If you had told me 35 years ago that I’d meander from Rock & Roll to build a neural network for cannabis credit ratings, I would have asked what you were smoking (and to share).
And yet, here we are.
For most of my career, my day-to-day involved high-stakes entertainment and the deep responsibility that comes with that.
I helped lay the foundation for iHeartMedia. I was a founder of Live Nation. I oversaw the estate of Elvis Presley, the IP of Muhammad Ali, and a little tv show called American Idol.
Later, my portfolio included Dick Clark Productions, the Golden Globes and of course some incredible humans making incredible music.
A career built on red carpets, stadium tours, and ensuring the show literally went on.
I’ve spent decades dealing with the biggest artist and the most complex IP in the world.
So naturally, the obvious next step for a guy with my background was B2B credit reporting for the legal cannabis industry.
How is a guy who worries about whether the Golden Globes finishes on time or 40k fans won’t be fried by a lightning bolt is now losing sleep over AR data?
Fair question.
I’ve been an investor in the cannabis space for a decade, and kept running into the same problem.
Traditional credit bureaus won’t rate cannabis businesses because of federal illegality.
This means that trade credit is being extended with zero visibility. No scores, no limits, no history.
Operators are essentially throwing inventory out the door and crossing their fingers.
It is a broken system costing the industry hundreds of millions every year in late payments.
After thirty years of managing billions in entertainment assets, I couldn’t unsee the structural absurdity of this.
So, I did what any rational entertainment executive and manager would do: I founded a fintech company.
We launched Reklaim Credit Solutions to be the first commercial credit rating agency built specifically for the legal cannabis industry.
We assembled a team of brilliant experts in predictive modeling and built a proprietary neural network ensemble model to deliver trustworthy credit scores.
The transition has been humbling.
In entertainment, if a deal goes sideways, someone writes a dramatic tell-all article.
In cannabis fintech, if the output is wrong, the supply chain breaks down even more, if that’s even possible.
The learning curve has been humbling and fun.
But building a global live entertainment company and building a network for cannabis credit have one major thing in common: you have to look at a deeply fragmented, chaotic system and figure out how to bring order to it. You just swap out the rock stars for algorithms.
If you need someone to explain Elvis’ IP, I’m still your guy. Build a global tour, give me a call. Protect and grow IP so it generates value for generations, me too.
But if you want to talk about how ensemble models can bring transparency to cannabis trade credit, pull up a chair.
Just don’t ask me to fix your printer.