Marijuana Fund Manager Talks Post-Covid Earnings, Gen Z Trends

Gen Z’s pot appetite fuels optimism

Emily Paxhia’s coming-around-to-cannabis story has a surprise ending.

Like many cannabis enthusiasts, Paxhia said she shifted in favor of the drug when someone close to her was suffering, and conventional medicine couldn’t help. But the plight of her loved one — her father, who passed away from cancer in 1996 — didn’t just turn her into an advocate for medical marijuana. She and her younger brother, Morgan, staked their fortunes and careers on the drug.

Together, they co-founded a cannabis investment fund, Poseidon Asset Management. It now has $200 million in assets under management, and Emily is one of the few female money managers in the space today.

“At the end of his life, he was so nauseous all the time — this came up as a palliative care thing,” Paxhia told me of her father. Though a hospice nurse suggested marijuana, he never got to try it as far as she knew. But she and her brother were deeply affected by the experience, as well as the long lines they saw forming outside California’s first medical dispensaries which opened just after his death. The sense of marijuana’s medical potential drove them to start Poseidon with their own money in October 2013. By January 2014, when Colorado’s market opened, they began investing outside capital. [Read More @ Bloomberg]