David Metzler is a San Diego-based serial 🏷️#entrepreneur and investor who led 📝CBD Capital Group, a company that acquired and scaled mid-stage cannabinoid nutraceutical businesses, as its Chief Executive Officer. Across his career he has worked as an investment banker, a venture capitalist, and a founder, with a stated focus on building companies tied to charitable and health-driven missions.
Metzler began his career in the U.S. Navy, serving five years as a Rescue Swimmer and Air Traffic Controller and earning multiple medals for leadership and valor. He then studied at Columbia University, graduating in two years while working at the Earth Institute on improving drought crop yields to address hunger in Ghana. He worked as an investment banker at CIBC World Markets and as a 🏷️#venture-capitalist at Mission Ventures, where he evaluated thousands of business plans before becoming a founder. He started OneHealth, growing it to more than 60 employees and raising roughly $16MM to build a software platform aimed at improving patient health outcomes, and later raised $4MM to launch Wildfire Inc., a fitness platform built to fight childhood obesity through a give-back model across hundreds of studio locations.
David and I met on LinkedIn and became friends in San Diego. He is one of the most heart-driven serial entrepreneurs I know, and a genuinely good man — nine years my junior, with more lives saved than most people twice his age.