YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Singer

lines on the record: 59
first: 2020-10-08
most recent: 2020-10-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I will tell you, at least in my professional career, the kindest thing that anyone has ever done in my professional career was Roger Ehrenberg paying me out of his own pockets to be an intern at IA when they were a friends and family company, which got me out of a job in San Francisco that I hated, which got me back to New York with my wife, or at that point my girlfriend, now wife, which led to me having a kid, a dog, and a company, and all just because he was willing to spend not much money to get somebody who he thought was smart and could help the fund. Yeah, could easily have finished Benny's, but he did it. And man, am I grateful? It was kind.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And take the molecular model and apply it to the inch model, you're not going to get anything predictive. And the models I have for marijuana are they just Colorado specific. We're going to find out soon. We're going into Michigan next year. Is this as unique of a market as I believe it to be? Or are there lessons in this market that are transferable to other states or is each state truly unique from top to bottom and everything has to be relearned? We don't know yet. That's both scary and wildly exciting. That's what keeps it new and fun.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cultivation is fascinating to me. I know I don't understand it. I know enough of it to know that it's complicated. I think that everywhere you look in the cannabis supply chain, it's easy for it to look simple, especially once you start scaling it up. Things get very variant very quickly. Just because you understand something the way it operates at one scale doesn't imply you understand how it will operate at another scale. That's one that is always scaring me is just trying to understand what's the next model that's going to work for thinking about this industry. I knew a guy once who got his PhD in the philosophy of friction and he described it to me as the way that friction works in a molecular level is different than the way it works at an inch level, different than the way it works at a mile level. The philosophy of friction is when do you change your model for what works? Something that describes the molecular level and now you've got something that describes the step up if you try”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been going in a totally different direction. I tell the story about you just heard the story about what happened with Ripple. That story could have gone in a bunch of different directions. We could have doubled down on low dose. We could decide we need to spend more money on performance marketing. Maybe that would have worked. I can't say that it wouldn't, but I think it's really dangerous to get into the mindset it was always going to be this way and it was always going to be this way because I'm so good bullshit. I don't care how good you are, the world is complex. Luck is massive, a massive factor. The best thing that you can do is put yourself in a position to have better larger options than you had before. As long as you keep on doing that, eventually you're going to find the option that you can really lean into. I'd say that a lot with this company. This company is the largest lever that I ever hoped to hold. And it got that way because we just started with a very small lever and kept putting ourselves in a position to go out and find things to add on to that lever. We couldn't pick exactly which one was going to be the thing.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Book is fine. His PhD thesis is much more interesting about how you actually set up decision structures for unstructured decisions. My best resource for this and something I think a lot about too is the CIA. CIA's internal library on making structured decision making in unstructured situations is as good as it gets. You think about what an investor is doing. They are trying to predict an inherently unpredictable complex system, which is itself impossible to predict a point outcome, but you can at least start predicting ranges of outcomes if you structure your thinking well. And you can avoid falling in love with a specific outcome given that the same facts might also align with a multitude of other outcomes. These are just things that I think are really important. I also think it's super important to always play the counterfactuals. Anytime anybody on my team is like, when you guys did this, that was so smart. I was like, yeah, that was smart. But let me tell you about the three other things we wanted to do before we landed on that one that were stupid, that could have worked and we could have.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to structure it. Jerry and I talk about this all the time, and I am You tell yourself, I just like the cut of his jib, they turn out to be great. That's luck. Good for you. That was not something that is repeatable. But what you can do is you can create structures, decision-making structures, that try and look for landmines, weed those out. You can try and raise the floor of whomever you hire. Don't think it's possible to hire a perfect person. What perfect means is different in the context of an organization, a team, a time. But I do think you can at least construct a hiring process to probe for things like integrity. to probe for things like a willingness to play games with the truth, to probe for just the difference between somebody who can describe things versus somebody who can actually do things. I think you focus on those. And Jeff Smart has this great”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of doing business, and I don't think you would see any reduction in innovation that actually has societal benefits off of that. If anything, you would see the exact opposite. I think most innovation these days is geared towards things that can really raise the value of equity, but not necessarily the standard of living of all the employees within the company. Yeah, I hate this notion that founders are aliens who are just really good at some sort of thing. Most of the time they're actually atrocious human beings who are just being carried by competent people within their organization while they're being treated like children internally.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That just feels like sort of violently true at this point. There is absolutely no penalty for lying or bullshitting at this point. We are rewarding the bullshitters from top to bottom. And that's fine, I guess. I think there is a belief that you need founders who almost bullshit themselves to create companies out of nothing, but I think that that's a form of idolatry that I think is just straight up wrong. There's absolutely no reason. Founders are not different from other people. They may be more tolerant of uncertainty. Some of them are good businessmen, some of them are bad business people. They are also humans. They are leaders of humans. And I think actually putting together an organization where everybody is treated as a human, where everybody is not asked to participate in a cult, where they're not asked to put the company over themselves, where they just said, like, this is a job and I need you to be good at it. And then I need you to go home and enjoy your family. That's a much healthier way.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to oversell my relationship with Tim. I don't think he would know me from Adam at this point. But he did have the best class I took and he was my major writing professor. But the big thing from him was just that market structures matter. That was what he was really talking about back then. I think it's still what he's talking about today. These things don't just exist in a vacuum. Markets don't come out of a vacuum. They're not naturally occurring. There's nothing natural about them. They are created by man. Therefore, they need to be created with intention if you hope to get out of them what you expect”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into packets and sell it as its own product. And that became Ripple is like a little stick pack, odorless soluble, flavorless, clean label soluble, THC and CBD mixes drops straight into a beverage and dissolves instantly. And that was the product that came out of those two things together. The need for a high dose product that would get bud tenders excited, the need for a process or a use of the waste so that it didn't destroy our margins. And suddenly that what was before waste became our growth engine. That was the product that took off. Everyone got really excited about the idea that you could make anything inedible and then they got really excited even further because we started discovering that people are giving us these anecdotal reports that they were getting high faster with Ripple than they would when they were taking other edibles. And we believed them, but we couldn't prove it until we went out and actually did the studies.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, creating these crepes of slurries, which is like an Elmer's glue type feeling texture, and then breaking them up by hand. And we were dumping the granules into tea sticks. The tea stick was our form factor. It looks like a stick pack with a bunch of perforations. It functions as a tea bag. But as part of that, we had to have granules of a certain size. So all the granules that are smaller, the fines, we were basically throwing out. Well, our yield was turning out to be like 50% of our THC, which is our core input there. And that was fine with a 2.5 milligram product, but when we realized we had to introduce a product that would get bud tenders excited, so we made a 10 milligram tea, we realized that, man, you can't get by with a 50% yield on a 10 milligram product. You're just getting destroyed on margin. So we looked at a couple different things we could do, whether we could try and find a different way to granulate, but we ultimately decided was, hey, this powder part, the water soluble piece was really the most interesting piece. Why don't we just package that up?”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In low dose products, we couldn't market to try and bring in more people, and the dispensers themselves didn't really have much interest in going outside that core customer base. They were making money and they didn't have to do any work. Everybody loves making money when they don't have to do any work. So we couldn't get that target customer that we had built this product around to even get in front of us, to even try to make the sale. And that was a big learning for us. It's sort of like you can't fight the Fed. You can come in with the market and want to have all these big ideas for how things should work. Why aren't these products merchandised? Why are they all behind glass? Why am I listening to a bud tender as if he's a pharmacist? Why can't we advertise and talk about the things that we're doing? But then there's like the market as it is, and you've got to figure out a way to sell into that. Fortunately, we had on the back end this nice little innovation story where to produce the water-soluble component of the teas, we were”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After we decided to become a food company, we wanted to produce a product that would serve my grandmother, 90-year-old seniors. And the product we came up with was called Stillwater Tea. It was two and a half milligrams of THC, and it was explicitly designed not to get you stoned. It was supposed to replicate the feeling you would get from taking three deep breaths and have that last for a couple hours. And we went out to sell this to dispensaries and were met with a collective WTF. We had one bud tender who was like, dude, I take 300 milligrams for breakfast. Why are you pitching me a two and a half milligram product to which the response is, first man, you've got a problem. But second, this product isn't for you. This product is for other people. Some would get it. We would get people, would give it to their mom, blood tenders and her mom or their grandmother, and they would love it and then they would become real advocates for it. It never really took off, and it turned out because you have to account for what your retail channel is. And the people walking into dispensaries just weren't that interested.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each one of those vendors takes two months to figure out whether they know anything. It is a blanket rule in this space for my staff. Don't believe people when they tell you things. It was a blanket rule for me as an investor, but it's especially a blanket role for me here. And it's not because people are even lying. I think people are just their optimism. They can't distinguish between optimism sales and lying. So I've seen like raft after raft people come through with just huge plans that never made any sense and never materialized.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's frowned upon by the legal team. So it's not like you can burn a whole earth performance marketing, even if you wanted to. I mean, the way you do it is you have to, if you want to put an ad on Instagram first, you have to go out and buy like an affiliate placement and get an article written on some third-party site. And then you have to have them buy an ad against that article that links to your website. The transaction costs, neoclassical economic sense are just massive in this space. And yet still 35% EBITDA. One thing we said a lot is we really pay a lot of attention to operational control. We pay a lot of attention to our margins. We pay a lot of attention to good process because we believe that if we can learn to function in an environment as far as”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it's different at each stage in the supply chain, so I can really only speak to my point as a products manufacturer. The margins are quite good. You're talking 30 to 40 percent EBITDA. And the key thing there is we don't have a huge sales force. We've only got 330 stores to sell to. We got a sales force of three. This is on our THC business side. So that's Stillwater Brands is our THC business. It operates. We serve 360 dispensaries covering a population of around 8 million. Total population of state population around 8 million. We self-distribute to them through a mix of couriers and our salespeople directly dropping off. There's not a lot of advertising to be done. So I don't think people fully appreciate that Google and Facebook won't take money from CBD or THC companies. If you have seen those ads, then they were placed there against public policy and usually through some sort of workaround that was probably enabled by the sales team at those companies.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Embrace marijuana in a similar way to how President Obama embraced gay marriage. Maybe he was circumspect at the election, but then he got it across the finish line once he was in office. And I think that's totally a plausible analogy that could happen here.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think hopefully we will have that by this time next year. And if you have regulators who are dedicated to the concept of public health, who are dedicated to imposing the will of Congress and enshrining that in administrative policy, you could have CBD regulation next year. You could clear up the banking issues around THC next year. You can get THC probably starting with decriminalization, but heading towards legalization within the next 24 months. These are all things that could have been said at any time in the last four years. But one thing that I do believe is if THC and CBD have managed to make this much progress throughout the administrations of Attorney General sessions and Bill Barr, the two most anti-marijuana people I could imagine, God, I can only imagine what happens when there's somebody who isn't making their life's work to destroy it. So we could be looking back on this three years from now, I think, with wonder. I kind of hope that the next president, whoever you might be, would”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So on THC, I think you could see a lot of movement next year depending on the outcome of the election. Obviously, marijuana reform and social justice reform and criminal justice reform are all tied very closely. And for many obvious and deserved reasons. CBD, you had Senate Majority Leader McConnell legalizing the production of hemp at the end of the 2018 Farm Bill, but FDA has been slow to actually accept responsibility for the derivatives of hemp that that legalized, namely CBD. FDA has claimed a three to five year timeline. I think it's wild for a food public health regulator to just ignore a market where 20 to 40 million people a day are consuming a product, totally unregulated because they don't have enough information. You regulate the market where you can and then you improve regulations over time. You don't look for perfect and in the meantime leave consumers to twist in the wind. That goes back to my point of like you need regulators who want to regulate and I don't think we have that right now.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commodity infrastructure that everybody has access to. That's the only way to differentiate. But today, quality and capabilities are how I think you differentiate yourselves. You actually have to build the platforms on which you operate. You don't get to go out and just rent somebody else's.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down where they were like, Oh, like can liners, the aluminum can liners, were eating the THC, so we have to delay the launch. Well, yeah, that's because you treated a $2 million problem like a $2 billion problem. That was a solved problem already, the can liners, and it's solvable if you have a small line and good food scientists who can operate flexibly. But again, there's new science here. What is the shelf stability? Work in an acid versus a base? Will a base break down CBD? The answer is yes. Do you need a high acid environment for it to actually live in? How long does that CBD stick around? Does it degrade below the label claim? These are all like the structured parts of the food and supplement supply chain that have to be verified before they can be scaled. And I think a lot of people were just, especially if you're trying to do brand, you want to go straight to scale because you want the cheapest way to get there. We're in an infrastructure phase in this industry. You've got to be in it for that. You've got to understand what you're getting into. Someday we'll brands win. Sure. Brands win when you have...”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it depends on timing. It's very easy for a lot of investors who've gotten used to just investing in D2C brands on Instagram or as a friend of mine calls it like QVC for millennials, where they just have platforms, they spin up a brand, they slap it onto a commodity product and make some money off Facebook ads, know whether they're profitable and move on with their lives. We're not there yet. A brand without consistency is just a logo. You actually have to produce a consistent product. And that is actually really hard, specializing cannabinoids water-soluble. The reason why we do that is so they can be placed into water-based food systems. And as well, so low-fat food systems. And we've also discovered that there's a much better absorption profile. So people actually get what they have bought into their bloodstream. To do that consistently, it's taken years of R&D investment. And I think when people go too fast with too much money, they go in the wrong direction. I think you saw this with Constellation, had this whole thing when Cannabis 2.0 came.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big companies are not great at that. I think that has been a real advantage to the marketplace. Just all of the things that make it hard are the things that keep Coke and Pepsi out and the things that keep innovation and small operators and opportunity in. At some point, they're going to come in and that'll be a different world. But in the meantime, as long as you have the right understanding of what the opportunity set is, which has to take into account what the demand side looks like, where you can ship to, truly what the market is, and you've build your production platform to match that, then you've got a great opportunity. If you overbuild relative to the opportunity, you could get into trouble real, real quick.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To serve one person a day, they're like, great, we do that five times a day. No problem. If I'm like, great, I need you to produce enough Coke to serve 100,000 people. They're like, shit, I don't know that I have equipment that I could turn on and turn off without losing all.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's two things that I think are holding back the big brands. One is you're absolutely right, federal legality is holding them back. Anybody who has an existing business line to protect can't afford to take the risk of operating this. We've said from the beginning that one of our big benefits is that Coke isn't sold on the same shelves as we are. We're not sold on the same shelves as they are. It sucks that we can't sell on their shelves, but it's great that they can't sell on ours. Dispenses are a unique environment. Operate much more like jewelry stores than CVS. Bud tenders drive 70% of the sales of new product sales because people come in and they know they want an experience. They don't know which product to get it with. So this is all opportunity that is available because the big players aren't coming in and able to spend time on it. So you can succeed at a small scale and really make it work. The other thing is the lack of federal legality just cuts all the advantages out from those big players. Those guys have all built up infrastructures that are designed to serve massive markets. If you told Coke, I need you to produce enough soda.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's cannabinoids in general. This is a category of ingredients. I think people make overbroad claims when they say it was 113 identified cannabinoids that all have bioactive effect. Yeah, maybe to some degree, but the real question is going to be which ones of those can be produced in an economically efficient way and brought to market with a safety profile that matches what we as a society are comfortable with and sold for a profit. The answer to all of that is probably going to be, I don't know. I think I'd be happy with three to five additional follow-on cannabinoids in the next decade that would come up there. This is a set of materials that are the most fascinating bioactives that anybody on my team has come across. I've got people who spent the last 25 years at M&M Mars working in their functional ingredients divisions and WAVE and Horizon Organic. These are food scientists who have been paying attention to Nutra, to bioactive and functional ingredients.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High inflammation properties, but we don't know at what levels. It has those in for which people and for what conditions. It's the sort of thing that only really comes through research and experience and just putting in the markets and structuring the market so that you can continue to collect good data, especially as a regulator. And so you can make good decisions on how to build for this forward. I mean, CBD, the tinctures that are the most popular part of the CBD world right now, CBD 1.0 was all these tinctures that would go everywhere. Well, the best research we have suggests that those things are 6% bioavailable, 94% of what you consume is getting excreted out without entering your bloodstream. It's no wonder that people don't have a good experience of that product. It's also basically an intermediate good. Nobody runs out and says, you know what my favorite thing in the world is to do is to drop raw crude oil on my tongue with an eyedropper. That's not a consumer product. There's also sets of claims that have to be developed around this, but that takes time and research. Once you get past CBDTHC,”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost all of it is left to be unlocked. When you think about, like I said, the THC market right now is 50 individual states that operate all on soup to nuts supply chains more or less. The National Industrial Food Supplement and Beverage Supply Chain is in the US is probably the most robust in the world. The marijuana supply chain looks nothing like that and could benefit wholly from that. There's just a degree of scale and structure that hasn't been put in place yet. There's a breadth of use that has been put in place yet. There's no reason why a lot of products can't have one to two milligrams of THC in them. That is not an intoxicating dose. There's no reason to treat that the way that we do. The 10 milligram stuff, yeah, that should be treated like alcohol. That's great. It should be. I think the CBD God, we know so little. We know that it has bioactive effect. We know that, I mean, it was proved as a prescription drug. It clearly has bioactive effects. It's got good anolytic properties. It's got good anti-anxiety properties, good anti-”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I keep saying the returns on lying are far greater right now than the returns on doing the right thing. And that's a regulatory fault. That is something that regulators can change. The answer is by putting in place regulation.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen good numbers that the legal THC industry, I think, is sitting in like the 10 to 20 billion range today. The illegal industry is sitting in the 60 to 70 billion dollar range for THC. And this is in America. CBD. I've seen estimates that this year you're talking like $2 to $4 billion. I think those are probably a little bit high. It's really hard to tell. CBD is just unregulated. THC is actually more regulated than CBD right now. THC, like, yeah, the FDA won't touch it, but at least the states are paying attention to it. Before product gets on the shelves in well-regulated states like Colorado, it has to go through cannabinoid testing, which is an imperfect science that is developing, but at least it's something. So you at least know what you are taking to a greater degree than you used to. CBD? No, there's none of that. Companies are self-regulating, but self-regulation isn't a thing. Self-regulation is just asking for trouble. There's no incentive to actually abide by the rules. When I lobby on this issue,”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“THC is kind of three different drugs at once five milligram dose for most people. It's like a light angiolytic. Perfectly fine. People can function, operate, no problem whatsoever. Five to ten or five to 15, you're starting to get real stoned. You're getting high for most people, although it changes again. Like different people have different tolerances, at least with THC. Once you start getting above 50, it's a psychedelic experience almost. It's not one that most people care to repeat. But before you can really start discussing what's the effect of marijuana, that question has as many multitudes as what's the effect of computers. There's a lot of nuance that has to be baked into there before you can start answering that question with any sort of specificity that's useful.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I basically throw out almost all research done before 2016. I throw out all research done around inhalable marijuana because we just don't know. All joints are not the same. Every joint is different. Every person is different. The amount that you're actually consuming is unknown. Edibles are actually sort of our first opportunity to control that input and reduce the variable there to something that what came out on the other end was actually observable and useful. We do a lot of work at our company with some academic partners on studying the pharmacokinetics of our products. We want to know how much THC is actually absorbed into the bloodstream in different formats, how much CBD is actually gets into your body.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to believe it. It's also hard to conceptualize. The concept of a drug is a mental frame, and the concept of an illegal drug is a mental frame. Can't tell you how many conversations I had more in the early days of this company where people would be like, well, I don't do drugs. I'm like, you got a nice wine cellar over there, man. Well, no, that's not really a drug. I'm like, those are some nice prescription opioids on your cabinet. Well, that's not really a drug. My doctor prescribed it. I'm like your coffee. Really enjoying that caffeine, right? No, not a drug. These are all drugs. They all augment physiology. The question is really, what is the safety profile? What is the effect? Marijuana, THC CBD, these are fundamentally no more less dangerous than caffeine. It's interesting to compare how caffeine has been regulated over time versus how marijuana has been regulated over time because it is just a very natural counterfactual that is fascinating about what is accepted and what is rejected and what that does to two things that have a very similar safety profile.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In common, which is the love of marijuana. And that hard on crime men, tough on crime mentality, the racist elements, all of that just hung around for a long time. And then you just had this cohort issue where you've got a whole generation of political leaders who still believe that this is a political third rail, despite the fact that it's got 67% approval among the population at large and even 51% approval among Republicans. It's just one of the strongest mental models that I have is cohort replacement. Some things don't shift until the people who are holding them back are gone. And I think this fits that bill very much.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no scientific excuse for marijuana to have been sitting around Schedule I for as long as it was. This was known when the Schedules first came out there was the Schaefer Commission report that immediately recommended rescheduling the Nixon administration put in a drawer in the early laws all the way back to the Stamp Act and Tax Act was racism against Mexican immigrants. The word marijuana prior to the marijuana tax act cannabis tincture, which is marijuana tincture, was one of the top three most used drugs in the country. You can go back to the US pharmacopoeia and find lots of tinctures there. You can find bottles from Bayer with cannabis tincture in them. And then it was decided that this was associated with unwanted Mexican immigrants and therefore we need to illegalize as much as possible. Then you've got coming up on the controlled substances act in the late 70s, there was an interview with one of Nixon's aides where he straight up admitted we couldn't criminalize being black. We couldn't criminalize being anti-war, but we could criminalize the one thing that they had.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aside beyond that, too, the equipment manufacturers themselves stopped manufacturing small scale equipment. It was really hard to just find stuff that could be used in a single state environment. So there was just a lot of complexities to be worked out in this market for it to actually function because everyone was trying to assume like, okay, what I see in CBG, that's going to work in THC. It's like, well, no, there's 15 reasons why that structure doesn't work here. All of the tricks that you've got, you've now got to figure out new tricks. None of those work”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grow the pot. You got the people who extract the pot and make the products, then you've got the people who sell it. There is no distribution infrastructure. There is no co manufacturing infrastructure. This was a big learning for us in the early days when we first came to Colorado and said we want to launch Microdoe product.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two things we got to differentiate. One is the CBD industry versus the THC industry. Those are wholly different industries with wholly different infrastructures and wholly different regulatory structures. Let's start talking about the THC industry because that's the one that everyone's tried to nationalize, even though it is federally illegal. And when you look at the THC industry, you're really looking at 50 different industries. Each state has its own set of laws and has its own market structures. Someday there is just going to be an absolute glut of economic research papers on the natural experiments of new markets with different market structures in the context of marijuana and which products they create and which behaviors they incentivize. So I could talk to Colorado directly and a couple other, but in Colorado at least, there's a three-tiered system that's based on the same model as alcohol. So you got cultivators, you've got processors, and you've got retail. There's a couple other that come up, but broadly speaking, you've got tiers. You've got the people.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the retail system is complex, the distribution system is complex, the production system, these all have to be brought up individually. There is a lot of people up in the early days who thought they could be first and be the Warren Buffett of Weed, never mind that none of them even knew what Warren Buffett did. They just thought, I'm going to integrate everything, I'm going to take a piece from everything, and it's going to be fantastic. Yeah, but then you never do anything well, and everything is expensive. And none of the accounting actually works. And what if the market changes? It's just. There are a lot of these hopes and dreams that didn't bear any relationship to how the world has ever worked in reality.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30 guys, 15 of them were stoned out of their mind talking about the great shatter and flower that they were growing. Another five of them were lawyers and doctors understood what this could do and were really interested. And then the rest of them were real estate guys who owned a bunch of warehouses that really wanted to get gross in them so they could get that really good cannabis IR that everyone was shooting for in those early days. It's obviously changed dramatically. I think up until last year at least or up until this year, you had a lot of people who still thought this was all just going to be easy. I graduated from grad school right into the teeth of the Great Recession 2009. I had two advanced degrees and no work experience, so I got a very clear taste of what things look like in a down market. And I think there are a lot of people in this industry now who have no conception of what a down market is add to that the whole promise of marijuana and this imagination that is just suddenly going to go legal and everything is going to change on a dime. Now these things are complex.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when that all went legal, a couple things happened. Investors came pouring in and they looked at the marketplace and they treated it the way they normally look at a marketplace. They're new to. Let me see who the leaders are and I'd like to invest some money in them. Well, they forgot that schema doesn't really work. The largest players in an illegal market who have been given the color of law are still the same people they were before they were given the color of law. They just were people who are willing to take risks that nobody else was willing to take. Criminal risks that nobody else was willing to take. Those are not generally the traits associated with building a responsible business that has cost controls, good accounting practices, governance, good project management. But they were the characteristics of the early markets. It was really interesting in the early days. Back at like the beginning of 2014, I went to what was then probably like the world's largest marijuana conference, which was held at the airport holiday and express by Logan Airport in Boston. And it was me in a room with”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to denigrate the early participants in the industry in any way. I don't think they were more full of shit than today's participants. Today's participants are better credentialed, but they are also full of shit. It's not even intentional. Most of it is just unconscious ignorance or just arrogance. gotten a lot of people who are like, oh, I'm well aware of how this market works. That's great. I've been in here six years and I've been studying it every day of my life and I don't even know that I know a thing about it yet. Good for you. I'm proud of you. So in the early days, you had a lot of people who were renegades. They were doing something that was quite strictly illegal. When we joined the industry in 2014, I like to joke that we were taking handcuff risk at that point. We were, but not nearly to the extent that people were a couple years before us. You had to really be comfortable operating without any sort of business controls, operating fully cash. Don't worry about accounting, just flying by the seat of your pants to operate in that business.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of functional foods, these are compounds that we know have effect. There's no question about it. That's usually the biggest question with any new food or supplement is does it do anything in this pretty obvious THC does something? How can you put it into formats that are mass acceptable that don't change people's identity and that are consistent enough that they can feel comfortable using it anytime during the day and that we can feel comfortable investing in building a brand against because we know that the experience is going to be the same from day to day? That's when we oriented ourselves very much as a food company focused on cannabinoids rather than a cannabis company playing with food. And it's been like that ever since.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, we saw this race to potency going on with edibles where everyone was just trying to shove as much THC as possible into the smallest container possible. We also made the decision that like, hey, if we're going to be in cannabis, let's be in cannabis. Why are we nibbling around the edges? Let's take this full risk. If you're going to take a risk, just do it. And then the third thing that happened was my grandmother asked me for a pop brownie. And those three things all happened within a week of each other. And what was really interesting with my grandmother is that she didn't want to get high. She just wanted to feel better. And I couldn't offer her anything that would make her feel better. Had this one brownie that was 100 milligrams. I cut it up into 20 pieces. I individually bagged them. I told her to eat half a morsel and wait two hours. I scared the hell out of her. She was never going to try it. Even offered her a joint and she was like, no, I'm not a marijuana user. Self-identity was a big part of this. So we just started looking at this as an opportunity.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Colorado and Washington on the verge of legalizing, which they did in January of 2014. And I kept getting laughed out of the room. Nobody was taking me seriously. Like, I got a lot of stoner jokes, but I kept taking it really seriously.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a story that I think a lot of investors would recognize themselves. I got interested in this space towards the end of 2013. I was teaching entrepreneurship. I was kicking around town doing strategy and operations work for a variety of startups. And I was looking for what to do next. And as part of that, I was kind of interested in getting back into investing, but I didn't necessarily want to go back into venture. I wanted a broader mandate. I have always kind of felt allergic to the siloing of technology as its own sector most companies that put themselves up to technology. I'm like, great, you're right. CPG company that uses technology, just like every other CVG company. Using technology and being technology were two different things. So I was looking for something broader than that because I love technology. I've been deep in it, but I see it as a tool to affect other things, not as an end in itself. And part of that process of pitching myself to funds was developing pitches on marketplaces and market spaces that I thought the fund should invest in. And two of the spaces that I was really interested in were underbanked and cannabis with college.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, now AB5 is out there in California, and they're claiming that that's going to kill the business. Clearly, laws matter. They would not have been able to build that business in the way that they did if they were required to employ the full-time drivers. They got to build a very different business that was very favorable to their capital because of that independent contractor relationship and interpretation that was at odds with the pre-existing definition of what an independent contractor was.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto and blockchain are looking for the same thing. They're desperately trying to get the Fed to declare them a store of value. I don't follow this space nearly as closely anymore. Every time I hear blockchain, I hear shitty database. They also clearly recognize that some sort of government sanction is required for this to be what they all believe it can be. The obvious one is Uber, car shares. This whole industry arose because we weren't enforcing laws around taxis and how they worked around employment versus dependent contractors. You look at Uber, I don't see technological innovation or Lyft. I don't see technological innovation, although there is some, like the distributed dispatch is a technological innovation. But fundamentally, that whole business, that entire, when I say that business, multi-billion dollar behemoth of a business that it is, the capital hoard that it is, is built around a use of independent contractors at a scale that has just never been done before. And that is built all entirely on a legal issue.”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them up a bit, then suddenly everybody is looking at this new jumble and they're kind of on a level playing field all over again. You get a lot more competition out of that. You get a lot more innovation, activity. You're not just trying focusing on spending 95% of your effort to get the last five percent of the way there. You're spending all your time getting that first 95% all over again. And that's where economic activity innovation really lies or in the opportunity to create things out of whole cloth. But you still need some shared basis of what is right, what is wrong, how are we going to interact with each other? How are we going to exchange things? It's a wonderful book. It's called Reinventing the Bizarre, Stanford Economist from around 2000, 70, 2008, that talks about just the limits of markets. They can be used. They can be misused, but you have to make a conscious decision about how you use them if you want to get an economic activity as a result”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough players, enough kids died that somebody said, okay, let's put some rules in place here. What does a first down actually mean? What does a catch actually mean? How many downs are there? Once you got these shared set of rules, then the play all became much more constrained around those rules. It wasn't just a free-for-all where whoever was alive at the end was the winner. You actually had to abide by certain things. And those rules have to be tweaked over time as people learn to exploit them. This is not some system where there is a perfect set of rules that there never is that suddenly things are all going to work in a healthy way. You can create competition through rules. My favorite modern example of this is F1 racing, where every couple years they change the rules around the build of the cars because if you leave the rules in place for too long, the cars get too fast. They get dangerous. Teams that are able to exploit certain things about it also are able to pull away. You get this fundamental inequality. But if you change the rules,”
2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source