Though in very different markets, Robyn Duda and Cassandra Farrington share a common legacy: building events that helped professionalize and energize industries from the ground up. Both came in as outsiders, and both proved that bold ideas, paired with community-first strategies, can spark movements.
Farrington co-founded MJBiz in 2011, starting as a cannabis newsletter before adding an event the following year. That show grew into the largest cannabis business gathering in the world, eventually filling the Las Vegas Convention Center and selling to Emerald in 2021 for $110 million.
When Duda launched RacquetX in 2024, it was billed as the first event uniting all racquet sports under one umbrella. The debut in Miami Beach drew 2,000 attendees. By its second year, the show more than doubled in size, and in 2026 it will move to Fort Lauderdale.
Both women built events that became synonymous with the industries they served, and they did it as outsiders.
From Scrappy to Corporate
Farrington has long credited MJBiz’s “scrappy startup mentality” for its success. Through the event, she helped the cannabis business evolve. “For us with MJBiz, we didn’t know anything about the cannabis industry when we started, but we knew how to teach people about business,” said Farrington.
MJBiz gave cannabis professionals a business-first environment, said Farrington. “We created an environment where all of those professionals could come together in a place that was very conducive for doing business,” she said.
But when Emerald, a company with 142 events, acquired it, she said, the dynamic inevitably shifted.
“When you sell your business, you’re selling your business, and what happens to it after that is completely out of your control,” she said. “By the time we sold it, the cannabis industry had become much more professional, much more sophisticated, in large part because of the influence that we provided.”
For Duda, the scrappiness never went away. She launched RacquetX after years of working inside UBM, where she said she often felt like the “SWAT team” brought in to fix underperforming shows. “I felt in my soul that I was not able to build what I wanted to truly build. So I mic dropped years ago, and found myself in this situation now,” she said.
Private Equity’s Push Into Events
Both entrepreneurs acknowledged the growing influence of private equity in the events space, and the risks of over-standardization.
“If you just templatize launching, especially in a new area, you lose the essence and the magic of what you’re truly trying to build,” Duda said. “We’re still serving industries and people and creating moments for them. And if that goes away, anybody can do what we do. But we’re creating human-to-human experiences.”
Blending B2B and B2C
RacquetX combined B2B and B2C from the start. “As we spoke to many of the brands, it was, ‘We want to be able to demo things and actually try stuff out,’” Duda said. “We built 12 courts by 12 different manufacturers. Everybody came together to play. That was the magic of the community.”
The path wasn’t without missteps.
“The biggest takeaway of my life was I should have hired slower and fired faster,” Duda said. Farrington agreed, noting that overstaffing before the pandemic created its own challenges.
Still, the rewards outweighed the risks. “The highs are so high and the lows are so low,” Duda said. “But when the doors opened and people walked in, that made it worth it.”
Long-Term Perspective
For Farrington, the long view mattered most. “The best way to maximize the value of a business is to run it as if you’re going to own it and love it forever,” she said. “If you do that, you are going to maximize the value of whatever exit comes about.”
Their experiences offer a blueprint for the next generation of event entrepreneurs. Both RacquetX and MJBiz prove that outsider perspectives paired with sharp business models and authentic community building can lead to successful events.
