Cheddar's CannaBiz explores the latest trends, and news in this expanding market of recreational, and medicinal marijuana. Cheddar's Hope King and Baker Machado speak with start-up founders about how they are capitalizing on cannabis.
Legal technology platform CannaRegs is on a mission to make sense of the legal landscape of marijuana for stakeholders in this growing space. The company's founder and CEO Amanda Ostrowitz explains the regulatory landscape for marijuana, and why she was inspired to launch this start-up.
"I realized the only solution to my problem was to build it," says Ostrowitz. "It's actually kind of influencing the way law is being made because we've been able to track it to such a level where the first time a city government even talks about cannabis--we've tracked it."
Colorado Marijuana sales hit $1.5 Billion in 2017, generating nearly $250 million in taxes and fees for the state. The Cannabist's Marijuana Policy and Business Reporter Alicia Wallace explains why the state sales could face a plateau, and lessons other states could learn from Colorado.
"In Colorado the slowing growth is more of an indicator of a mature market," says Wallace. "We're the guinea pig on this, and we've been able to learn a lot of lessons really quick as this industry came out of nowhere here."
Sensi Products recently underwent a complete redesign to make the transition to solely medical marijuana edibles to consumer products for recreational use. The company's co-founder Lisa Tollner explains how her company made this switch, and her outlook for this expanding market in California.
"For the most part it was a pretty straight forward maneuver for us," explains Tollner. "We saw this coming. I would say as early as five or six years ago we felt it was just a matter of time."
Cheddar's CannaBiz airs every Tuesday from 3:30 to 4:00 p.m.
TC BioPharm, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing cell therapy products targeting, went public on the Nasdaq in January. CEO Bryan Kobel joined Cheddar to talk about the company's IPO launch, its cancer-fighting therapeutics tech, and its potential for using its research to treat COVID-19. "The opportunity here for us is to really get safety data and covid and expand into other areas," Kobel said. "So from COVID, where we hope to treat patients, hopefully maybe the elderly population, populations that that really can't handle the antivirals because they're too hard in the system, well then we'll expand out into maybe severe influenza Ebola, other viral and viral infections where we think we can be helpful."
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
Following the surprising big beat on estimates for the January jobs report, William M. Rodgers III, vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, joined Cheddar News to break down the data. “We ended 2021 with a strong crescendo to a recovery that had taken hold, and we started 2022 in good fashion." He also discussed the dueling pressures of wage growth and inflation.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
Following Ford's earnings miss, the stock price dropped despite a bullish outlook from the auto giant. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with ISeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to break down why investors may not be sold on the carmaker because of the ongoing factor of supply constraints. "The product is not an issue. There's really good product coming from them, including the electric vehicle side, and the demand is not an issue. There's plenty of demand, but nobody really has a solid grasp on when we're going to get past the supply chain issue," said Brauer.
