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Karson Humiston’s future as a serial entrepreneur traces back to her elementary school days growing up in East Aurora, New York, a small town outside Buffalo. That’s where she started her very first venture on the local golf course when she struck up a deal with the club’s pro to allow her to retrieve lost golf balls and resell them for ten cents each on the fourth hole every Monday.
“I would go out at night pick up the golf balls, clean the golf balls set up my stand at like seven in the morning and sell the golf balls and also sell drinks and different snacks,” says Humiston, who was in fourth or fifth grade at the time.
The golf ball business took off so quickly, she went back to the pro a few weeks later to ask if she could hire her neighbor Savannah to run a second location to peddle the recycled golf balls and refreshments.
“We convinced him to be able to do Mondays and Thursdays…and people loved it,” recalls the Denver-based CEO, who today helms Vangst, the fast growing legal cannabis staffing and recruitment platform she founded two years ago while still in college.
Vangst announced today that it has secured its first round of outside funding, a $2.5 million dollar seed investment led by venture capital firm Lerer Hippeau. Casa Verde Capital, the venture fund focused on ancillary businesses in legal cannabis co-founded by entertainment icon Snoop Dogg, also invested in the round. The raise is notable both because Humiston is leading a business related to cannabis, which remains federally illegal, and because she is female founder. In 2017, only 2.2% of women-led companies in the U.S. successfully raised venture capital investment.
Humiston says the funding will allow Vangst to build out new technology that will more aggressively surface the right candidates for jobs and streamline the recruiting process for companies. Although marijuana is federally illegal, more states than ever are considering local measures to commercialize it and the demand for workers is growing. Humiston says there are 165,000 people employed in cannabis in the U.S. and predicts the number could swell to 250,000 by 2020, surpassing jobs in manufacturing.
“There are going to be more jobs created from cannabis in the next few years than any other high growth emerging industry,” explains Karan Wadhera, managing partner of Casa Verde, “This is the first time we saw someone build a business really quickly and had a really strong strategy of how [she] wanted to be dominant in the space.”
The golf ball stand was the first of many enterprises the 25-year-old built throughout her childhood and college years and it was that drive and history that deeply impressed the partners of Casa Verde.
“It was really clear incredibly early on that Karson was a really special entrepreneur,” says Wadhera, recalling that after the first coffee meeting in early January, he was convinced the company would fit well in Casa Verde’s portfolio of "canna-tech" companies that range from Eaze, the app-powered delivery service known as the "Uber of weed" to LeafLink, the software platform connecting cannabis brands with distributors and retailers. In addition to Vangst’s demonstrable growth, Wadhera was moved by the profitable company Humiston started while she was a student at St. Lawrence University called On Track Adventures, a travel agency that planned and sold trips to college students around the country. The experience and the money she earned from that venture she later leveraged to start the first iteration of Vangst after attending a cannabis industry trade show and discovering the demand for skilled workers in the rapidly growing sector. She first called it “Gradujuana,” a marketplace matching recent grads with jobs in the cannabis industry.
Right after her own commencement, she hit the road for Colorado, at the time, the Mecca of legal marijuana startups, and spent three months pounding the pavement trying to get the business off the ground and pay her rent.
“For all of May, and all of June, until July 12th I couldn't get anybody to sign up, which was horrifying. I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ And of course, everyone is saying, ‘Okay you tried it. Just pack up and get out of Denver,” she said. But on July 12th, 2015 she finally got a call back from a business looking to hire an accountant. She jumped on the opportunity, successfully placed a CPA, and was introduced to her second client, Canna Advisors. The rest, she says, is history.
Eventually, Humiston decided the name "Gradujuana" didn’t quite reflect the professionalism of the candidates she was trying to recruit and she later rebranded the company as Vangst, which means “catch” in Dutch. To date, Vangst has connected 500 companies with more than 5,000 employees and runs The Cannabis Career Summit, the largest cannabis career fair in the world.
Humiston, who is fiercely competitive and led her rowing team to victory as coxswain as a high schooler, says she kept the business lean, reinvesting revenue and waiting as long as she could to raise venture capital. She didn’t begin to take a salary until last fall and did not take the decision to raise outside capital lightly.
“When you raise money, you’re asking someone else to believe in what you are doing and they are taking an enormous risk. ...in our case, a $2.5 million risk. And you are going to need to go to bed at night knowing that I’m going to give my investors a huge return on what they gave us and you need to be really confident,” says Humiston, “I think entrepreneurs should say, “What do I need this money to do? How am I going to do it? And how are my investors going to see a return?' If you don’t have that clear path, take a step back and try to figure that out rather than just diving right into it."
