Obviously, we should all feel bad for the MedMen employees who are now out of jobs after the once-seemingly-high-flying company finally declared bankruptcy last week and announced that it would wind down operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that aside, anybody who wants to see a healthy, thriving legal-cannabis industry should breathe a small sigh of relief over the news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or at least we can hope that MedMen\u2019s demise is a harbinger of change. Cultivated Daily<\/em> thinks it is: \u201cThe halcyon days of young, inexperienced founders raising millions on bold promises to build flashy-yet-unprofitable cannabis companies are over, as investors look for returns and to back diligent operators,\u201d the cannabis newsletter declared on Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s no doubt partly true, at least for the time being. But it took a lot more than just MedMen\u2019s crash-and-burn to get investors to look for \u201cdiligent operators\u201d where, previously, a lot of them just looked for the flash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It only takes a quick look at the industry\u2014the taxes, the regulations, the often-slim margins, the competition from the illicit market, the millions of things that can go wrong\u2014to know that a lack of diligence will mean certain death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike, say, tech entrepreneurs during the dotcom bubble of the \u201990s, cannabis companies can\u2019t really ride for year after year on investor money raised solely on the basis of bullshit marketing drivel. In cannabis, you have to make sales, and those sales have to earn a profit. MedMen tried to emulate the tech boom, and failed miserably. Investors will feel forced to be more wary, and less credulous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, though, we still live in America in 2024, a land where an obvious lunatic and maladapt is widely considered to be business genius and a tech visionary even as he stumbles about, woefully mismanaging giant companies that sometimes literally get people killed, making insane promises, saying bigoted stuff, and affirmatively providing a platform for literal Nazis to gather. \u201cLate capitalism\u201d has become a clich\u00e9 for a reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cannabis isn\u2019t free of soulless tech-bro operators whose primary motivations are cash and hip cachet. It likely never will be, though few will measure down to Adam Bierman, the bro who founded MedMen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bierman\u2019s tale has been told countless times, including in this space, but it involved stuff like massive, mindless spending on expansions and acquisitions, lavish bacchanals, Teslas for execs, insane levels of compensation, and stuff like him installing a panic room in his house. He\u2019d been gone four years already when MedMen\u2019s final slide began in January as it closed a bunch of stores and its stock was delisted upon reaching a value of zero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The new management did what it could but the damage was done. In March, MedMen closed its last Bay Area location in San Francisco and had just two stores left in California, both in Los Angeles. At its peak, MedMen operated dozens of stores in more than half a dozen states. After it went public, it was \u201cworth\u201d more than $3 billion at its peak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before that, it had become the pot industry\u2019s first \u201cunicorn\u201d (a private company valued at more than $1 billion). Despite the implosion he caused, Bierman is still proud of that fact. On his LinkedIn page (where he lists his current profession as \u201cCannabis Futurist\u201d) he actually brags<\/a> about the company\u2019s erstwhile unicorn status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is little room in cannabis for excesses like the ones that killed MedMen. People like Bierman were attracted to the business because it\u2019s still sort of outr\u00e9 and because they were expecting a gold rush. Reality quickly set in, but not quickly enough to save such people from themselves, or to save the industry from near-collapse. And it won\u2019t keep mercenary types from entering the business, especially if and when the business starts to turn around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, the void left by MedMen might serve as something of an opportunity for those people in the business\u2014and there are many\u2014who just want to make a good living doing what they love.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCannabis Bubble Pops<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Death of a Unicorn<\/h2>\n\n\n\n