The advice cost thousands of dollars and arrived with the certainty consultants reserve for bad news: cannabis education should not exist. Nobody would take it seriously. Max Simon had asked whether a business could be built around teaching a complicated, stigmatized, fast-changing industry. The answer he bought was no. He kept the question and discarded the answer.
More than a decade later, that refusal has become a useful piece of founder folklore. Green Flower, the company Simon co-founded in 2014, says its programs now reach more than 48 university and college partners. Its catalog has narrowed from a sprawling library of cannabis videos into career-focused credentials for specific kinds of work. In 2026, the company added an employer network meant to introduce graduates to operators that need trained people.
The clean version of the story is that Simon saw a gap and filled it. The more instructive version is messier. He saw several gaps in sequence. First, credible information was hard to find. Then information alone became cheap. Next, learners needed proof they had learned something. Finally, that proof needed a route into an actual job. Green Flower kept changing its container while holding onto the same premise: knowledge becomes valuable when people can trust it and use it.
The first apprenticeship
Simon did not arrive in online education as a cannabis insider searching for software. His earlier career was an apprenticeship in turning expertise into products. Beginning in the early 2000s, he spent roughly eight years at the Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Accounts of that period credit him with running the products business, reworking the brand, helping launch 49 products, and building a digital marketing strategy at a moment when reaching an audience online still felt like a specialized craft.
He later founded Big Vision Business. Green Flower’s early company materials described it as a digital marketing firm that had helped more than 60,000 business owners launch products and services online. Those numbers belong to the company’s own pitch, but the pattern matters more than the tally. Simon’s working life kept returning to the same task: find a practitioner who knows something, shape that knowledge into a format, and make it legible to a larger audience.
Cannabis made that task unusually difficult. The subject carried decades of caricature. Rules differed by state. Vocabulary moved between agriculture, retail, manufacturing, policy, and culture. People who had spent years learning through practice did not necessarily speak like instructors. Newcomers could be enthusiastic and still have no reliable map.
The earliest Green Flower tried to make the map broad. A 2015 presentation described a media company for “responsible cannabis users,” mixing videos, reports, newsletters, reviews, and online courses. The language was audacious and unmistakably of its era. Build a large global audience first; develop products and revenue around it later. The company expected media to be the front door.
Simon was building from Ojai, a small California valley that sits at some distance from the usual startup theater. An interviewer visited his home there as Green Flower’s subscriber count began to climb. Simon recalled that people in his professional circles were confused by the move into cannabis. Later, some wanted to leave their own companies to join his. The reversal did not make the original decision less risky. It showed how quickly a category can change once customers, capital, and institutions begin treating it as a business rather than a provocation.
A library looks for an outcome
By 2019, Green Flower had become a streaming library with thousands of expert-led videos, an academy for industry training, programs for businesses, and early university relationships. That summer it closed a $20 million Series A led by Tuatara Capital, joined by Poseidon Asset Management and Phyto Partners. The plan called for more certificate programs, more original content, more partnerships, and a much larger team.
Money can accelerate a model. It can also expose every unresolved question inside it. What exactly was Green Flower selling: access, mastery, status, or employability? A viewer browsing an explanation and a worker preparing for a regulated role may watch similar material, but they are buying different progress. One wants an answer. The other wants a signal that travels.
“A consultant once told me cannabis education shouldn’t exist.”Max Simon, recalling an early warning he chose to ignore
The company’s evolution suggests an answer. Green Flower gradually placed more weight on structured programs, role-specific skills, assessment, and credentials. Its partnership model brought that curriculum into continuing education departments at established institutions. Simon’s contrarian subject acquired a familiar frame: a college catalog, a cohort, a certificate, a line on a résumé.
This was more than borrowed respectability. Universities offered distribution and a recognizable administrative home. Green Flower supplied subject-matter experts, curriculum, technology, and student support in a field where many schools lacked internal capacity. Each partner could enter a growing labor market without assembling the entire program from scratch. Green Flower could reach learners through institutions they already understood.
In a young industry, content explains the work. A credential makes the learning portable. An employer connection gives it a destination.
The product behind the product
The Ganjier program shows Simon’s instinct for professional symbols. Introduced as a cannabis counterpart to the sommelier, it borrowed from the traditions surrounding wine, beer, tobacco, and chocolate. Its developers studied how those fields trained people to assess quality and guide customers, then built their own vocabulary and evaluation method for cannabis. Simon earned the Certified Ganjier credential himself in 2022.
A new title can sound ornamental. In practice, a title becomes useful when it compresses hard-to-observe qualities into a shared signal. “Sommelier” tells a restaurant guest something about taste, training, and service before a bottle opens. Ganjier is an attempt to give cannabis a similarly legible professional. Green Flower’s other credentials do comparable work for cultivation, retail, product development, compliance, and sales.
The connective tissue is standards. A fragmented industry does not merely lack information. It lacks agreement about what a competent person should know. Without that agreement, employers invent training repeatedly, workers struggle to show what they can do, and customers encounter uneven service. Curriculum is the quiet machinery that turns scattered expertise into a common language.
Builds products and digital marketing at the Chopra Center.
Co-founds Green Flower as an education and media company.
Raises a $20 million Series A and expands certificate ambitions.
Receives the Certified Ganjier credential.
Rolls out redesigned career programs across 45-plus schools, then adds an employer network.
The last mile is a job
In late 2025, Simon announced a redesigned group of career programs across more than 45 colleges and universities. The programs were organized around jobs rather than broad categories of curiosity. Green Flower says more than 50 industry experts helped shape them. The change reflects a market that has aged. Early learners needed orientation. Today’s learners are more likely to ask what role the training prepares them to perform.
The next move arrived in 2026: a national employer network for Green Flower and Ganjier graduates. Its charter companies include operators such as Curaleaf, Kiva, Stiiizy, 710 Labs, and Canopy USA. The network gives employers access to people who completed Green Flower programs and gives graduates a clearer place to carry their certificates.
That closes a loop many education companies leave open. A course vendor can declare victory at completion. A workforce company has to care about what completion makes possible. Simon’s language around the network is pointed: plenty of people want into cannabis, but employers need to identify the ones who have invested in learning it. The certificate is evidence of that investment. The network is the introduction.
None of this guarantees a job, nor does a curriculum settle every dispute about standards in an industry shaped by different local rules and business models. It does something more modest and practical. It reduces ambiguity. A candidate can point to structured work completed. An employer can begin from a known baseline. A college can offer a program without pretending it invented the field.
Persistence without rigidity
Simon’s story is tempting to flatten into vindication: the consultant was wrong, the founder was right, and 48-plus institutions prove it. Real businesses rarely move in such a straight line. Green Flower’s original audience-first media ambition is not the same model as a workforce platform connected to colleges and employers. The company had to learn where its knowledge created the most durable value.
That is the more useful founder lesson. Conviction does not require loyalty to the first format. Simon kept the underlying belief that cannabis needed credible education while allowing the product to migrate from articles and streaming videos to certificates, institutional partnerships, and hiring infrastructure. The purpose stayed steady. The mechanism matured.
His public remarks carry a direct, occasionally playful tone. He jokes about ignoring expensive advice. He once answered a favorite-food question by saying Indian food, from almost anywhere. But his stated ambition is earnest: to make a positive impact and be remembered as someone who made a difference. Green Flower gives that aspiration an operational form. Build the class. Define the skill. Issue the credential. Help the graduate find the next door.
The contrarian part of the wager is mostly over. Cannabis education plainly exists. The harder question is whether it can become trusted infrastructure for the people who work in the industry. Simon is no longer arguing that the course belongs in the catalog. He is trying to prove where it can take the student after that.