Renee Gagnon has seen the business world from both sides of the gender coin and knows from personal experience that it’s a different world for men and women. As a transgender woman, the CEO of Hollyweed North Cannabis has sought capital and built companies as both a man and a woman and says that as a middle-aged white guy, she was once “part of the club.”
That all changed, however, when she came out and began her transition, six months before Caitlyn Jenner brought the issue mainstream.
“It’s amazing how fast they revoke your privilege,” she says. “Suddenly now I’m a hyper-minority.”
Gagnon is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years in the IT field and experience at startups stretching back to the beginning of the internet and the dot-com boom. She describes it as “12 smoking craters and two good ones,” but all that experience helped her build Hollyweed into a successful business that produces the TerraCube, an all-in-one grow room with built-in power, plumbing, lighting, security and a seed-to-sale tracker. It’s designed to help growers create a consistent product by controlling all the inputs.
It’s the combination of a lifetime of interest in technology and cannabis. Gagnon says that when she first saw an Apple II in 1981 she immediately started figuring out how it could be used to help grow marijuana. As the cannabis industry emerges from the underground, Gagnon says the “scaled-up hobby agriculture” and “pseudo-art” that has emerged in many states may produce great cannabis, but there are just too many variables to be able to produce a consistent product.
She sees the TerraCube as a way to address the equity balance in the industry because it is a low-cost alternative to raising huge amounts of capital to start a business, something that is more difficult for women and minorities — groups Gagnon views as key to the success of the industry in general.
“You cannot adequately service a market if you don’t look like the market you are servicing,” she says.
With that in mind, Hollyweed North actively seeks to create a diverse workplace. Gagnon says 11 of 18 executives at the company are women and 30% of the staff is LGBTQ.
“These are the cultural things I can affect,” she says.
Gagnon sees herself as a “skeleton key to the industry,” and says her experience as a man and a woman in business has shown her that that men often have the luxury of seeing and experiencing leadership at a more intimate level than women because of the access their gender can provide.
Gagnon advises women seeking to enter the industry to look toward Silicon Valley and take a boot camp on essential skills, such as creating a pitch deck and executive summary, things that make it easier to find investors.
“If women and minorities wish to gain access they must be equipped with the same tools,” she says.