Anthony Bendana
Age: 33
Company: Audacious
Title: Director of Sales
Until recently, Anthony Bendana was living a double life.
While Bendana was traveling all over California and Nevada, selling cannabis products and building out distribution networks throughout the West, he was also pursuing his longtime dream of becoming an NFL agent. And though he succeeded in his dream of becoming an agent, the obstacles in the way of making a career out of it seemed to be insurmountable — and, due to the regulations and stigmas still associated with cannabis use, he couldn’t even talk to players about his other career.
Earlier this year, Bendana made the difficult decision to end his career as an agent and put all his energy into cannabis.
“It was so hard to be an NFL agent and work in cannabis at the same exact time,” he says, “because when I was recruiting players, I couldn’t tell parents, ‘Hey, I’m also selling weed,’ right?”
Having overseen sales for multiple cannabis companies in his career, Bendana and Ben Koppel co-founded LOOS, a high-potency cannabis-infused beverage brand — similar to the energy shots found in convenience stores — that was acquired by Audacious in the summer of 2021.
Bendana says one of the things that made LOOS so successful was that he and Koppel “speak the language of the elicit operators and corporate executives.”
“I think that’s the secret sauce that Ben and I were able to unlock together, which was critical to understand the customer, but at the same time understand business strategies and how to be profitable.”