Vance Crowe Podcast 015: Tony Sansone III Cannabis Entrepreneur that sold a company for $22M

About this episode

Tony Sansone III, a young St. Louis entrepreneur connected to Vance through his father, walks through how he and a group of partners bought a Nevada cultivation license on the secondary market in early 2016, built a 30,000-square-foot cannabis cultivation facility from the ground up, and sold the operation to publicly traded Mhar Dean in August 2018 for $22 million. Strikingly, Sansone has never used alcohol or cannabis himself — he stopped drinking at 18 after his mother's death — which he frames not as puritanism but as clear-eyed self-knowledge about how different people react differently to substances. Much of the conversation is a masterclass in the business mechanics of a brand-new, heavily regulated industry: the deliberate decision to hold off ramping up cultivation capacity while overeager competitors overbuilt and later "hit the wall" and lost their entire investment when regulatory approval lagged behind harvested product; why debt capital (not equity) is nearly impossible to access in cannabis because federally regulated banks won't touch it, creating an opportunity for his current venture connecting operators with private debt financing; and the surprisingly persistent competition from the black market even in a fully legal, heavily taxed and tested industry. The two also range widely into libertarian philosophy, federalism (state-by-state cannabis legalization as a working example of local policy experimentation, echoing Ted Cruz's states'-rights framing), Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore as a case study in strong small-government execution, and St. Louis's underappreciated strength in agricultural life sciences as a more durable regional identity than chasing a "Silicon Valley of the Midwest" narrative.

Key moments

• **[00:02:59]–[00:04:41]** — Origin story: buying a cultivation license secondhand in Nevada (Feb 2016), building a 30,000 sq ft facility, and selling to Mhar Dean for $22M in August 2018.
• **[00:12:48]–[00:16:10]** — The core business lesson of the episode: competitors who rushed to scale cultivation immediately after recreational legalization passed ran into a regulatory bottleneck, sat on spoiling harvests, and suffered a "permanent loss of capital" — while Sansone's group deliberately held off and avoided the same trap.
• **[00:22:09]–[00:23:54]** — Explains his current venture providing debt capital to cannabis operators, since traditional banks ("You can't go to Wells Fargo") won't lend into a federally illegal industry, leaving equity as the only capital source for most operators.
• **[00:27:02]–[00:28:24]** — A counterintuitive industry secret: not every cannabis operator actually wants federal legalization, because interstate commerce would let ultra-low-cost outdoor growers (e.g., a California operator growing at one-fifth his cost) undercut higher-cost indoor operations like his own.
• **[00:30:16]–[00:34:39]** — Discussion of persistent black-market competition even in fully legal Nevada, and Sansone's candid admission that despite the direct hit to his own bottom line, he doesn't morally support arresting black-market sellers — a rare example of libertarian principle overriding self-interest.
• **[01:14:11]–[01:15:38]** — Riffing on Peter Thiel's "Zero to One," Sansone describes the common investor mistake of chasing the hot sector at exactly the wrong time (tech in 2000, real estate/PE in 2007) and credits his own contrarian, "unnatural weirdo" instincts for avoiding the same trap in cannabis.
• **[01:17:10]–[01:18:19]** — Argues St. Louis's genuine competitive advantage is agricultural life sciences (citing its unusually high density of plant biologists), not chasing a generic tech-hub identity, and floats that this same talent pool could give the region an edge as cannabis cultivation professionalizes.