(This story has been updated from an earlier version to clarify Privateer’s relationship with Marley Naturals.)
Privateer Holdings, a marijuana-focused private equity company, has laid off a portion of its workforce, only weeks after its subsidiary Leafly cut 15 employees.
The Seattle-based cannabis investment firm did not reveal how many staffers were eliminated, according to GeekWire.
Layoffs by a prominent cannabis company like Privateer might strike industry watchers as strange, especially considering workforce reductions are a rarity in the growing marijuana industry.
Here’s what you need to know:
- Privateer eliminated jobs in its information technology, human resource and legal departments.
- The investment company has 136 employees, and more than 500 work at all the companies under its umbrella.
- Besides Leafly, Privateer owns Tilray, a British Columbia-based medical marijuana brand; and Marley Natural, a California-based cannabis brand created in partnership with the family of iconic reggae musician Bob Marley.
Growing Ambition. Companies leverage capital, partnerships and diversification to expand beyond state lines.
So, the zenith has been reached. And now the slow yet inexorable, typically corporate, diminishment of energies in the MJ corporate sector.
It is sad that real human beings will lose their incomes after some corporate A-holes try to maximize profits and slush their money into offshore bank accounts, while continuing to suck up the bandwidth of social services upon which their businesses rely: traffic lights, digital infrastructure, and public sector inputs. The more they claim to eschew “small government” the more they’ll suck the real taxpayers dry.
Enjoy your “legal” weed!
Sounds like they are now large enough to outsource services that aren’t part of their core business.
If you don’t like corporate a-holes, maybe you should move to a communist socialist country where the government owns everything and everything is equal and fair. That way you can have enough money to purchase Vodka and a cow just like everyone else. Pure happiness!
As if government doesn’t control the market here now, favoring narrow corporatist interests? When cannabis is actually legal (versus quasi-legal) and available in a free (not absurdly over-regulated) market, you’ll have room to defend “corporate a-holes”. Crony self-protectionism by this ilk is as much of a problem as all-out prohibition, in the long term.