Cannabis-Startups.com FUND
“Let us know how I can be helpful” — Every Capitalist
While most investors genuinely want to support, it’s often unclear how they can help. So, we wrote a manual for founders (we call them “makers”) to serve as a working doc of specific things we can help with — product, hiring, fundraising, recruiting, press, etc. — and tips on how to best accelerate innovation through our Cannabis-Startups.STUDIO
Here are the areas we can be most helpful within Cannabis-Startups.com:
Product Strategy
Daniel and Falk have a background in product management.
Falk started his career in the agency space (UDG) in marketing before moving into product management at the age of 22. He went on to become the first PM of a last-mile logistic startup at MediaMarktSaturnAccelerator (METRO AG) to utilize his fleets of delivery restaurants. Since then, he founded various products in the tech and last-mile space. Since 2018 he is pushing boundaries in the cannabis space.
Prior to joining the FUND, Daniel was in charge of the first fund in the EU, only focusing on cannabis. He creates value in market access and in private capital, understanding to build the bridges to Israel and the US market.
Daniel and Falk love diving into product strategy or jamming on tactical details with founders.
Community Building Strategy
Daniel spent the past years building up his investor network by “asset rich” investors by having a “good nose” on the right intro to the right time!
Falk has spent the majority of his professional career building communities (even before Cannabis-Startups.com on a smaller scale). While the community has become a buzzword, relatively few people have experience building community at a meaningful scale.
We love chatting with founders about how they can build a community to increase our collective, increase defensibility, and build something that people really want to be a part of. This isn’t limited to consumer startups — B2B companies can also benefit from a community strategy as long as we can build brands.
Hiring
We’re always eager to dip into our network to help find the right hire, but we can also help to promote open roles on our website and private profile! This has been an effective way to increase the top of the funnel given our reach within the cannabis community.
Job platforms have gone from light to layered; from simply matching potential candidates with open roles to adding additional value to the employers, the job seekers, or in some cases, both. Just as the gig economy and product marketplaces evolved from listings to managed marketplaces, job marketplaces are entering a new phase: the deep platform era.
The deep job platform includes products and features specifically designed for the candidates and companies we work with. Every specific feature we launch through our talents page is highly dependent on the type of vertical the candidate or employer serves in the cannabis startup.
Cannabis-Startups.com TALENTS recognize the inadequacy of the traditional low-touch job platforms. A16z describes it as “ which has only been exacerbated by the current economic crisis. By identifying and removing hiring friction, harnessing SaaS tools, fostering authentic networks, and training a uniquely skilled workforce, builders of deep job platforms are fundamentally reinventing not just how we hire, but the opportunity available to millions of people in the European Union and around the world. We combine a deep knowledge of the particular segment — an essential feature of the Great Rehiring — with an optimistic, future-focused view of how to best harness the talent available. Not only do deep job platforms better serve job seekers and hiring managers — but they’re also far superior to businesses than the traditional job marketplaces, which can become spammy and low fidelity as they grow.
We just want to create job platforms that find potential future talents and eliminate the constraints of employees that throttle their unique, vertical networks and producing features to eliminate them. Not every full-stack marketplace has all these features, but the core menu of services is:
Fundraising
We write small checks so it’s in our best interest to help founders fill their round with strategic, helpful investors. When it’s time to raise a Series A, we like to get very involved in making intros and supporting the founder as much as they want. Falk has built a pretty good network through his work at Cannabis-Startup — Meetups over the years, so that helps, as well as build masterclasses for emerging cannabis investors.
If you’re currently raising or planning to raise soon, we’d be thrilled to introduce you to investors we work with and believe will be a good fit. We prefer to work off a shared spreadsheet together so we can be efficient and stay in sync during the process.
We’re also eager to help with the deck and much more. We’re big fans of using Loom for this type of feedback. Async is more efficient for everyone.
If you want to take it seriously you can apply for a seat to get your customer and product development accelerated via Discovery Assistant, which we build through COVID, while we have no opportunities to go to international conferences, we are here to get your foot into the German and European market.
Press Introductions
Chasing press is usually a waste of time for many companies but it can be helpful for recruiting, user acquisition, and brand-building. If you’re planning to break news, we’re happy to connect you with journalists in our network that might be interested in your story.
Transparently, if we don’t believe there’s a “story” to be told, we’ll let you know and may not make introductions. It’s unproductive for all of us to force a piece.
We have a deep relation to HighTimes for international releases as well as a good connection through our network in the industry to german newspapers like Hanf Magazin or access to France and the UK!
Sharing Announcements
We love sharing announcements and launches from our network companies via Falks Newsletter with almost over 3.000 recipients in Europe and the US.
If you’ve been featured or have something new to announce, please let us know.
Sales and Partnerships
We’ve helped a number of B2B portfolio companies connect with other network founders that might benefit from their services or have some strategic alignment. We also Partner with various journalists in the industry.
Of course, we’ll only reach out if it makes sense for both parties. The last thing we want to do is “spam” founders’ inbox.
Founder Brainstorms
Our philosophy is to every four weeks, we host a 4–6 person feedback session with fellow CS network founders over video. Our goal is to bring a diversity of experts (engineers, designers, marketers, salespeople, etc.) together to help each other.
There’s no formal prep required for these sessions but everyone should bring forth 1 or 2 specific challenges they’d like feedback on. Of course, everything is off the record. We take confidentiality very seriously.
Deals and Discounts
Cannabis-Startups.STUDIO founders have access to some pretty useful deals, including HubSpot for startups and access to the University of Hohenheim.
We also offer great discounts for conferences where we always announce via our “Makers Letter” and shoot out your message if you have something to say!
Crisis Management
Falk has been through the high highs and the low lows of entrepreneurship in the past and still in the health space in Germany. He’s also advised portfolio founders on how to navigate firing an early teammate, how to manage a cofounder breakup and other challenging situations. If you’re going through something difficult with your company, we’re here for you.
If you’d like to chat about something urgently, please email us with the prefix “urgent” in the subject line so that we know it’s time-sensitive.
Originally published at Cannabis-Startups LinkedIn
