Chad Powell

The man who delivers - twice over

In San Francisco in January 2013, a same-day flower delivery startup shipped its first bouquet. The company was called BloomThat. Chad Powell co-founded it, graduated with it from Y Combinator that summer, and helped build it into a business that FTD Companies - one of the oldest floral brands in America - acquired in 2018. That's the backstory. What Powell has been doing since is where the real story starts.

FLOWER CO. is the Costco of cannabis. Members pay $120 a year and get 40 to 50 percent off the prices you'd see at any California dispensary, with next-day delivery from a curated selection of state-licensed, lab-tested California cannabis brands. Powell joined as Head of Growth when the company entered Y Combinator in Winter 2019 - his second time inside that accelerator - and has since risen through VP of Product Development to CEO. Under his leadership, the company has grown to $53.4 million in annual revenue.

There's a through-line in Powell's career that's easy to miss if you only read the categories. Flowers. Water-saving showers. Electric skateboards. Cannabis delivery. These look like a scattered resume of someone chasing the next shiny thing. They aren't. Each one is a physical product that moves through a supply chain, requires cold customer acquisition, and competes against established incumbents who are slow to innovate. Powell's expertise is in building the growth engine for exactly this kind of company.

Between BloomThat and FLOWER CO., he ran product and growth at Nebia - the startup that made a water-efficient shower head beloved by Silicon Valley environmentalists and eventually acquired by Moen - and at Boosted, the electric skateboard company that became a cult brand in San Francisco before going through financial difficulties. At Nebia alone, Powell's work contributed to 100,000 homes adopting the product and more than 500 million gallons of water saved. These aren't marketing numbers; they're operational outcomes.

What makes FLOWER CO. unusual in the California cannabis market isn't the delivery - several operators deliver. It's the membership model and where the products come from. FLOWER CO. sources directly from California cannabis farms, including growers with deep roots in Humboldt County, and updates its product selection daily based on freshness. The pitch to customers: lab-tested products, transparent sourcing, and prices that reflect a direct supply chain rather than the markups layered into dispensary retail.

The company serves Los Angeles (from Calabasas to Long Beach), the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, Vallejo, and Humboldt County, with expansion into Orange County and San Diego on the roadmap. At the time of its Series A in December 2021, FLOWER CO. had raised $16 million - with participation from Centre Street Partners, Artemis Growth Partners, Bias Capital, Boost VC, and Service Provider Capital - giving it a trajectory to build out the logistics infrastructure the model demands.

Powell's role at FLOWER CO. sits at the intersection of product, growth, and operations - the same mix he's worked in at every company he's joined or founded. His University of Colorado Boulder economics degree and Y Combinator training show up in how FLOWER CO. talks about its model: cost-per-member, member lifetime value, supply chain compression. The language of tech economics applied to a business that requires trucks, refrigeration, and compliance with California's evolving cannabis regulations.

Before Powell's startup career began, he had an operations role at Medivance, a medical device company. It was an early lesson in physical products and regulated industries - a combination that would follow him throughout his career. Cannabis, like medical devices, is an industry where the product matters but the paperwork can define the business.

BloomThat launched in January 2013 and graduated Y Combinator Summer 2013 alongside Powell's co-founders David Bladow and Matthew Schwab. The company built a same-day flower delivery service in San Francisco before expanding to other cities. By 2015, Powell had moved on. Three years later, FTD - whose own business was being squeezed by on-demand competitors - acquired BloomThat to bolster its tech capabilities. The acquisition was the kind of outcome that doesn't make a founder famous but proves the model worked.

His stints at Nebia and Boosted kept Powell inside the Bay Area's early-stage hardware ecosystem through the mid-to-late 2010s. By 2019, cannabis delivery had emerged as a category where everything he'd built expertise in - logistics, consumer hardware, regulated industries, membership economics - converged. FLOWER CO. was the intersection.

California cannabis retail is a difficult business. High taxes, complex licensing requirements, persistent black-market competition, and a consumer base that has many choices. FLOWER CO.'s bet is that the membership model changes the economics for both sides. Members who pay $120 annually and receive significant discounts have a strong incentive to consolidate their purchases through the platform. FLOWER CO., in turn, can forecast demand, build supply chain relationships accordingly, and run a delivery operation with more predictability than a walk-in dispensary.

The description "Costco of Cannabis" was coined during FLOWER CO.'s Y Combinator Demo Day appearance and has stuck - partly because it's accurate, and partly because it's rare for a cannabis company to have a membership model that's actually the mechanism of the business rather than a loyalty program tacked onto existing retail. The members-only structure defines the supply chain, defines the pricing, and defines the logistics model.