An investor asked Christine De La Rosa about her projected EBITDA. She had built businesses. She had a graduate degree. She understood the underlying idea. But the acronym was unfamiliar, and in that meeting, an abbreviation became a small, consequential barrier. Later, telling the story, she described a lesson that would inform her own work with founders: teach people the language that the people with money already speak.
- The People's Group focuses on BIPOC- and women-led cannabis businesses.
- Its 2021 launch announced a $50 million fundraising ambition.
- Its approach pairs investment with management review and founder preparation.
There is something useful about starting with those six letters. They make an abstract argument about inclusion suddenly concrete. A founder can understand a customer, manage a shop and know a product, yet arrive at an investor meeting without the vocabulary expected there. The question is what an investor does with that gap. Treat it as a reason to walk away? Or as something a capable person can learn?
The education before the investment
De La Rosa's route into cannabis began with illness. She told Essence that, after years of pain and a lupus diagnosis, her experience using cannabis changed her direction. She left a career in technology and helped build The People's Ecosystem, whose roots go back to an Oakland dispensary in 2016. Her account is personal: the important business consequence was that a database architect became an operator in a very different industry.
She then encountered a second problem. Starting a business and getting investors to back it were separate skills. In her telling, networks, introductions and the conventions of fundraising were unevenly distributed. The People's Group grew from the wish to give other founders resources she had needed herself. By 2021, she was putting that idea into an investment firm.
“It’s all the things I wish I’d had when I was raising capital for my company.”Christine De La Rosa, 2021
A license is only the beginning
The firm's public identity places cannabis culture and its history at the center of its investment approach. It explicitly includes legacy founders alongside new ones and names BIPOC and women-led businesses as its focus. That matters because it changes where the search for investable talent begins. Experience acquired outside conventional financial networks becomes something to examine, rather than something automatically missing from the résumé.
The practical problem is easy to picture. Permission to open a business does not furnish the building, assemble the team or explain the accounts. An owner still has to turn an opportunity into a functioning operation. The fund's launch announcement addressed that distance with proposed growth capital, debt facilities, license and product investments, and management support. Its offer crossed the boundary between financing a company and helping it become financeable.
Make the next pitch better
In its 2021 description, the process started with a pitch deck. An interested team could arrange a meeting with De La Rosa, followed by an evaluation-team meeting. Further scrutiny considered the founder's experience and management, with advisory review before an investment decision. The fund could also help identify management where it was missing.
The revealing detail concerned applicants it declined. De La Rosa said the team would help them improve their presentation for another investor. A rejection could still leave a founder better prepared. For readers building their own investment or mentoring programs, that is a concrete practice to copy: make feedback specific enough to use in the next room.
Two numbers, two different meanings
The October 2021 announcement put $50 million in the headline. Its explanatory text described an intention to raise that amount. Read as a plan, the figure communicates ambition and the scale of the proposed opportunity. It should be kept separate from the money already put into a business.
Cannabis Now later identified that first investment as $250,000 for Spectrum CannaLabs, a Bay Area cannabis testing facility. A laboratory is an instructive choice. The story of cannabis ownership is often told through the dispensary counter; this example points to the businesses supporting the wider market. The same report described an ambition to support 10 to 20 companies over five years.
It also described an adjustment in fundraising: De La Rosa moved away from traditional capital sources toward private financiers who shared the impact-investing aim. The lesson is about fit. A founder can spend a great deal of time improving a pitch for people whose priorities remain elsewhere. Finding an aligned audience changes the conversation before the presentation even begins.
The business behind the principle
Frederika McClary Easley, identified by Global Citizen as the fund's director of strategic initiatives, brought a labor-rights perspective. Her argument concerned access to the informal settings where investment relationships form. De La Rosa linked ownership to jobs, household security and money circulating in communities. Together, those views make the firm's social objective more concrete: consider who owns the business and where its economic activity lands.
This remains an investment proposition. It needs companies that can operate, teams that can execute and capital providers willing to accept the underlying business risks. Advice cannot substitute indefinitely for cash; a sympathetic investor cannot substitute for customers. The approach depends on finding overlooked capability and supporting it well enough to build a viable company. That is the commercial test inside the mission.
Subsequent public appearances kept that mission visible. De La Rosa was included in mg Magazine's 2022 leaders-to-watch list and appeared on Thinking Outside The Bud in April 2024, identified as The People's Group's founder and fund manager. For a reader, the durable idea lies back in that early investor meeting. Knowledge can be shared. A founder's preparation can improve. An investment process can be designed to do both.