Visibility Is the New Currency: Jessica Ferranti on Why Women Need More Than a Seat at the Table

The Currency Nobody Talks About

Cannabis has never lacked good ideas. It has lacked capital. That has been the industry’s defining conversation for years as founders navigate high interest rates, limited institutional investment and an increasingly competitive market. Jessica Ferranti believes that conversation, while important, often begins one step too late.

“Visibility is the new currency,” she said.

For Ferranti, capital is rarely the only obstacle standing between entrepreneurs and growth. Long before investors review financial statements or customers purchase products, founders have to overcome a more fundamental challenge: becoming visible enough to earn credibility. Without that credibility, the meetings never happen. Without the meetings, there are no partnerships, no investors and no momentum.

It is a perspective shaped by experience rather than theory. Ferranti has spent more than a decade working across nearly every corner of the cannabis industry, from startups and media to manufacturing, technology and executive leadership. Today she serves as founder and CEO of The Mycelia Group, a strategic advisory firm that helps cannabis businesses scale through consulting, fractional leadership, licensing transactions, executive networking and operational strategy. The firm’s name itself reflects her philosophy. Just as underground mycelium networks quietly sustain entire forests by connecting individual organisms, she believes successful businesses grow through relationships that often remain invisible from the outside.

That same philosophy inspired IgniteHer, an initiative launched alongside The Mycelia Group at the IgniteIt Cannabis Capital Conference, to address what many women see as a recurring problem throughout the cannabis industry. They were attending conferences, building companies and creating innovative products, yet many still struggled to access the rooms where investment decisions, partnerships and major business conversations actually took place.

“I saw a lot of different women-only events,” Ferranti recalled. “There was just a major gap.”

Why Access Isn’t the Same as Opportunity

For Ferranti, simply giving someone a conference badge does not create opportunity.

Instead of treating scholarships as complimentary tickets, IgniteHer was built around a simple question: once attendees walk through the door, what tools do they actually need to compete?

The answer went far beyond networking.

Participants received concierge support capable of facilitating introductions to executives throughout the conference. They gained unrestricted access to the event’s messaging platform so meetings could be arranged directly with operators, investors, and business leaders. Rather than leaving women to navigate one of the industry’s largest conferences on their own, IgniteHer attempted to reduce the invisible barriers that often prevent meaningful conversations from ever happening.

The initiative also focused heavily on preparation. During the application process, Ferranti noticed a pattern among founders seeking scholarships. Many had promising companies but pitch decks that were not telling their stories effectively.

That is why, instead of offering another inspirational keynote, IgniteHer invited experienced capital allocators, including Anthony Coniglio of NewLake Capital Partners and Jeanne Sullivan of Arcview Ventures, to conduct intimate workshops where founders could receive direct feedback on their investor materials.

“The entire goal was to teach these women exactly what investors are looking for in a pitch deck,” Ferranti said. Rather than simply hearing another panel discussion, participants left with practical revisions they could implement immediately after returning home.

The program extended beyond fundraising. Women could also participate in one-on-one coaching sessions covering executive presence, media interviews, personal branding, public speaking, and the increasingly important art of delivering a compelling thirty-second elevator pitch.

Visibility, Ferranti believes, is a professional skill that can be learned.

The Visibility Advantage

Ferranti’s argument about visibility has less to do with social media than with human psychology.

Before founding The Mycelia Group, she spent years leading media organizations and marketing initiatives. During that time, she noticed a consistent pattern regardless of whether the client was a cannabis startup or a multinational corporation.

Consumers rarely trust brands they have seen only once.

Repeated exposure creates familiarity.

Familiarity creates credibility.

Eventually, credibility creates business.

“You can have a wonderful product,” Ferranti said, “but if not many people know about that product, your business or your idea doesn’t see a lot of movement forward.”

The same principle applies to entrepreneurs themselves.

Conference appearances, interviews, LinkedIn content, thought leadership and public speaking are often dismissed as personal branding exercises. Ferranti sees them differently. Every public appearance makes a founder more familiar to potential investors, customers and partners. Every interview lowers the barrier to the next conversation.

“It isn’t just what you’re saying,” she explained. “It’s the frequency.” Repeated exposure builds trust long before someone decides whether to invest, collaborate, or buy.

Power Doesn’t Always Look Like Power

Statistics explain part of the story. Experience explains the rest.

Ferranti points to research showing that women-founded companies generated roughly seventy-eight cents in revenue for every dollar of capital raised during 2025, while male-founded companies generated approximately thirty-one cents. Women-led businesses also spent about fifteen percent less on overhead. Despite those results, companies founded by women received only about 2.3 percent of venture capital funding.

“There’s really not a whole lot of data that would support that kind of decision-making,” she said. “Unfortunately, it’s mostly inherent bias.”

Those biases, she argues, are often subtle rather than explicit.

Throughout her career, she has repeatedly entered executive meetings accompanied by male colleagues only to watch clients instinctively direct strategic questions toward the men standing beside her.

Her team would usually correct the misunderstanding themselves.

“They would turn to the client and say, ‘I’m not the boss. She is,'” Ferranti recalled.

These assumptions about authority quietly shaped the conversation before anyone spoke.

Power, Ferranti has learned, is often influenced by biases and perception before performance is ever evaluated.

When the Interview Became the Story

Ferranti took a moment to focus on the structural realities that shape women’s careers. She pointed to research showing that, regardless of whether women earn less than, the same as, or more than their partners, they still perform roughly 80% of the work at home.

“Even if they make more than their husbands,” she said, “women are still carrying about 80% of the workload at home.”

For Ferranti, that imbalance doesn’t disappear when women become founders or executives. It exists alongside board meetings, investor calls, conference travel and the day-to-day responsibilities of running a company.

She argues that these competing demands are often overlooked when discussing entrepreneurship, even though they shape who has time to build networks, pursue new opportunities and remain visible within the industry.

Then, in the middle of the interview, one of life’s non-negotiable moments quietly asserted itself.

A small voice from the other room reminded her that breakfast couldn’t wait.

Ferranti paused.

The invisible labor she was describing ceased to be an abstract statistic and began unfolding in real time as an executive discussing leadership, investment, and business strategy paused, however briefly, to care for her family.

The mic went on mute, and that brief pause said more than any statistic could.

It became the clearest illustration of everything we had been discussing.

Leadership Beyond Ego

Ferranti is careful not to argue that women are inherently better leaders than men. Individual personalities vary too much for conclusions that broad.

What she does believe is that many women bring a different approach to leadership, one grounded in emotional intelligence rather than status.

“I find there’s a lot less ego involved,” she said. “How can we meet in the middle? How can both parties gain something?”

That distinction matters in cannabis, where negotiations can easily become competitions instead of conversations.

“The one thing I see, unfortunately, in the cannabis industry specifically, is that there’s just a great deal of ego,” Ferranti said. When executives become more interested in proving they are the smartest person in the room than solving problems, she argues, everyone loses.

Healthy confidence remains essential. Unchecked ego, however, often prevents the very relationships businesses depend on to grow.

More Than a Women’s Event

Perhaps Ferranti’s most controversial position has nothing to do with gender itself.

It concerns where women build relationships.

She has attended plenty of conferences featuring wellness lounges, spa sessions, networking breakfasts and women-only spaces. She believes those events have value. At the same time, she questions whether they address the industry’s most pressing business problem.

If most investment capital is still controlled by men, removing women from mixed business environments may unintentionally reduce access to the people making investment decisions.

“Men primarily hold a great deal of the money that’s flowing in the industry,” she said. “If we take women out of those rooms where money is… we’re actually reducing their potential access to those crucial things like capital.”

That philosophy also shaped IgniteHer’s programming.

“I didn’t want to create a lounge that was for relaxation,” Ferranti said later in the interview. “These women need real tangible things they can walk away with that grow their business.”

Looking back on Chicago, she laughs at the idea that anyone attended hoping for downtime.

“I don’t know one woman that was at this conference that was just sitting back and relaxing. They were all there to hustle… to build and learn.”

That, perhaps more than anything else, captures the philosophy behind IgniteHer: It was designed to create outcomes.

One participant secured a meeting with the chief executive of one of the country’s largest multi-state operators within hours of arriving. Another built relationships with dispensary owners that eventually evolved into long-term retail partnerships across New Jersey. Those introductions continue producing business long after the conference ended.

As IgniteHer expands into new markets, Ferranti hopes to deepen those opportunities through larger investor networks, founder showcases and year-round programming. Yet her broader message extends well beyond cannabis or even gender.

Power rarely begins with money. More often, it begins with visibility.

The people who are repeatedly seen become familiar. Familiarity becomes credibility. Credibility opens doors. Behind those doors are investors, partnerships, customers, and opportunities that would otherwise remain out of reach.