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Charlotte Figi suffered her first seizure when she was three months old and on Wednesday, her mother Paige Figi’s Facebook page updated a previous post to announce Charlotte “is seizure free forever.” The 13-year-old was hospitalized earlier this month with pneumonia, which caused her seizures to return and resulted in respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. She died peacefully in her mother’s arms on April 8, 2020.

Rick Batenburg III=RB: I am from Loveland, Colorado. The short answer on B-school is, yes, I graduated second in my class at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts. However, my business education began decades earlier while going to the office with my father and learning negotiation and investment prowess through osmosis. I have two mentors: First and foremost, my father, Rich Batenburg Jr., and professionally I am mentored by Jim Jungjohann, a hedge fund manager.

This year was not especially auspicious to CEOs. As of October 2019, a record number of 172 CEOs from companies that included Nike, WeWork and Under Armor, left their posts. The legal cannabis industry was not immune from this CEO-apocalypse. Last summer, Canada’s Canopy Growth, the largest cannabis company in the world, ousted co-CEO Bruce Linton.

Rich Batenburg Jr.: My cannabis-focused investment company operates in several states, many of which we entered at original deployment of a legal marijuana program. While we hear about officials from new jurisdictions coming to Colorado to do research, as well as hiring regulatory consultants from Colorado, it seems like they listen and then try to reinvent the wheel.

SNNLive spoke with Rick Batenburg III, Chief Investment Officer of Clear Cannabis, Inc., a private company, at the Planet MicroCap Showcase 2019 in Las Vegas, NV.

Clear Cannabis Inc CIO Rick Batenburg III chats with Proactive Investors' Steve Darling during the 9th Annual LD Micro Invitational Investor Conference in Los Angeles, CA. The Denver based company has the goal of providing consistent standards across the cannabis product industry.

The only firm licensed to invest in Colorado cannabis companies is a father-son team with roots in finance, yes, but also comedy and cable television. Cliintel Capital Management Group is the one investment fund that’s been blessed by the state with the “Qualified Institutional Investor” designation, a classification and term created by state Senate Bill 16-040 that became law in 2017. It allows “qualified institutional investors” to own as much as 30 percent of a retail or medical cannabis business.