Building a Cannabis Giant: Jason's Leap from Pharma to Pot In this episode of the Proud to Work in Cannabis podcast, host and fellow entrepreneur, Karson Humiston, sits down with Jason Wild, the chairman of TerrAscend one of the large publicly traded company in the cannabis industry. The episode is recorded live from MJBizCon in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Building a Cannabis Giant: Jason's Leap from Pharma to Pot
In this episode of the Proud to Work in Cannabis podcast, host and fellow entrepreneur, Karson Humiston, sits down with Jason Wild, the chairman of TerrAscend one of the large publicly traded company in the cannabis industry. The episode is recorded live from MJBizCon in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The conversation begins with Karson expressing admiration for entrepreneurs and their inspiring stories. She asks Jason to take the listeners back to the beginning of his career and share how he got started. Jason reveals that he had always been entrepreneurial, even in his teenage years, and had bounced ideas off his father, who was also an entrepreneur. He shares a story from his senior year of high school when he started a food delivery service for restaurants that didn't offer delivery. This experience, although challenging, set him up for the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the cannabis industry.
Jason then discusses his path to becoming a pharmacist and how he discovered his talent for stock picking. He explains that he started investing in the stock market with $10,000 and quickly realized that he had a knack for it. In his first year as a pharmacist, he made over $400,000 in the stock market, which sparked his interest in pursuing a career in investing.
After several successful years as a pharmacist and investor, Jason decided to start his own hedge fund. He shares the challenges and successes he experienced during this time, including a significant market crash in 2008 that led to a decrease in assets under management. However, he persevered and eventually built his fund back up.
The conversation then shifts to Jason's entry into the cannabis industry. He explains that he was introduced to the industry through a banker in Canada who informed him about the legalization of medical cannabis. Intrigued by the potential growth of the industry, Jason made several trips to Canada to explore investment opportunities. He eventually invested in four cannabis companies which turned out to be highly successful investments.
Inspired by his experiences in the cannabis industry, Jason decided to start his own cannabis company, TerrAscend. He shares how he convinced the company to take a $52 million private placement and co-invested with Canopy Growth. The stock price of TerrAscend skyrocketed, causing Jason to feel the pressure to deliver on the market's high expectations.
To ensure the company's success, Jason made the strategic decision to pivot to the U.S. market, becoming one of the first Canadian LPs to do so. He explains that although they couldn't list on a U.S. exchange, he believed in the long-term potential of the U.S. cannabis market.
The episode concludes with a teaser for part two, where Jason will discuss TerrAscend's entry into the U.S. market and his strategy moving forward.
Overall, this episode provides listeners with an inside look into Jason Wild's entrepreneurial journey, his success in the stock market, and his transition into the cannabis industry. It highlights the importance of patience, perseverance, and seizing opportunities in the ever-evolving world of entrepreneurship. https://terrascend.com/management-board/jason-wild/
Karson Humiston: Hey, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Proud to Work in Cannabis podcast. We are coming to you live from Las Vegas, Nevada, MJBizCon, and finally, finally, I have Jason Wilde, chairman of Terrasen. We've been trying to do this for about five years, and now we're here.
Jason Wild: Five years is an exaggeration, but at least five cannabis years. Which is like a year or something normal.
Karson Humiston: Well, thank you for finally doing it.
Jason Wild: Thank you, and I'm sorry for all the blown and reschedule things we've had to do over the last year.
Karson Humiston: Well, the good news is that now we get to do a live one. This is only our second live podcast ever, so I feel like it was kind of meant to be.
Jason Wild: Yeah, but even here, I got here a half an hour late, so we can only do a half an hour.
Karson Humiston: Well, let's get going then. So, Jason, you have an incredible entrepreneurial story. I absolutely love entrepreneurs, being an entrepreneur myself, so people like you are super inspiring to me. And I feel like people really only see you as the chairman of this large publicly traded company. Can you take us back to how you got your career started and the path that you went down? Because it wasn't the same as everybody else's.
Jason Wild: Yeah, it wasn't the normal path. Absolutely. I mean, I always grew up like entrepreneurial. I was, I remember like when I was in like ninth grade trying to figure out, I was going to like sell lollipops in school or something like that. And always, my father's an entrepreneur as well. And he's a pharmacist and he had a bunch of drug stores when I was growing up. And I would bounce all these ideas off of him. And then I came to him with an idea when I was a senior in high school. I lived in Rockland County, which is suburban New York, and none of the restaurants delivered, like zero. There were multiple pizza places and Chinese restaurants and all that. None of them delivered. And I was like, people want to get there. Everyone doesn't want to have to go drive in and get the stuff. I'm going to go. I think I can go make a deal with these restaurants, say, I'll take care of the delivery for you. So if you get any orders that come inbound on your numbers, you refer them to us. But also, we're going to generate business for you. And I worked out a deal. They gave us like 15% of the check or 18% of the check. And then we also got like a delivery fee. And we were essentially like Uber Eats or DoorDash or something, way ahead of, you know, this is 1989. And the crazy thing is- The DoorDash of 1989. Right. There weren't even cell phones. Maybe it was like $100 a minute or something like that, and people had them. So we had to have all of our delivery people, after they made their delivery, go back into town and call us. So we would give them a roll of quarters. And if they got lost, we didn't even have … There wasn't MapQuest or- No, we didn't know where they were. Nothing. There was no navigation or anything like that. I would have delivery guys, sometimes they'd get lost for like an hour and a half, two hours, you know, and at the same time we're getting annoyed. It was very, it was difficult, but I feel like that sort of set me up for, also for the cannabis industry, where you got a million different variables coming at you all the time, and you got to sort of like, There's a million balls coming at you. You've got to take them and put them in the right place. Everybody else is dealing with the same stuff, generally, that you are. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You've just got to roll with it and do the best you can.
Karson Humiston: That was your senior. Then you went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Right. Then talk to us about, it's your senior year of college, how do you decide what you want to do when you get out of school? That's a moment in time for people where there's so much pressure on people, they're seniors in college, what was going through your head about what you wanted to do with your career at that time?
Jason Wild: Totally. And even the pressure I just put on myself, what do I want to do? I was thinking about getting into healthcare. As I mentioned, my father's a pharmacist. I was pre-med, but I am not a strong student. I was always the person who did as little work as possible and generally did okay, often with the help of some friends in high school.
Karson Humiston: You paid them from your business. I thought A students teach B students how to work for C students.
Jason Wild: Okay, that's a variation on the, usually it's just the A students work for the B students. I like that though. Well, let's add in the C one because as a C student, I want to… I was a C student, so I ended up deciding to go to pharmacy school because my dad was like, oh, you'll come into, you know, you'll come help me with the drugstores and we'll be in business and like, you know, I love that aspect of it. But by the time I graduated pharmacy school, He had sold the stores because it was impossible to make money with the insurance companies lowering reimbursement and competing with CVS and Walgreens and all that. I graduated pharmacy school, but my last semester of pharmacy school, my roommate had the Peter Lynch books. Peter Lynch read Fidelity Magellan. He was considered almost up there as Warren Buffett, not quite. grew Fidelity Magellan from millions to billions, amazing stock picker. And his books were all like, buy what you know. If you're a pharmacist, then you should know a lot more than everybody on Wall Street that's investing and controlling a lot of money investing in these drug stocks, but has never worked in a pharmacy or doesn't understand the science. I really took that to heart. $10,000, largely because I sold that business for $10,000 before the Uber. The Uber DoorDash, yep. Right. It was called Phone for Food. I like that. Phone for Food.
Karson Humiston: Yeah, yeah. Thank you.
Jason Wild: So you had $10,000. So $10,000 that I had in an account, and I started investing it in the stock market. And I realized that, and they don't talk about it in the books, but I think people are either built psychologically to be good at picking stocks, or they're not. And most people aren't because they're too emotional. And when things are going well, they often They're like, oh, man, why don't I own more? They have a complaint about when it goes up. But when it goes down, so many people get so beat up that they end up buying the highs and selling the lows, which is obviously the opposite of what you're supposed to be doing. But I had like 10 grand in an account. I started picking stocks. And then I got my pharmacy degree. This was 1997. And I was so excited. I was making $65,000 a year as a base salary. All my friends who did not go to pharma school, their starting salaries were like 30 grand. So I felt like I was rich. And amazingly, I was able to take every other paycheck, post tax, and deposit it in my brokerage account. To do investing. To do investing and buying stocks. And I didn't know any better. I was margining everything two to one. So that works when things are working. And I turned that first year, being a pharmacist, I made $65,000 as a pharmacist, and I made over $400,000 in the stock market. Holy cow. On like $25,000, $30,000. So I was like, I've got to do this. So you're like, I'm kind of good at this. And I'm bored out of my mind filling prescriptions. I was working in a mail order facility and filling, like it was just a numbers thing. I didn't even get to, you know, I like to talk and socialize and all that. You're on the side.
Karson Humiston: You're asking the customers, like, have you seen the stock?
Jason Wild: It's funny, it was this big facility and they had a corporate lunchroom and I remember, it's funny that you say that, I remember being in the lunchroom and looking for somebody who was interested in talking about the stock market with me and I couldn't really find anybody.
Karson Humiston: No, there was no other pharmacist interested in the stock market.
Jason Wild: No, not at this place. Not at this time. And then when I looked at the numbers and all of that, and I remember talking to my dad, because halfway into the year, I was like, I'm bored out of my mind. I feel like there's no, I'm supposed to just do the same thing every single day or whatever. And I remember he said to me, That's why they call it a job, which I thought was bullshit. And I wasn't going to sort of fall into that line of thinking. And I ended up, I saw an ad in the back of Barron's. My dad always got Barron's, the financial weekly. And there was an ad in the back of Barron's towards the end of the first year of me being a pharmacist. And it said, do you want to run or open a mutual fund or hedge fund? Call me. And it was a guy who's a fund administrator. I called him up and he ran me through everything.
Karson Humiston: Off the back of a, you see it on the back of a, you know, paper, basically.
Jason Wild: Yeah, back of a, oh yeah, right, the back of a, I have the ad, by the way. Oh my gosh. Because Barron's interviewed me a few years ago and the editor went back and found it on like microfiche or whatever it is. Wow, that's cool. You call the number. I called the number and he laid it all out for me. Mutual fund, impossible unless you raise them a billion dollars or whatever it was. I had like 80 grand that I was thinking that I was going to start it with, but it cost me 20 grand to open up a hedge fund. It's really just an investment limited partnership. He was going to be my fund administrator, settle all the trades. We'd get a conference of all the trades and he'd send out all the statements to everybody. We've now used him for 25 years. Oh my gosh. Probably his biggest customer. He was charging me back then like $100 a month or something like that. Yeah, and I started I decided I was gonna start the fun and mainly because I believe that the stock my stock picking was gonna drive performance I just felt and I believed in the you know, you're like 25 or something at this point 26. Yeah, 26. And what happened was I said, if you build it, they will come. I started with $80,000. It was like $50,000 of mine, $20,000 from my dad, and $10,000 from one of my buddies. And I was running it. At this point, I was engaged to my beautiful wife. And we had an apartment. And I was running it.
Karson Humiston: I feel like this is crazy.
Jason Wild: No, no, she's always been super supportive and believed in me. And I was able to do this because she was making enough money to support us that I could say I'm giving up this $65,000 a year job or most of it. Pharmacy. Because the first couple years I worked in the ShopRite pharmacy in Paramus, New Jersey, like two nights a week. So maybe I was making 20 grand or whatever it was. And it was really, when I talk to people about the story, if I talk to somebody who's my age now or 40 or something, It's sort of like, I can't necessarily encourage them to do something like that, because at that point, I had such, you know, little expenses, I didn't have kids, you know, my wife. Your burn's low. Yeah, right. So, it's harder. I always think about that.
Karson Humiston: Like, it's the best, like, I mean, similarly, I started my thing in college, and I think about it now, like, when I talk to my friends who want to start businesses, I'm like, wow, you have, like, kids and a house and a mortgage. Like, it definitely gets harder as time goes by, which is why I always tell people, like, your 20s are, like, the time. Like, just send it. Who cares if you mess things up? Because, by the way, it doesn't matter. You don't have anything, so there's nothing else to lose.
Jason Wild: 100%.
Karson Humiston: So 20 people in their 20s out there, now's the moment to send it. And I was listening. I love Danny Myers. I just think he's incredible. I was listening to one of his books, and he said he was studying for the LSAT. He was taking the LSAT the next day, but obviously he'd always wanted to be a chef. And his uncle said to him, Danny, how many years are you going to be dead? And he was like, I don't know. And his uncle said, well, you're going to be dead a hell of a lot longer than you're going to be alive. So why the fuck are you taking the LSAT when you want to go and be a chef? And he went on to open a ton of amazing restaurants, Shake Shack, you know. And it's just like, I love that you were like, I'm filling prescriptions. Why am I filling prescriptions when I can be doing something I love? So anyway, I want to get back to your story.
Jason Wild: And I have ADHD. You have ADHD. Me too. So it was undiagnosed, but it was like,
Karson Humiston: This podcast could be hard because we both have ADHD, but I feel like I'm doing a good job.
Jason Wild: Let's change subjects and talk about something else. What's going on out there? I'm just kidding.
Karson Humiston: So you start out, you got basically a hundred grand. Some of your family, your wife's working.
Jason Wild: Yeah, she's working and I was running it out of my one-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan. And somebody introduced me to another guy, he knew that I had a fund. I went over, the office was three blocks away, it was like a hedge fund hotel, multiple funds. And the guy liked having me around, and I just started showing up there every day. Your office. Yeah, it was like, you know, there's a Seinfeld where Kramer showed up for the job that he wasn't hired for, and that's what happened. I started showing up there every day, and after like, two or three weeks, the guy that owns the firm, he's like, well, you're here every day, you might as well run your fund out of here, and we'll also give you, it's cool. Zia told me to turn this off before, and I did. No, we like it.
Karson Humiston: If it was Rosie, we would have had to answer.
Jason Wild: That's funny. Yeah, for sure, I wasn't. So he was like, and you should trade our prop account, proprietary trading account as well, which was like, awesome. I was just trading whatever I was trading in my fund. I was doing it double the size, doing it for this firm. And they paid out monthly in terms of the profits, and at 50% payout versus my fund at 20. So that is what, for the next several years, made it so that I could, you know, Help support, you know me and my wife as well because I was essentially, you know you know carrying two jobs at once to a certain extent and I think like a Takeaway here is like Jason just showed up to these people's office like when you show up over and over again I think eventually good things begin to happen.
Karson Humiston: So that's where today of 600 million dollars under management according to the website. But talk to me, how did you go from the $100,000 to the $600,000? Obviously, you got a lucky break here, but not even a lucky break, but just you kept putting yourself in the position to get lucky. What was the next several years like as you started really growing the fund?
Jason Wild: So it took a while.
Karson Humiston: And then eventually, we will get to cannabis.
Jason Wild: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It took a while. I mean, the fund went from like $80,000 to by the peak in the market, the Nasdaq peaked in March or so of 2000. by the way, the same exact day that I got arrested in Central Park for smoking weed. That was the Rudy Giuliani, no broken windows policy. They were going to go after everything. I went into jail. I was like in jail, in downtown. 2000, March or April of 2000. It took me like 24 hours to get, you know, put through the whole process, and when I finally got out, I got out, every single one of my stocks was down. That was the peak that day before.
Karson Humiston: And you didn't know what was going on because you were in jail.
Jason Wild: I didn't know what was going on. 24 hours. But it was a little crazy, not that I think the whole world revolves around me, but me and the market both sort of crashed at the same time. Over the following year or so, we built the fund back up from that peak in 2000. I was definitely much more aggressive back then and had major volatility, but figure by four or five years later, we were only up to like 8 million in AUM. I think that this is something that I often tell people who are entrepreneurs. To me, one of the biggest aspects about it is just patience. It's not all going to happen right away. And I don't care. I mean, I'm here. It's the same thing with cannabis. I'm here for the long term. If it takes a year, if it takes 10 years or 20 years, it doesn't matter. And I think that's what separates. A lot of companies, they go to reach and try to grab a dollar today because they don't have patience, when if they don't take it today, they can make $5 next year or something like that.
Karson Humiston: Which I think is a big issue for venture capitalists too, especially, like the impatience, right?
Jason Wild: Oh, absolutely.
Karson Humiston: And I think, like when I think about it, everyone seems to think everyone's an overnight success 15 years later, 20 years later. And so I think this story is so good because you're talking about, you know, the first, like you're talking about, that was like a decade that you just described and you were still $8 million under management. So I want to keep going with the story.
Jason Wild: So we peaked, so by 2010, which was 12 years in, Let me back up a little bit. We got up to about $50 million in AUM by the beginning of 2008. Then the market crashed.
Karson Humiston: In 2008, was your second time going through this?
Jason Wild: Yes, there were two of them. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And generally, you know, we have a major, you know, they always call it like a thousand-year flood, but it seems to happen in the market, you know. We've had some nice, strong bear markets every, you know, six years or so, but got up to $50 million in AUM by the beginning of 2008 and by the end of 2008. with the combination of, you know, not great performance, you know, down 20-something percent or high 20s percents, and all these other funds put up gates and didn't let people take their money out, and we didn't, because my view was like, I don't want somebody to be stuck in my fund if they don't want to be there. But they all came to me for liquidity because they couldn't get it out of other places. I had a lot of investors who had money with Bernie Madoff. They got wiped out from that. They had to take money from us. So between all of that, we went from $50 million in AUM to about $12 million in AUM. And if you look at the history of our fund, that's sort of like we have a big run, and then we have a decent pullback. It consolidated, and then we go on another big one. We ended up going straight from $12 million in AUM to hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years.
Karson Humiston: There's a perfect example. If you would have just been like, you know what? This isn't for me. I've gotten too beat up. If you would have quit then, you would have never had the success that you ultimately had from just sticking it out and keeping going.
Jason Wild: Yeah, absolutely. And just knowing that it's a long game and not to judge myself too much on whatever is happening in the near term, just sort of believing in what we were doing. But what happened in 08 also was my real specialty there was what's called specialty pharma companies, which are the smaller ones that aren't Merck and Pfizer. They're often much more entrepreneurial. And I ended up in like, oh wait, I ended up finding, two of the public companies I was invested in, I found one company, this amazing deal, they bought an asset from this other company, paid $10 million for it, and they did like, they ended up doing like 300 million in revenue. They had a few things break their way over the, yeah, at like an 80% gross margin. And I put that whole thing together, that company wouldn't have gotten it if it wasn't for me. And that's the one that you're on the board of? No, this is the genesis of that. So I was like, and I got a pat on the back from them. So, and I was like, you know, it didn't really do anything for my investors and my fund and all of that. And I was like, I got to, whenever I sort of have something where I miss a huge opportunity or squander an opportunity, it makes me feel a little better if I say, okay, that was my education, part of my education. I need to figure out how to not squander that opportunity again.
Karson Humiston: I always call this a very expensive MBA.
Jason Wild: We're both getting very expensive MBAs out there. Exactly. So what I'd set out in 2009 to do was find a CEO to partner up with, and I wanted to start a drug company because I had so many companies coming through my office, public ones, and they were much more open with me than they would be with competitors if there was a business development guy at another pharma company. So I could be like, this product doesn't seem to fit with the rest of your portfolio. Would you be willing to sell it and all that? And often, you know, a product that's lost or an orphan within a big company could really be revitalized by a smaller one that puts, you know, some attention behind it. So that was my idea, was I have all these, I can see this deal flow and I'm good at knowing what are good deals and just knowing, like, if you told me a product, I could easily have a service. I could look up their sales and how many prescriptions they're doing a week. I could figure out their margins. I can usually on the back of the envelope tell you roughly what it would be worth. And I wanted to be able to refer those opportunities in-house. And that was the genesis. It took me about a year to find a CEO to do it with me. And we co-invested in this thing, Arbor Pharmaceuticals. We bought a small company called Arbor that was doing like a million and a half in sales. We bought it for $2.5 million. put another three million on the balance sheet, the CEO put a million dollars of his own money in the company, which I thought was admirable, and also said he wasn't taking any salary until we were cash flow positive, which was crazy at the time, because we didn't have anything. We were starting from scratch, and we ended up, we did that in April of 10, and we found three amazing deals that first year, required practically no cash up front, where the next year we were doing 127 million in sales, and 55 million in pre-tax profits. So it worked out for the numbers. Yeah. Three years later, we're doing $100 million in profit. And KKR, the big private equity fund, came knocking. We sold them a third of the company. We sold them all secondary shares. So I was able to go to all my investors and say, you know, KKR will buy every share that you'll sell them at 150 times what you paid for originally. They were happy. They were happy. And it took my fund, you know, to the next level from $20-something million, which is what I had gotten it back to.
Karson Humiston: And this was in 2013, you said?
Jason Wild: So we sold to KKR that piece in 14 or 15.
Karson Humiston: So this was like a huge break, but this, again, to like the 15 years later, this was like 15 years later?
Jason Wild: Oh, yeah. What's the saying about all these years to become an overnight success or something? And it took my fund up. I mean, this company was earning $100 million. If you conservatively market, even for what we kept on our portfolio, that's worth $800 million, and we owned half of it. So, and we raised like, the company raised total equity from inception of $20 million. So that means that all those earnings were massively accretive on an earnings per share basis. And, you know, we invested at 25 cents a share and we sold to KKR at $37 a share.
Karson Humiston: Wow. So I want to get into cannabis. So now this happens.
Jason Wild: So I took that money.
Karson Humiston: So you took this much. Yeah. So this happens.
Jason Wild: Took that money and I put it into weeds. You're like, I'm not done yet. I'm going to do it. Yes. Oh, it wasn't even a thought about whether I was done. I mean, even now, like I plan on doing this for stock picking and investing for as long as I can. For 100. Yeah. 100 is cool. That's good. But what happened was we had my investors cashed out about $150 million in this whole, it was like on a million dollars. It became 150 roughly or something like that. Crazy cool. And I got a call from a banker in Canada saying, hey, did you know they legalized medical cannabis here? We're raising money for this company up in Toronto. You want to come see? I had been a connoisseur or a consumer of cannabis for multiple days a week for 20-something years, I guess, at that point, or maybe a little less. But I was like, I had never seen it grow before or seen live cannabis plants or anything like that. Maybe I planted a couple of seeds, you know, which ended up being males or whatever, you know, in 1992. But I wanted to go see it. I'm always a big believer in going, getting off my butt, not sitting in front of my computer and watching my stocks tick all day. Getting out there. Getting out there, even if it's a company that I don't want to end up investing in.
Karson Humiston: That's a good tip, everybody. Get out there.
Jason Wild: Get out there and turn over every, you know, stone that you can in terms of different opportunities, You never know what you're going to find. And even if you don't find something you're going to invest in, it might be an opportunity for later, where they come back to you or something changes. Or you just learn and they put you on to some other company that might be interesting. I always learn. So that's what happened. We went up. It was this company, Metrum, that ended up becoming part of Canopy Growth. And I went up there, and I was like, holy shit, this is going to be huge. I was starting to get more worried about pharmaceuticals and pricing. The presidential election was coming up, and it was the first time we had a Republican in Donald Trump who was anti-Big Pharma as well. Usually, it was just the Democrats. And I just felt like cannabis, I considered it health care or pharmaceuticals. I just felt like it was going to be the only part of pharmaceuticals that I thought was going to grow very strongly over the next 20 years. And when I came back from that trip, I was like, I got to meet as many of these cannabis companies as I can. This is going to be huge. I was even surprised. I was talking to my parents about it. They weren't like, what the fuck's wrong with you?
Karson Humiston: Were you living in New York or Miami at this time?
Jason Wild: I was living in New York. In New York, OK. Yeah. Yeah. I was in Armonk in Westchester. So, I started going up for like three years or so. I probably did, you know, 30 trips up to Canada. I would start off on the West Coast and work my way to Toronto. And we ended up investing mainly in like four companies. And fortunately, those turned out to be some of the best ones. And even the way we weighted them, we put the most money into the biggest position, and that was Metrum, which was bought by Canopy Growth. And we held on for a few years with that, and we were getting paid like over 20% a year in short interest to lend our shares out. And that did really well. We were like the sixth largest shareholder in Canopy when Constellation invested in it. Incredible. What was it, $3 billion or whatever it was. Kronos was our second, we were like ninth largest shareholder in that. So we had invested, you know, roughly $20 million. My view was like, if it works, it's gonna work and have a real impact on the portfolio. And if it doesn't, we'll lose a few percent and it won't be a disaster. It's like, you know, it was just, I felt like the risk reward from a dollar perspective was good. And we ended up, you know, we put in, We put that money in, and two, three years later, it was worth over $200 million, because all these stocks went crazy. It was before REC in Canada. And in late 17, I was up there at a conference and talking to Bruce Linton, the old CEO of Canopy Growth, and I said, I just met with all my companies and a bunch of other companies, and these guys, these executives, and I said, it was mostly guys. There weren't too many females back then in the space in Canada, but I said, They're all the biggest fucking lightweights I've ever met in my life. I said, I think I can do like a Arbor 2.0, but in cannabis, but the difference is when we started Arbor, Argo was at 100 million in sales within like five years, I think. which, you know, which we beat in the first year. But it was never to be the biggest, you know, most profitable pharma company in the world. There was so much competition, but I felt like in cannabis there wasn't. And I said, I think we can be a top, you know, five or 10 cannabis company in the world within five or so years. And Bruce Linton, like, loved the idea. We had a very good relationship, but he's like, we want to do it with you. So the way that manifested itself was Terrasan was a company I'd put 500 grand into in January of 17. It was now November. I called them up and said, I want to come by and see you. And I convinced them they had a $50 million market cap. They were trading on the CSE. And I convinced them to take a $52 million private placement. Canopy Growth co-invested in that deal with me. I did 60% of it, and they did like 40%. And that was the start of the whole thing. That was the start of the whole thing. And at first, we were only doing Canada. I was worried about getting arrested and all that. Yeah, yeah, you didn't want to get arrested again. No, not again. But within about a year or so, the stock, here's what happened. The stock went from a dollar, it was the day before MJBiz in Vegas in November of 17. We announced it, like we put out the press release the morning, it was like the first day of that. The stock went from a dollar where it closed, it opened at $2.20, closed at like $1.90. And then over the next six months, it went to like $5. And I was freaking out because we hadn't done anything yet. We didn't have any sales. And we were looking for deals. We keep getting outbid by other Canadian companies that were willing to overpay and all of that. And we were being disciplined. And I realized, like I was stressed because We were being given so much credit at that point, and I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to deliver. And I realized that the only way that I could feel comfortable that we were going to be able to deliver is if we went to the U.S. And you came to the U.S. And we came to the U.S. We were the first, I think, Canadian LP, or maybe we were the only one that completely pretty much pivoted to the U.S. We gave up the right. At the time, we knew we weren't going to be able to list on a U.S. exchange. But to me, it's the whole short-term, the market's a voting machine, and long-term, it's a weighing machine. And we weren't going to be able to build a real business if we didn't go after the biggest market in the world. And that's how it started.
Karson Humiston: And here's the thing. This is actually a two-part episode. Yeah. So part two, we're going to talk about how Terrasen went into the US, your strategy in the US, what you're predicting for 2024 will be coming to you in part two. So Jason, thank you so much for coming. I can't wait for part two of this episode.
Jason Wild: I'm psyched. I can't wait. All right. Thanks.