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Robert Hunt
Founder of Linnaea Holdings, Shingle Hill, Tuatara Capital
Robert Hunt
Founder of Linnaea Holdings, Shingle Hill, Tuatara Capital
Biography
Robert Hunt is a founder of Linnaea Holdings, a private equity backed business focused on rolling up California-based cannabis assets. Rob is also the founder and manager of Shingle Hill, a boutique consultancy and market intelligence firm for the cannabis industry. He has more than 15 years of experience in cannabis as an attorney, consultant, operator, and investor. Rob specializes in assisting his clients with legislation and policy issues, due diligence, and structuring complicated financial instruments. Through this work, Rob has helped his clients navigate a rapidly evolving legal and regulatory landscape.
Previously, Rob was a founding Partner, and the Lead Industry Executive of Tuatara Capital, the world’s largest private equity firm dedicated to cannabis-based businesses. In this role Mr. Hunt was responsible for leading Tuatara’s deal generation efforts, operational due diligence and the execution of new investments. He remains a member of the General Partnership. As an expert in and an advocate for the cannabis industry, Mr. Hunt has been interviewed by media outlets as diverse as: The BBC, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Entrepreneur, Fortune, US News & World Report, NBC News, ABC News, The Street, BuzzFeed, MarketWatch, Vice, PC Magazine, Wired, Equities.com, The Boston Business Journal, The Boston Herald, MMJ Business Daily, CNN Money, Ozy and The Cannabis Financial Network as well as numerous other publications and media outlets. He has also taught continuing legal education (“CLE”) classes for The American Lawyer (AmLaw) on cannabis law and policy.
Prior to this, Rob was the owner and CEO of Rocky Mountain Hydroponics in Colorado, and Evergreen Garden Centers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. Rob tailored his company to specialize in organic and hydroponic growing methodology to help maximize yields at commercial cultivation centers. He sold this business to GrowLife, Inc. where he served as both the President of the retail division and a director.
Speaker Videos
Big Money to be Made in the Cannabis Industry | The Street
California Cannabis Business Expo Speech
Cannabis Cultivation – Inexorable Path to Economic Sensibility
Speech Topics
The Regulatory Landscape for Cannabis in the United States
A discussion of what the realistic path to Federal legalization is and when we may expect to see interstate commerce.
This talk will cover topics such as:
- A history of legislative changes that allowed for cannabis legalization at the state level
- How different administrations, Senate compositions, and DOJ leaders have addressed the cannabis question
- The impact of the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 (the "Farm Bill") on hemp legalization
- Pending legislation in the House and Senate today, including the SAFE, STATES, and MORE acts
- The projected timeline to adult use legalization of cannabis
- The catalysts that will bring about Federal change
- When we may expect to see interstate commerce and how that will affect the current market dynamic
- Which businesses stand to win in the long term
- How will institutional capital likely react and what their entry point in the market will be
Ancillary Businesses in the Cannabis Industry
As the cannabis industry continues to scale, there currently exist multiple opportunities where institutional capital can play today without crossing "the Green Line''. This is a discussion of who are the companies providing the proverbial picks and shovels to the minors in today's "Green Rush".
This talk will cover topics such as:
- An examination of the commercial cultivation supply industry who supply all the equipment to the cannabis industry including Hydrofarm, Scotts Miracle Grow's Hawthorne division, and GrowGeneration as well as other private equity backed entrants
- The commercial real estate opportunity and how larger pools of capital are being assembled to provide real estate financing, primarily in the form of sale leasebacks
- Equipment manufacturing for greenhouses, extraction, and retail
- Software for point of sale, inventory management, and cultivation facility management
The California Cannabis Opportunity
With Federal legalization looming close on the horizon, larger cannabis businesses need to determine what role California will play in their long term success. This is a discussion of why California is the most important cannabis market in the World and why it will be the exporter to all other states once interstate commerce becomes a reality.
Topics to be addressed include:
- Current fragmentation of the CA market and how it will consolidate
- Why the largest multistate operators have largely ignored CA to date despite the TAM that exists there
- The internal intricacies of being a producer and consumer state and how that affects the legal and illicit markets both domestically in CA and around the country
- The superior position that CA will command post Federal legalization
- How the larger companies in cannabis are planning ahead and trying to time the transition for maximum market impact
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