Brendan Kennedy: the data geek taking cannibis mainstream

Brendan Kennedy was an early mover in the market as the world started to legalise cannabis. It seemed like a crazy and risky decision a decade ago. Now, he’s sitting on a fortune.

Brendan Kennedy was an early mover in the market as the world started to legalise cannabis. It seemed like a crazy and risky decision a decade ago. Now, he's sitting on a fortune. Jane Lewis reports.

When Brendan Kennedy gave up his job in finance to gamble on the commercial potential of legal cannabis, everyone thought he was crazy. Nine years on, he has become "a poster child of the green rush", says The Times. He presides over Tilray, a self-described "global leader in cannabis research, cultivation, processing and distribution", which has ridden "an extraordinary global surge towards legalisation".

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.