Inside the Cannabis Industry with Snoop Dogg's Fund Manager Karan Wadhera

The Urban Income Show

In this episode, Casa Verde Capital’s Managing Partner Karan Wadhera talks about how he started a cannabis fund with Snoop Dogg, the investment opportunities adjacent to the cannabis industry, and what’s happening in the cannabis e-commerce space.

Karan Wadhera is the Managing Partner at Casa Verde Capital, a cannabis venture fund where he leads investment strategy, fundraising, and management of the firm.

Karan also provides leadership and guidance as a Director on the board of over 10 companies and is an experienced finance professional who held senior roles at Goldman Sachs and Nomura.

During his tenure at Casa Verde, Karan has invested in more than 20 portfolio companies, collectively raising more than $1bn in funding. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Urban Income Show:

• How Karan started a cannabis fund with Snoop Dogg
• The unique challenges of marketing cannabis companies
• The benefits of investing in ancillary cannabis businesses instead of operation-focused companies
• Different businesses are adjacent to the cannabis industry
• How alcohol companies are responding to cannabis legalization
• How the stigma around cannabis is changing
• Social equity and diversity within the cannabis industry
• What’s happening in the cannabis e-commerce space
• How to get involved in the cannabis industry
• The habits you need for financial success

Resources:

• Casa Verde Capital
• Flavor Fix
• Benzinga
• Miss Grass
• Vangst
• Seamless AI
• The Urban Income Show
• Growth Skills

Connecting with Karen Wadhera:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Connecting with Lavall Chichester

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Quotables:

• 8:49 - “There are so many challenges that are specific to cannabis that traditional business can’t solve so to what you said all the advertising channels that if I was just a sparkling water brand I wouldn’t have the same issues for if I was manufacturing gummies.”
• 11:43 - “There’s the potential for a huge tectonic shift of what cannabis’s role in society is if you compare it to alcohol we’re still a nothing business globally which is a good cop similarly to tobacco or pharma or wellness there’s huge chunks of industry that we can go after so it can be tempting sometimes to lose focus or look outside your lane but it’s important for us to remain on track.”
• 20:34 - “There’s a huge disconnect between the people who have been disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs and those who are benefiting from it now as legalization is happening so trying to bridge that in any way we can is very important and obviously at Casa Verde as Founders we’re all people as color as well so it all resonates in its home.”
• 25:01 - “The biggest thing I did that really started helping me thinking about money was starting to invest pretty early on basically right as I left college was when I first started investing so I was working at Goldman Sachs I was on an equities floor we’re talking about stocks day in day out and it felt kind of crazy that I wasn’t doing anything myself so we opened up accounts internally and started actually buying into these businesses that we were super excited about and I think that’s a very scary thing to do initially just parting with your money in any way for the hope to get more later is scary no matter how risky the investment is or isn’t but that first step I think helped.”
• 27:37 - “There’s just, including this podcast, infinite resources to learn from, you don’t have to leave your couch to listen to the smartest people in the world talk about a host of subjects so now every moment I get I have a hundred episode cue ready to go for podcasts, I don’t know if I’ll ever get through it.”
• 32:59 - “Keep burn as low as possible in life where you can we all want to look for ways for more passive income and increase revenue here amazing if you can do it but another way is if you keep your lifestyle as light as possible again it’s just so much opportunity, I don’t think I would have had the courage to jump into an industry like this and leave my job and go without income for many years if I hadn’t built up a little bit of a nest egg and done that primarily by keeping my spend and burn low.”