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XSPAC Deal Aims to Create the Largest Pot Company in California
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.

Dealmaking in the frenzied cannabis market continues to flourish with the latest megadeal announced Thursday. Investors aim to build a Coca-Cola or Hershey of marijuana, launching the first national pot brand in the United States.
Glass House Group, a vertically integrated California-based cannabis company, is being gobbled up by Mercer Park Brand Acquisition Corp., a Canadian SPAC —or Special Purpose Acquisition Company — for $576 million.
The combination will create the most expansive fully-integrated, publicly listed cannabis business in California, with plans to build a six million square foot greenhouse, the biggest in the state.
The deal comes after Century City-based Ceres Group Holdings announced a SPAC in February to take Atlanta-based cannabis producer Parallel public in a $1.88 billion transaction.
Related: What Is a SPAC?
Ceres has also been trying to close a separate deal to raise a $100 million fund to make other cannabis investments, especially those in Los Angeles.
The Ceres SPAC, like Mercer Park's, trades on Canadian exchanges because U.S. cannabis companies are still barred from listing their shares on major U.S. stock exchanges as marijuana is still illegal at the federal level.
But with President Biden taking over the White House, cannabis investors are optimistic he will ease restrictions, following the lead of many states.
Earlier this month, New York became the 15th state to legalize recreational marijuana.
The possibility of federal legalization as well as record amounts of blank check deals led to $600 million in capital raised for cannabis companies in the first quarter of 2021, the highest level since 2019, according to Viridian Capital Advisors.
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Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
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Cedars Sinai Health Ventures’ Maureen Klewicki on How Tech Is Changing Health Care
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Cedars Sinai Health Ventures’ Maureen Klewicki talks about price transparency for health care, the labor shortage crisis and emerging models of health care.
Klewicki got her start working in the venture capital industry as the program director at the Techstars Healthcare accelerator. She then spent five years working at L.A.-based venture firm Crosscut. At Cedars Sinai, she helps cut checks of between $1 million and $10 million from the venture firm’s $100 million fund.
“There's one million and one problems right now Cedars Sinai is facing,” Klewicki said. The fund is structured in part to focus on the long-term future of the health care industry, but about half of it is focused on the immediate problems that Cedars doctors and staff are facing.
To get an understanding of their pain points, Klewicki said she talks directly with leaders of departments from nursing to surgery, asking them: “‘What are you thinking about? Where do you need help? And where can we find a company that we can plug in right now?’”
The pandemic has taken a toll on health care workers, Klewicki said, exacerbating a huge nursing shortage and adding more trauma to an already overworked labor pool. But Klewicki also says that the labor force crisis could be a thesis for an entire fund.
“Could you solve it through the use of smart robotics? Could you solve it through computer vision? Could you solve it through ambient scribing?,” she asks. ”Can you do things that make it so that nurses aren't spending 30% of the time logging things into the EHR?”
Another crucial issue for Cedars: keeping the cost of care down. One strategy has been keeping patients out of the hospital if they don't need to be there, and making sure they have a range of services at home. There are a number of different solutions that are being developed toward that end, Klewicki said, from teams that are made up of both health care professionals and tech entrepreneurs.
“You might see a team that is half-Uber and half-health care execs,” she said. “And so that's where I think you start to see these really cool combinations of technologists and people that know health care really well.”
Klewecki said recent changes in how hospitals get reimbursed have incentivized startups that focus on a “value-based” health care model that focuses on preventative care.
“Because that overall care team approach is what keeps the cost of care down,” she said “And so you see a lot of movement from VC-backed and private equity-backed companies in the value-based care space because that's where the payment models are moving.”
That might mean setting up urgent care facilities in different neighborhoods, sending providers to aid patients at home or focusing more on telemedicine rather than bringing patients to hospitals.
Klewicki added, “If you do it right, you can have a very valuable company that is improving outcomes for patients.”
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Engagement Fellow Joshua Letona contributed to this post.
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Have a Look Inside Amazon's New Store in Glendale
Drew Grant is dot.LA's Senior Editor. She's a media veteran with over 15-plus years covering entertainment and local journalism. During her tenure at The New York Observer, she founded one of their most popular verticals, tvDownload, and transitioned from generalist to Senior Editor of Entertainment and Culture, overseeing a freelance contributor network and ushering in the paper's redesign. More recently, she was Senior Editor of Special Projects at Collider, a writer for RottenTomatoes streaming series on Peacock and a consulting editor at RealClearLife, Ranker and GritDaily. You can find her across all social media platforms as @Videodrew and send tips to drew@dot.la.
Starting today, Glendale’s most meme-able outdoor mall, The Americana at Brand, will be home to the Amazon Style store—the ecommerce giant’s first foray into brick-and-mortar apparel retail. We got an early sneak peak inside the new digs (located on the corner with Sprinkles Cupcakes, next to H&M and the Apple store) and were able to try out some of its tech-enabled features, which—as ever with Amazon—seek to make the act of shopping as easy as possible.
1. It’s Bigger Than It Looks—Even From the Inside
The floor is massive—laying out original products from Amazon’s own apparel lines alongside name brands like Theory, Adidas and Calvin Klein, as well as several other lines that have up until now only existed online. But the actual store is much larger than the two floors that most customers will only ever see.
Amazon Style is just the front—the homepage, if you will—behind which a large warehouse facility keeps a gigantic surplus of inventory. A floor-to-ceiling glass window on the main floor gives shoppers just a peak behind the scenes, as employees help load industrial-sized elevators with racks of goods to send upstairs to the dressing rooms.
2. Online Shopping IRL
When perusing the store’s bouquet of cottagecore maxi dresses, Kendall & Kylie blazers and, yes, a whole section dedicated to Y2K apparel, one doesn’t just pick an item off the rack and take it with you while you shop. Instead, each rack has a barcode that you can scan via the Amazon Shopping app, which has your sizes pre-loaded from previous purchases. (Though you can, of course, opt for a different size if you choose.) That cues an AI-enabled algorithm to start searching through the store’s warehoused catalog and zip the desired item over to the second floor, where the dressing room provides its own glimpse into the future of shopping.
The store also boasts a version of The Drop, a Style staple that allows online customers to shop an entire influencer-curated collections for a 30-hour flash window.
3. Changing Stations of the Future—Today
Your phone also acts as your keycard to get into your personal dressing room. To prevent waiting, you are put in a virtual cue the moment you scan your first item; should your screen prompt that your room is ready while you’re still shopping, a press of a button allows you to hold your spot in the queue while freeing up the room for someone else. (I have no idea how any of this works if your phone dies; ostensibly it can’t, and you will be forced to go home empty-handed—or worse, to The Cheesecake Factory while your device charges.)
Amazon Style’s dressing rooms offer a tech-enabled twist to trying on clothes.Image by Joshua Letona
The changing room is like its own parlor trick. Designed to look like a walk-in closet, one wall has a full length mirror and a giant touchscreen while another has all the clothes you scanned in your style and size preference. Expect to see a few surprises in there, as the algorithm picks out other stuff you might want to try on based on your picks. It would be spooky if it wasn’t so convenient—an IRL mashup of the online retailer’s “Recommended Based on Your Purchases” and “Frequently Bought Together” features.
If an item doesn’t fit quite right or you want to see how a skirt looks in blue instead of black, just tap the touchscreen to request a variant. Or an entirely new outfit, as the screen makes available everything in the facility. Then just bring it down to checkout...perhaps the wildest part of this ride.
4. Palming the Bucks
Checking out of Amazon Style’s flagship store is what really blew my mind—although apparently it’s because I haven’t been to one of the Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods locations where cashless checkouts have been an option in select locations since 2020
I assumed you would just walk out the door with it, because I watch Saturday Night Live sketches for news. While the Go payment option isn't available at Amazon Style, there are several checkout options to keep the experience as frictionless and non-cumbersome as possible.
In one scenario, you take the clothes you want out of the dressing room, and go directly to Amazon’s palm-enabled checkout kiosks. That’s right: register on the spot for an Amazon One account, and you need merely to wave your hand over a little black device that reads your palm and charges your on-file payment method. Super convienent for everyone except $10 boardwalk psychics, who are about to be put out of business.
For the more traditional set, you still have the option of paying via credit card or cash.
Shoppers can check out of Amazon Style with the wave of a palm.
Image by Joshua Letona
5. Supply & Demand & Return
Amazon Style’s brick-and-mortar location opens up a variety of new ways to shop, return and exchange clothing. For instance, you can order a load of clothes online and pick them up in the store; anything you don’t want can be returned in the store without you ever having to print a shipping label.
See something you like but don’t have time to try it on? Just scan the barcode, pick it up at the front of the store and pay on your way out without ever going into a dressing room.
The Amazon Shopping app also boasts a Deals feature, which automatically sorts for the best price on items to help customers either save money (or believe they are).
While Glendale is home to the only Style store so far, Amazon isn’t ruling out more locations. With fewer retailers able to afford rents on America’s main strips and shopping malls, Amazon’s resources—and its unique position at the intersection of tech and retail—make it easy to envision more Style stores on the horizon.
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Drew Grant is dot.LA's Senior Editor. She's a media veteran with over 15-plus years covering entertainment and local journalism. During her tenure at The New York Observer, she founded one of their most popular verticals, tvDownload, and transitioned from generalist to Senior Editor of Entertainment and Culture, overseeing a freelance contributor network and ushering in the paper's redesign. More recently, she was Senior Editor of Special Projects at Collider, a writer for RottenTomatoes streaming series on Peacock and a consulting editor at RealClearLife, Ranker and GritDaily. You can find her across all social media platforms as @Videodrew and send tips to drew@dot.la.
Gaming Will Keep Growing Despite Economic Woes, Netflix Exec Says
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
The economic headwinds that are hurting tech companies these days won’t halt gaming’s growing popularity, according to Netflix Vice President of Games Mike Verdu.
During a panel discussion Tuesday at the Montgomery Summit conference in Santa Monica, Verdu said the roughly 3 billion people who currently play video games will continue to grow in number. He agreed that gaming can even be countercyclical—meaning that the industry can sometimes do better during tough economic conditions. And he predicted that the industry will continue to see more consolidation as tech and media giants, including Netflix, gobble up game developers.
“The genres and categories that are open to people will keep increasing, so I think you'll see richer and deeper experiences, as well as games that will draw people in who have never played games before,” Verdu said.
Verdu spoke at the Montgomery Summit on the same day that his company announced the release of four new mobile games this month. Netflix, which is dealing with a startling decline in subscribers, has aggressively expanded into gaming since late last year and will soon have 22 titles under its belt.
The strategy could help Netflix hang onto subscribers by making its monthly subscription more valuable. Verdu noted that the subscription model also frees developers to design mobile games that might not work with a free-to-play model, in which games rely on advertising and in-game purchases to make money. By bundling games into its subscription, Netflix hopes to “drive this explosion of innovation in the creative space,” he said.
“We're not trying to convert you, we're not trying to monetize you—we're trying to give you joy and delight to create an experience that will get you to come back,” Verdu added.
When asked about the metaverse—the loosely-defined term for immersive and extensive online worlds—Verdu said he hopes the experience is not limited to virtual reality.
“My hope is that the metaverse will be accessible through your phone, as well as through your VR headset,” he said. “Maybe your VR headsets give you a better flavor of it or a more immersive flavor of it, but there's no reason why it can't be distributed across devices.”
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Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.