation. They don't make any money.” As soon as it is federally legal, they're going to have access to all the agricultural subsidies. They're going to have plenty of money. Invest now in the people who are going to be responsible for creating the plants that make your medicine and recreation.

The Framework

Another nugget that you shared was these three-meaning frameworks that you have especially as a woman when you are approaching men for capital or collaboration partnership, whatever it is. What is that framework?

I learned that framework in New York. I came out here in 2017 when I was starting to raise capital in the first round. I was new. I definitely fell for a lot of stuff. What I learned was that it doesn't take that many meetings to get money. If you have a data room that has all of the information and that's what a data room should do, a data room should have everything you want an investor to know. It should answer every question so that they don't have that many questions. Whatever questions they have put in the data room for the next investor. You have your first initial meeting. I always people 30 minutes.

Where is this data room?

You can put it anywhere. I have it on OneHub. You can have it on DocSend. There is actual data room software that is online in the cloud. I have a whole thing about what you put in it.

This is where investors go to. See if it's a credible investment.

It will be like, “What's your performa? How are you structured? How do I invest?” The first meeting is about 30 minutes and before you had to meet them face to face, but since the pandemic you can do that 30 minutes on Zoom, which is great because otherwise, you spend a lot of money traveling.

The first meeting is on Zoom. What are we discussing at that meeting?

You're pitching. You have about 20 or f 30 minutes after you do his and hellos to be like, “This is my company. This is how much money I'm looking for. This is how we're going to spend the money in this how we're going to get your money back to you.” If they're like, “I'm interested,” they sign a non-disclosure agreement then you give them access to the data room. Usually, the investors are not coming through the data room. It's their financial people.

They go through the data room and they're like, “Does this seem viable? Does this work?” It does work. We're going to ask for a second meeting to answer some questions which are called due diligence questions. They're going to come back and ask you for things. You don't know what things it's going to be. It's different for every investor, but it's a due diligence.

Let's back up. I want to be slow about this because there are a lot of moving pieces. They're signing an NDA. Why?

There's a lot of corporate secrets in your data room, how you're going to market, how you're going to spend the money and how you're going to capture the market. You're showing them your executive plan. These people have tons of money. They can take your executive plan and go find somebody else to do the executive plan. They can't do that because you got the secret sauce. You want to protect your intellectual property.

First meeting, pitching, “I'm interested,” “Cool, sign this NDA. I'm going to send you more info.” That's over Zoom.

Usually, in the second meeting, if they're interested, you're not talking to them. You should be talking to their financial folks, the people who ran through the data room they can ask any questions and have a sense of calmness about what you're talking about because they're investing not only in your company. They are investing in you as a founder. The final meeting should be assigning the meeting you're signing. You're giving me some money.

What I did wrong and what I tell people now is I would go to lunch, and dinner and do these things. I would waste a bunch of cycles on people who had no intention of giving me money, but they like to hear themselves talk or they like to have a dinner companion because they were lonesome or whatever. I always tell people, “Don't ever do dinner. Dinners are no, off the table until after they've invested then you can have a dinner,” but prior to that I always say coffee. If you're going to be in person I say, “Coffee date at the beginning. Maybe a lunch for the second one if you need it, but after three meetings, they're not going to give you money. It's very rare.”

I know some people that might have gotten some money but it costs a lot of time and energy for not a great investor. That's using it's important about investors is that you want people who believe in your vision, believe in you as a founder and are going to help you build up your company. They should be partners with you because their money's invested they want to multiply their money so they need to be part of your team. They're not just people who gave you a check.

As I was telling you a breakfast, we had an investor meeting. It was super exciting but we had an ask. At the end, we asked, “Make sure you're following us. Make sure you're telling your friends about us. Make sure you're wearing our gear make sure you're buying our products.” This is how investors can be helpful, “Help us raise other capital.”If you have a friend who wants to invest, contact them.” Your investors should be part of your team and help you be successful.

Investor Red Flags

When do you know when an investors full of crap?

Usually, when they want to have dinner.

I feel like a lot of business happens at dinners.

A lot of businesses. Usually, B2B. Investors are not business. They're investors. It's different. I do a lot of business over dinner. I go to dinner. I do my business, but investors that are serious whether they're a family office, individual investor, part of another fund or whatever that might be, they're trying to move capital to start working. They want to work in the capital. You never want the capital city in a bank. It makes no money sitting in the bank. If they're being casual about it, they're not motivated to make their money work means they're not motivated about you.

For me, usually dinner isn't a loud place. You can't hear me. I can't hear you. I'm yelling at you. You're yelling at me. Even if we're in a quiet place, we can't talk very loudly. I don't have anything to show you. I'm just talking to you. I have not found this to be helpful. I have not found them to be helpful. I have found Zoom calls to be helpful and coffee dates for lunches where we can be in a place that's not dark has been helpful so you can see me because you want your investor to get to know you. They're investing in you as a person or a Founder, but you don't want to waste cycles on somebody who needs to dinner companion because they're lonely.

That's a red flag. Anything else?

At any point, in your conversation where you feel uncomfortable, that's a red flag. I had two major things happen to me early on that I didn't trust my gut. Trust your gut. One of them was I remember I was talking to somebody about why it was important for Black and Brown people to own in the Cannabis space. I was talking specifically about social equity programs. I remember this guy who worked for Procter & Gamble. I was like, “If I could get investment like that. I’m excited about it.”

He's like, “I don't really invest in social services. I'm not a welfare company.” I was like, “Okay,” and I stayed for a couple of more minutes then it was over. The minute he said that, I should have been like, “Great. Thank you. Go up and leave. Why waste your time? You've already told me that you're not investing in social welfare, even though that's not what I'm talking about. You're already not listening to me.” It was funny because about two years later during the pandemic, he wrote me an email. He's like, “I'm interested in investing in you,” and I was like, “We're not taking Investments,” because not all money is good money. Not all money is going to work for you and what you don't need is to have money working against you.

A lot of times, you have to be careful with investors because they're in the game is to get you out and own your company. Some people raised $50 million or $500 million. I go super slow so I make sure that everybody on my cap table, everybody who's invested in us is our advocate, a person that helps us and not a person, that wants to take over that they are invested in our success as a company and as a team.

The second example was even worse. I've almost never talked about this. I'm here in New York. I was living in Park Slope. I was working with some of the folks with Governor Cuomo at the time. They were working on social equity. I'm considered one of the premier social equity folks. What was helping them think about how that would show up in New York? I got an investor for the company and he was willing to invest $50 million into the company.

I thought I was a bad girl. I was like, “I got $50 million from an investor.” We're going down the path. I have my lawyers. They have their lawyers. We agree on terms. We signed operating agreements. We signed investment agreements. We have everything. I think. “We're going to do this.” I go to the bank with him to open up the account where the money is going to enter. I do all of those things. I had hired people. I had people starting to work because we had signed papers. It was a sure thing. The night before the first $5 million was to come in, he called me and said, “I would like to own 55% of your company.”

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I’m like, “That's not the agreement. You're not going to be a majority owner of my company.” He's like, “I'm not going to give you $5 million.” I remember that moment. I remember I was standing in the bathroom of this Park Slope apartment that I had subletting and I felt my entire body. I was like on the ground. I'm like, “I'm going to have to call you back. I got to call my partners.” I called my partners and I said, “This just happened. As a CEO, my recommendation is that we don't do this. If this guy wants to do 5% of the company the day before we get $5 million dollars of the first 50 and we've already signed all the paperwork.”

It’s a super sleazy move.

They agreed with me. I called him back and said, “I'm going to decline.” He was mad. He yelled at me on the phone. How dare I. How I do this. Do I know who he is? “Yes. I know who you are. You're somebody who's not going to be a good partner to us.” I had to go and lay off all my people. I had to re-pivot. I had to call people and be like, “I'm sorry this happened, but this is where we are.” It took us about a year to recover from that because we had invested so much time and energy to get the paperwork, done to pay the lawyer and do all the things.

That was the second bad experience. The reason I'm saying that is because I had glimpses of who he could be prior to that night. I thought, “No. We're signing papers. We're doing the legal things.” He is incredibly wealthy. Is that super wealthy don't play by the rules? I didn't care about lawyers. He got a piece of paper, sue me.

“You got money to sue me?”

That was here in New York. I remember traveling all over New York and thinking that was the thing. I'm totally let down and two days later, I had to go speak in DC. I was crushed.

What do you do now differently?

I have a feeling that I go with it, the trust in your gut. If I'm talking to somebody and they feel weird, and maybe they're not weird. Having a weird feeling about somebody is not about they're not trustworthy. Sometimes it's an energy thing like my energy is not going to mingle with your energy which means we're already always going to be at odds. I don't want to be in a company and taking money from people where I'm going to be at odds with them. I don't want that. I've turned down a lot of money. I've accepted a lot of money. I feel very proud of the investors I have because they are rooting for our success. They want their money, but they're also willing to wait knowing that I'm building slowly so that we have something that's valuable at the end of this game.

Is there anything legally that you're going to do differently? Will you not go out and spend money you don't have yet?

I've never done that before After that happened, my biggest thing was people being like, “I'm going to give you some money.” I'm like, “Until it's in the bank, I’ll act like I don't have it until it's not only in the bank cleared a couple of days.” That's one of the things that I definitely did differently because it never occurred to me when you come from where I come from, your word is your bond. I come from a very lower middle-class family. When you made an agreement, if you signed an agreement even more tight, but if you told somebody, “I'm going to do this thing,” you did that thing. If you sign a paper saying you're going to do that thing you were in a contract. Having to learn that that's not how some people who are wealthy act, you learn to be super careful and do everything legally but also wait. Don't assume that that money is going to come even if they sign something.

Let's say you come across another investor who wants to give you $100 million. Are you going out and hiring the lawyers to draft the paperwork?

Yes.

There's no cost of doing business even that type of conversation to get an agreement going.

It costs money to get money. You have their own lawyers, but you want your lawyers to draft up your agreements and then their lawyers can do what's called the red line for things that they don't agree with. Having control over the paperwork is important for you as a founder to make sure that the investment you're coming and you understand your obligations to that investor and the investor understands their obligations to you. I did that in that scenario where I got totally screwed over. It was my lawyers that put it together.

I did everything right. The other thing I want to tell all founders, but especially women founders. You can do everything, and still have somebody kick the table out from under you. I spent about a year being crushed. My confidence was crushed. I'm like, “How could I fall for this?” I realized, “It wasn't me. I did what I was supposed to do.” When you have a person in your sphere that doesn't have integrity that's not a reflection on you. That's a reflection of them. You do have to learn from that because if you make the mistake a second time that is on you.

Thank you for sharing that I know that happens more often because savages are out here who are trying to steal up your ideas, IP and company, especially people with money because they do have leverage and that's the fact of the matter.

They don't always have creativity. I always tell this to my founders. I now mentor a lot of founders and talk about my story about how to raise capital and all that stuff. I tell them, “People with money have a lot of opportunities because they have money, but a lot of times they don't have the creativity, geek or coding ability to be able to use that money. They need the founders that have the creativity and idea.”

I'm sure the first person that was like, “I'm going to make an AI thing.” The first person was like, “I don't know of any investors that can do that.” When you look at Elon Musk, who's not a genius. He just had money. He bought Tesla. He didn't make Tesla. He bought Twitter. He didn't make Twitter. Founders are very important. Know your worth. Don't think that you're not very worthwhile and when you're asking for money and don't let any investor try to tell you that you're nothing without them.

Fundraising Advice

With that being said, would your advice to a founder be to bootstrap or go out there and fundraise?

I always say, “Bootstrap until you have some traction.” Bootstrap doesn't mean do it yourself. When we started our very first fundraising, the first million we ever raised was from our community, not family and friends because our family and friends don't have money. My family and friends don’t have money. A lot of other folks who are White have family and friends that can ride a $10,000 check. No problem.

We went out to our community and we asked our community to invest in us. We did a crowdfund for that first million. At that time we had no crowdfunding platforms so we had to do it old school with lawyers and all that way, but we were able to raise that first million. We were very upfront because at that time it was even more tricky about whether cannabis was going to hit. I believed it was but that was right at the transition into the Trump era. There's a lot of things going on.

I did 1,000 investor calls. I did many investor calls. I started, “This is an investment, not a loan. You could lose all of your money.” I said it at the beginning so that people would know that. We bootstrapped using community dollars who believed in what we were doing for the community and for cannabis in general. I would tell people bootstrap, but if you don't have the money yourself try to see who in your community believes in what you're trying to do because if you get big investment up front, they're going to own more of your company.

If you have an idea and you find an investor who believes in your idea, they're going to own your company. Eventually, you'll have to let go more and more of your company, don't do it at front, but front you're worth zero so you have an idea. They can be like, “I'm going to own 90% of your company and what are you going to do you? It's a thought.” If you have built it over a course of 1, 2 or 3 years and when you built it now, you're worth $10 million and they can invest $1 million, they're only going to own 10% of your company. When you can, build the value of your company before accepting large investments.

Have you ever had an investor ask you, “How much money have you invested on your own?”

They do all the time and I have a number. I’m like, “This founder invested $400,000. I'm invested $600,000.” There are three of us, “The other founder has invested $250,000.” We cashed out 401(K). We did invest in our own company.

Do they use that as a measurement of your seriousness?

I don't know if they use it as a measurement of the seriousness of it. They want to know that you have skin in the game, but you don't have to make big investments into your own company to have skin in the game, “You have a company. That's your skin.” Everything that you're doing is around you making your company successful and it doesn't always have to be dollars. It can be commitment. It could be, “I work 60, 80 or 120 hours a week.” I don't go to sleep. It can be all those things.

I was fine when I had an investor ask that question. I'm like, “Ye, I invested X amount of dollars.” At this point, the three of us invested over $800,000 into the company, but more importantly than the $800,000, we've been able to build this large company where other people have had $500 million to do the company. We've done it on five. That should show you that we're budgetary conscious. We're good with money and we believe being financially accountable to our investors. That's more important about how much money I put into the company.

You've been an entrepreneur now for how?

My first company was in the ‘90s. I had a tech company in the ‘90s. I sold that company, and then I was a consultant for a long time which is an entrepreneurial thing when you don't have a 401(k) and insurance and you cover that, you're an entrepreneur even if you're a single or solo entrepreneur. Probably, my whole life. The only full-time job I ever had was with Verizon Wireless. I had that for seven years from 2000 to 2007. I feel like my whole life has been entrepreneurial.

Sticking It Out

The example that you shared with us courageously about this dude who wanted to invest the $50 million, after that you slowed your role, but you started questioning yourself, self-doubt started looming and I'm pretty sure there are tons of other examples of that. How do you get through that? How do you process it in such a way that you're going to stick it out and not give up?

I don't know how other people do it. For me, it was having a very tight group of friends who were able to help me process that and believed in me when I wanted to be like, “I'm terrible at this. This is one person. This person is a terrible person. You're not a terrible person.” They nursed me back to health and my confidence because that's a big confidence buster. It took me almost a year to get back towards like, “I can do this. This is not about me. This is an indictment on me. It wasn't a commentary on me. It was a commentary on this mean and small guy.”

You can be a billionaire and still be a very small person. Not just friends but my two founders who were around me still believed in me. They're like, “This is at you. Let's get back to where we were.” I think I would have done it faster, but we went immediately into the pandemic. That happened to me in April and May of 2019. I was devastated, and then I was coming into 2020. It's a new year. I'm ready to go.

What's funny was that I'd come out to Chicago for the NBA All-Stars in 2020. I raised $6 million. They were coming to sign my paper. We're going to buy this company. It was a group of investors that came out of American Airlines Delta and United. I'd gone to Chicago to close the deal. They were going to fly to San Francisco to see the location and also sign the paperwork for the investment.

A week before they were going to come, they closed the airlines for the pandemic. I remember they called me like, “We still want to give you the $6 million, but we're with United Delta. We don't know what's happening. Let's see what's going on in June. We'll come out in June.” By the time June, we were still closed down. There was some travel, but I lost the $6 million and not because of anything I did or even anything they did. It was what happened in the world.

There's a place where you get something you're like, “Woo-hoo.” I've raised capital and lost capital. Sometimes, it's literally a global pandemic. You have to keep it moving. That's what I learned from the first account. I was like, “I can let this devastate me or I can be like those guys, an asshole. Let's move on.”

I want to know more about the emotional roller coaster because entrepreneurship is hard. When you're playing at the level, you're playing at there are different pressures, triggers and things that are happening and that you're responsible for, team, investors and all the things. How do you manage through that type of responsibility for some they might say, “I'm going to live a simple peaceful ass life, make my $50,000 a year. I don't have the answers to anybody. I'm good. I go to work I come home.” Why have you chosen this life? How do you manage it all?

What it is for me is that I've never felt comfortable and I wish I did. I am not doing wrong. Sometimes, I wish I could make my $50,000 and have a simple life. Sometimes that crosses my mind. It crosses every entrepreneur's mind where they're like, “I could be living a pretty good life and not having all of this stress. I’m taking my two weeks vacation and going whatever.” I'm like, “That looks good,” then I'll tell my husband that. My husband will start laughing at me, and he's like, “The second that you retire, you're going to start working on something else. That's who you are.”

That's true. I'm like, “I want to sit around for the next year.” He's like, “You can't sit around for two minutes.” Part of that is is that knowing who you are. Neither one is good or bad better than the other for somebody wants a simple life where you don't have a lot of stress you live a life and you have a peaceful, meaningful life and that's how your meeting happens, you should do it. Some people want to be entrepreneurs and personalities. Some people want to be all sorts of different things. When you have that thrive, dampen it Is to live a half-life. If you're a person who wants to have a simple life, and you're not an entrepreneur and you are not before you're also living to half-life. It's about finding what it is that will satisfy, encourage and enchant you. What is magic for you? That's enough. You don't have to aspire for anything else. Know what that magic is for you.

Fighting through the fear.

The fear is a real thing. I have laid up at night with much anxiety like, “Is it going to happen? Did I make the right decision? Did I do this right or wrong?” It is something that you're with all the time and you have to become peaceful with it. You have to believe in what you're doing. This is a big thing to understand the pivot. Where I thought my company was going to be back in 2016 is totally not where we are nowadays because over the course of the last few years, I've learned things. I've increased my knowledge about things. I did things. I failed that things. As long as you are willing to pivot, to not be married you started with but to understand the idea you're going to, if you understand the pivot, you will be successful because you pivot out of the thing that's not working.

If you saw in your gut that you're going to be stubborn, if you're going to sit with that and you're going to be like, “This is the only way it can happen,” you're going to fail. If you say, “I have fear but this is not working, I'm going to pivot,” because when we started we wanted to have dispensaries. I don't have a dispensary nowadays because I learned. It's not what I wanted.

How do you know when it's not working versus you need to be patient and stick it out?

It's a very hard thing to figure out in general. What has been helpful for me is that, “How hard is it? What is that barrier for me? Is that barrier that the time for me is not right or is that barrier that I'm trying to put a square peg into a round hole?” It's different for every founder to make that decision. I questioned that decision all the time when I decided to Pivot. When we started we were going to own dispensaries and we bought and ran a dispensary. I’m like, “This is not the business. I don't want to own a dispensary. I want to own manufacturing companies.” That was a huge pivot.

People thought we were crazy. They're like, “You own a dispensary.” I’m like, “Who cares? It doesn't make enough money. I want to make more money.” I remember when we met as a board to sell the dispensary, they were like, “Are you sure?” I said, “We're going to make three times what we bought it for and we're going to take that money. It's not an exit. We're reinvesting into the manufacturing companies.” It ended up being a great decision. You always questioned that. I think there's data that shows you when you're making that decision, there is data there that tells you, “This is not working. This is working.” Read your data.

What in your data are you reading exactly?

For instance, for us, we were buying from manufacturers. I had one dispensary that was buying 100 products a month to sell. That's one dispensary. We made 100 products. There was a cap on how much money we could make in a month based on how much we purchased. I went to a manufacturing facility and realized the thing that I bought 10 of, they were making 1,000 of because they were selling 10 to me, 10 to the dispensary down the street, 100 up the street and 400 to the other town. I'm like, “I could literally manufacture 1,000 pieces of something and sell it to every dispensary. I can be one dispensary selling 10 of them.” That doesn't seem like a good plan for me. That was a day to a driven decision for us.

Pay Attention To The Numbers

What if you are a founder and the numbers don't intrigue you? You don't want to pay attention to the numbers.

first of all, I'm going to tell you, regardless of who you are, you have to pay attention to your numbers because you are the person they're investing this. you need to know your numbers, but you don't have to do your numbers. for that, you hire someone who can come in and help you model your financials, which is what I do. I have a person who models all my financials and then teaches me about what he modeled so that I can speak to it investors. I didn't go to school for that. you find the talent that can do that for you.

It can train you so you have your talking points when you're out there. Let's get into the Talk That Talk segment. This is something taboo in the Cultura? You touched on this earlier, but I want to take a deeper dive. The stigma that exists within the Latino Community around alternative medicine and cannabis, how do we create a shift around that?

Education. We have to educate our people, not only in the fact that is medicinal, but it's also creative. You're seeing a big movement in psychedelics in Ayahuasca and Peyote. All of these are holistic and people are like, “I'm going to get high.” “For a little bit, what's the problem there to open your mind  and heart?” I know that sounds woo-woo and I'm not woo-woo but I think education and having people not be afraid. What are you afraid of when you think about cannabis? If you ask people this question and I have, “Why what makes you afraid?” “I'm afraid I'm going to lose control.” It's almost always the number one thing.

You educate them and say, “If you use CBD, that's not psychoactive. You're not going to lose control. If you use an Indica, you're going to fall asleep and have a very restful sleep. You're not going to lose control.” If you want to be creative or if you're a creative person and you have a Sativa, not every sativa, but there are certain Sativas, all these words that I'm using a lot of Latinos have never heard these words. They're like, “What does that mean?”

Education is the way to do it to be able to teach people about how cannabis works. There are many ways in which it works. I take a particular type of cannabis and strain to manage my inflammation. It doesn't make me super high. It makes me much more alert. I always tell people it's like everything's flickering, the lights a little bit brighter. The world looks a little bit better. It's not rose-colored glasses. It's working in my body to reduce the inflammation in my legs and my pain levels. I'm never so high, “I can't talk to you.” I never consider myself high because it's an adaptable thing. You learn to work within that framework like everybody else. If you think about people who have to take anti-anxiety meds, you're working with the infra framework of what the anti-anxiety meds are doing for you.

There's cannabis that helps with anxiety. It's very similar. If you're taking Vicodin, you are high and learning how to live with that high. People are like, “You're high.” “I was hyped for like five years on synthetic medications.” If you're interested and you're trying. to remove the colonial mindset that has been forced upon us and you say, “I want to learn about the plant of my ancestors,” that education will change your mind. It changed my mind and a lot of people that I work with are like, “I could use it this way.”

What about people who get paranoid?

There are hundreds of strains of cannabis. There's cannabis that's been mutated and crossed with other things. Understanding what strains to do is important. If you are a person who suffers from paranoia when you get high, don't take a sativa. A sativa will help the paranoia. An indica can make you sleep. If you're like, “Why don't want to go to sleep.” You're looking for a hybrid that has an Indica-dominant strain and a Sativa. Think about it this way. An Indica dominant strain and a Sativa shot. If you think about drinks you'll have a drink and then a shot. This works together so that it more than likely will not allow you to get paranoid. You'll have a more mellow experience. If you take a pure sativa and you are worried about having that effect more than likely you're going to get it. Education and understanding of how to partake in the plant.

Colonialism Around Cannabis

I want to touch on real quickly the colonialism around cannabis. Where does that start? I know you made a little bit of a gesture towards it in our conversation earlier, but where is it rooted?

The biggest myth in American culture, and I think you might be too young for this but back when I was growing up the thing that was on TV for kids was being a melting pot. America was a melting pot. I don't see color because we're a melting pot but that was a way to separate us from our culture. When you think about people who are immigrants that come over to the US, everybody had their medicine. Chinese folks had opium. We had cannabis. Other people had mushrooms. The very first thing America tries to do is to homogenize us and strip our culture.

We're smart now, but we were not smart then. We were like, “We're a melting pot. We shouldn't see color. We should call ourselves Hispanics not who we are. Mexicans or Dominicans. We should be a melting pot.” That's where the colonialism in my lifetime started. That's why I speak Spanish but not fluently because my mother was afraid that I would speak Spanish in school and be deemed one of those Mexicans who don't know English. I can understand Spanish from anywhere anybody, but if I had to have an advanced conversation, I couldn't do it.

That's why we talk Spanglish on this show because we embrace that identity.

If you think about that, we were being stripped of our culture. That little show on Saturday mornings like, “We're melting pot.” That was to tell us that we were not individualistic. We did not have Cultura that was our own so we had to adopt a Cultura that didn't exist. There is not an American culture other than racism. That's the culture of America. When we were being told that we were being stripped up our own culture because it makes us weaker if we don't have our culture around us as a culture. If you want to keep people down, that's the first thing you take, their medicine in their culture, and that's what they did.

Thank you so much for being on the show for dropping many gems and for educating us on the industry and how to raise money as a founder. There are many nuggets. I hope you guys took a lot of notes and read this episode again if you need to because there are many key takeaways from this. Let the people know where they can find you, how they can invest in your company and how they can purchase some products. A lot of us had the pleasure of experiencing the product when we were in Napa and it was a rave. It was amazing. We need this every single year. It was awesome to experience because it was Latina. The team was badass. It felt so right and amazing. Please tell the people where they can buy more.

You can find us on all social media as the @ThePeoples.Ecosystem. You can find me on all social media platforms as @MizChris. If you're interested in investing, grab us through one of those channels and we will reach out to you.

Thank you so much for being here.

Important Links

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