Buzzkill: The Weedsmith with Emily Paxhia

This week on The Weedsmith, Emily Paxhia talks about an epic buzzkill—not just any old fail, but one that had her questioning her sense of direction. The managing director of Poseidon broke down how this devastating failure ended in a failure: She has now decided to never step down and always stand up for what’s right.

Transcription:

Ricardo Baca:

‍You're listening to The Weedsmith, a show about modern cannabis leadership. And today I am psyched to be sitting across from my friend, Emily Paxhia.

It's that time in the program we call Buzzkill. And what we discuss on Buzzkill isn't just any old fail. This is the kind of fail that has you rethinking direction, questioning your own instinct. The kind of fail that inspires a crisis of confidence. But it's also the kind of fail that forces you to reassess and learn, and you come out the other side of it stronger and smarter and more ready to run this business than you've ever been.

So, Emily, let's hear about your Buzzkill.

Emily Paxhia:‍

There is a very specific situation that occurred that I feel forever changed me in terms of how I manage working with companies in our portfolio and the failure actually ended in a failure. The company no longer exists.

So the thing that I learned in the moment that is so ingrained in my memory,  I feel like it's ingrained in my physical memory  because I remember where I was when it happened, how I felt when it happened.

And I was at a board meeting, and this company was having a problem. It was having a leadership change. I wanted to exercise some oversight on the new CEO because I did not feel as though this person was being transparent and honest with the board of directors. And so I had been asking for more financial oversight. There was a moment when I asked for that and he did the finger wag, "Listen up, you little girl." 

Very, very inappropriate. And he told me I was overstepping and micromanaging  and I was overstepping my role as a board member. I stood there and I looked around the room and I did not necessarily feel that I had the explicit support of other people in the space and I backed down.

And to this day, I still think I should have insisted that this other person step off the board and gone hard on the fight for that,  and I should have insisted that we had the ability to dig in and do a financial review and dig in on what they had been doing during that time. I will never be told that again. I will always stand up if I know that something is wrong. I will always speak up,  even if it is not the popular thing, even if I'm getting treated like I don't have a place at the table or if I don't have a right to that, because I just feel like that could have changed things.

But it was definitely a moment that crystallized in time. I remember everything about it very viscerally.  And it's, to me, one of the pivotal points that I could have changed, so I won't do that ever again.