Remember when weed was fun? Cresco Labs is buying New York-based Columbia Care for $2 billion to create the country’s biggest legal weed company with $1.2 billion in combined revenue.
Just a reminder that Cresco says its mission is to “professionalize” cannabis. And boy, does the Board of Directors look professional.
Nielsen, on the other hand, rejected a $9 billion buyout offer from private equity, saying it “significantly” undervalued them. BOLD when your famous product is a set-top box that tracks how much basic cable people are watching. Good news for employees, though, who won’t have to deal with the uncertainty and cutbacks that often come with new ownership.
They should have known it takes $10.7 billion to make a deal these days. That’s how much Chicago-based private equity firm Thoma Bravo is paying to acquire Anaplan and wow those nouns just mean nothing at all to us. Apparently Anaplan, which is based in San Francisco, sells business intelligence and planning software to other software providers dear god sure fine whatever.
Zebra is only dropping $875 million on its acquisition, but will only own a part of Matrox, a Montreal-based company that helps track and automate manufacturing. Zebra mostly specializes in barcodes and scanners (get it? black and white stripes?) to track inventory. It plans to use Matrox’s technology to expand that out to factory floors.
Plenty of companies got their dollars through good old-fashioned fundraising over the last two weeks. FLASH raised $250 million at a billion-dollar valuation, and would like you to know FOR SURE that it’s not just a scan-and-pay QR code system for parking garages, but a “connective layer that transforms parking assets into multi-purpose mobility hubs.”
Honestly we’ve missed this. A few companies get slapped back down and all the sudden no one wants to say crazy shit about their startup anymore. Thank you, FLASH, for bringing 2017 back, down to the obnoxiously capitalized name and the belief that parking is a growth industry. The company is based in Austin, with 90 people in its Chicago office and plans to hire another 200 this year.
dscout is taking us in the opposite fanciful capitalization direction, where it just raised $70 million to expand its customer research platform, which aims to let businesses test ideas on a cheaper version of focus groups. It will use some of the money to launch a hiring initiative.
TimeDoc keeps the cap theme running, closing a $48.5 million funding round to expand its platform for virtually monitoring chronically ill patients. It was founded before the pandemic, thankyouverymuch, so it isn’t just another one of these “Johnny-come-lately” telehealth startups. It will use the money to hire up to 150 new care coordinators to handle the patient monitoring.
New Era ADR raised $4.6 million on the bet that everyone really does hate lawyers, planning to grow its software that allows two parties in a dispute to request virtual mediation or arbitration. Still better than litigation!
Halo Investing hasn’t raised any money, but it is planning to raise headcount, moving to a new office ahead of hiring an anticipated 100 more people.
And just a little reminder before your weekend shopping: Jewel-Osco still hasn’t given workers the raise it promised its union back in December, due to unidentified “payroll errors.” OK! So they’ll definitely understand if we all have scanning errors, right?
Jobs, Glorious Jobs
Director of Digital Media at the Chicago Bears
Oversee the website and app, and develop new digital offerings and features. Plan and budget for the digital media department, and manage your team. Develop a content strategy that includes things like a “recurring series likely to be consumed by global Bears fans.” And if it all sounds too good to be true … it’s because it’s on-site in Lake Forest.
Communications Director at the National Marine Manufacturers Association
Run PR, media relations, social media and executive comms for the recreational boating trade and consumer advocacy organization. Gain support and engagement for association programming and DiscoverBoating.com, where the motto is, “Life is better with a boat.” (The Chicago office makes sense now.)
Inspiration of the week
“The most powerful tool of the truly ambitious is that they harbor no qualms about voicing or pursuing what they want.”
—Ghostwriter to the mysterious “rich and famous” Caroline Cala Donofrio on what she’s learned from all of the stories she’s been tasked with translating. A lot of it is not aspirational! Some of these people are monsters! Still, they earned the opportunity to be monsters by following a simple rule: “When opportunity presents itself, they never ask, ‘Why me?’”
If they don’t let themselves fail by not trying in the first place, we don’t have to either. So stop telling yourself whatever it is is “not worth the effort,” and instead consider for a second what you would do if you thought your success was inevitable.
Forward this email to anyone who’s still asking why. They can sign up here to get twice-monthly reminders to go for what they want.
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