I sat down to write this note to attempt an explanation on why I started this site. The honest answer is that, like millions of other people right now, I want to learn how to make money in the Legal Marijuana Industry and I don’t know where to invest. I am not some bleeding heart activist trying to better the world through pot smoking or advocate for the legalization movement, I am a capitalist, plain and simple.

I have decades of experience in Venture Capital, Hedge Fund and Private Equity investing, Asset Management and Business Operations, but I just don’t know where to put my money in this space. So as I embark on the due diligence process and try to pull together a bunch of disconnected information, I figured, why not aggregate it into a place where I can navigate it and share it as well.

There are so many areas that this industry will touch. The obvious sectors of Cultivation and Dispensaries are just the tip of the iceberg and licenses are hard to come by. There will be testing labs, technology and compliance vendors, edible products, travel and tours, security firms… and the list goes on.

At the moment I have absolutely no investments in the space, either public or private, and I have no revenue model built for this site but I do intend to somehow use it for profit. From time to time members of our ownership or staff may may hold investments in companies we write about. In those instances we will disclose the relationship at each story. I have investments in the financial and publishing industry. Specifically, I am currently the CFO of and investor in The Alpha Pages, which is scheduled to launch in 2014 and is positioned to become the leader in Alternative Asset News. At the current time we own and operate 2 different news publications; Futures Magazine and Resource Investor which are over 40 years old and provide similar niche coverage in the alternative asset space. The Alpha Pages has no financial interest in MMJ but it does position me well to be able to leverage a publishing platform for profit. I have other investments and operating roles in some of those companies as well, simply by way of full disclosure.

I have no idea what form this project will take and I suspect this note will serve as a time capsule of sorts. Similar to the letter my Freshman year biology teacher made me write on the first day of high school listing all of my favorite things and then mailed it back to me after graduation. For the record Led Zepplin is still my favorite band of all time!

David Friedman
Publisher
MMJ Investor News