cannabis
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Curaleaf’s real product is access
A cannabis company can grow the plant almost anywhere. Curaleaf’s expensive education has been learning where, and how, it can sell it.
The cannabis company that gave a license back
Green Thumb Industries built a national cannabis business by making a local promise repeatable. Its most revealing early decision was to turn down the chance to grow.
Ben Kovler and the value of an unfinished puzzle
A riddle book, a bourbon family history and a cannabis company: the Green Thumb founder has spent years working out when to make a move - and when to leave a piece on the table.
Sebastian Solano and the party that kept changing businesses
Before Jeeter, Sebastian Solano sold tickets to paint-soaked dance parties. His second act carried the same friends into cannabis, along with a lesson about knowing when to cross the next border.
Kit Gallant’s Five-Year Trip to the Checkout Counter
He left a New York law firm to build Fernway in Massachusetts. Buying his own product back in New York would take more than five years, three partners and a rather different education in patience.
Connected Cannabis Co. bets on the flower
Biscotti made its name. Repeating that quality in another state is the harder trick. Inside the Sacramento cannabis company turning a grower’s judgment into a national business.
Berner put a neighborhood on a hoodie. Then he took it abroad.
Gilbert Anthony Milam Jr. built Cookies by keeping music, clothing and cannabis in the same conversation. The next question is how much of himself he can leave in a business built to outlast him.
Lukasz Tracz and the party that kept going
He learned marketing by putting the audience inside the show. From Life in Color’s paint parties to Jeeter’s jars and comedy shorts, Lukasz Tracz has kept his oldest collaborators close.
Sublime turned a sticky problem into Fuzzies
An Oakland cannabis maker found a product hiding inside a packaging nuisance. Its next chapter shows why a popular brand and the factory behind it can end up on different paths.
Canopy Growth Spent Billions Chasing Cannabis Everywhere. Now It Has to Win Somewhere.
The Canadian pioneer turned a C$5 billion war chest into a sprawling global experiment. After closures, write-downs and a strategic retreat, its comeback now rests on a less glamorous idea: grow better flower, sell it through channels it controls and stop confusing reach with a business.
From the Grocery Aisle to the Cap Table
Justin Dye grew Albertsons by tens of billions. Now his Boca Raton firm buys seafood distributors, RV power tech and cannabis lenders - and runs each one like an operator, not a spreadsheet.
The Cannabis Company Built Like a Grocery Aisle - and a Power Plant
Verano controls the journey from indoor grow room to dispensary counter. That makes it part farm, part factory, part retailer - and a revealing test of whether a national cannabis brand can be built one state at a time.
Jeeter - a DreamFields Brand
Jeeter turned a college-era nickname for a joint into a nine-figure cannabis business. Its real product is not only the pre-roll - it is the ritual, packaging and release-day theater built around it.
Garden Society
Garden Society is a Cloverdale, California craft cannabis company founded in 2016 by Erin Gore and Karli Warner, built to redefine cannabis for women. A certified Benefit Corporation, it makes wine-country-inspired edibles - artisanal chocolates, gelees and gummies - alongside sun-grown pre-roll Rosettes, and sells across California and select multi-state markets. The company raised a $7 million Series A in January 2022 to scale manufacturing and expand nationally.
LeafLink
LeafLink is a B2B wholesale platform for the legal cannabis industry - often called 'the Salesforce of bud.' It connects thousands of cannabis brands, distributors and retailers through a single marketplace that handles ordering, payments, banking, logistics and market data. Founded in 2016, LeafLink processes roughly $5 billion in annual gross merchandise value (about $9 billion including its acquired Leaf Trade platform), representing a large share of U.S. wholesale cannabis commerce across roughly 30 markets.
NorCal Cannabis Company
NorCal Cannabis Company is a vertically integrated, seed-to-sale cannabis operator based in Northern California. Founded in 2014, it grew out of the region's long, pre-legalization cannabis culture into a licensed holding company spanning cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, a portfolio of consumer brands, and retail dispensaries. The company scaled revenue from roughly $2M to over $70M in a few years and raised more than $50M in capital, positioning itself as one of California's more compliant, operationally mature cannabis businesses.
ANJA
ANJA (ANJA Life LLC) is a minority-owned, state-licensed adult-use cannabis dispensary in Highland Park, New Jersey. Founded by a team of New York- and New Jersey-based entrepreneurs, it opened in January 2024 as the first recreational cannabis dispensary in Highland Park. ANJA pairs a curated retail and delivery experience with an education-first mission - normalizing cannabis through reliable information, community events like ANJA Fest, and partnerships with local New Jersey cultivators. The name is a play on the cannabis synonym 'ganja' and a Sanskrit term meaning 'to manifest.'
Julio Casado
Julio Casado is the CEO of ANJA Life, the first adult-use cannabis dispensary in Highland Park, New Jersey, and the founder and managing partner of Full Funnel Growth, a NYC-based growth marketing agency. A Cornell-educated, Bronx-raised operator with a decade-plus background spanning Deloitte, AXA, Success Academy and Bridge Philanthropic Consulting, he now sits at the unlikely intersection of management consulting, e-commerce growth funnels, and a Sanskrit-rooted cannabis brand named for the act of manifesting.
LEVEL
LEVEL is a science-driven cannabis company that engineers precision cannabinoid tablets - Protab, Hashtab, Rosintab and Tablingual - designed to deliver effects-specific experiences without sugar, calories or guesswork. Founded in 2015 by organic chemist Chris Emerson, PhD, LEVEL manufactures in California and has become the state's leading cannabis tablet brand.
Treez Inc.
Treez is an enterprise cloud commerce platform built for the cannabis retail industry, bundling point of sale (SellTreez), cashless payments (TreezPay), inventory and compliance, retail analytics, ecommerce, and loyalty into a single system. Founded in 2016, the company powers over 600 dispensary locations, processes more than $5 billion in annualized transactions, and is used by an estimated 15% of the U.S. retail cannabis market.
PINATA
PINATA (Go Pinata Inc.) is a New York-based enterprise SaaS company building the operating system for front-line brand execution. Its platform unifies budgeting, scheduling, task execution, reporting, and payments so brands, distributors, agencies, and field teams can plan, run, and measure real-world activations in stores, warehouses, trade shows, and the field. Originally focused on experiential marketing, PINATA now serves the beverage-alcohol, CPG, and cannabis industries, replacing clipboards and spreadsheets with data-driven TaskFlows used across thousands of organizations.
The Arcview Group
The Arcview Group is a vertically integrated cannabis and hemp company founded in 2010 by activists-turned-entrepreneurs Troy Dayton and Steve DeAngelo. Built around the Arcview Investor Network - one of the first and largest groups of accredited investors backing legal cannabis - it pairs capital and brokerage with the industry's most-cited market research, business consulting, events, and social-equity initiatives. Headquartered in San Francisco, Arcview has helped channel hundreds of millions of dollars into more than 200 cannabis companies and turned a once-illicit market into investable territory.
Cookies
Cookies is a global cannabis and lifestyle brand co-founded in 2010 by Bay Area rapper-entrepreneur Berner and cultivator Jai. Built on proprietary genetics like the iconic Girl Scout Cookies strain, it has grown into a network of 70+ dispensaries across more than 20 markets in 6 countries, plus a streetwear arm (Cookies SF) that helped legitimize the brand long before federal legalization caught up.
FLOWER CO.
FLOWER CO. is a California members-only cannabis delivery club that sells lab-tested weed, prerolls, edibles, and concentrates at wholesale prices, shipped next-day from Humboldt to San Diego.
NUG
NUG is a vertically integrated California cannabis company founded in 2014 that operates the state's highest-volume extraction facility, multiple retail dispensaries, and one of California's largest wholesale distribution networks. Known for their premium flower, vapes, and edibles, NUG has pioneered Oakland's first equity-owned consumption lounge and is deeply committed to social equity programs that support entrepreneurs affected by prior cannabis criminalization.
Chad Powell
Chad Powell is the CEO of FLOWER CO. (Flower Company Cannabis), a members-only cannabis delivery service operating in California. He co-founded BloomThat, a Y Combinator-backed same-day flower delivery startup that was acquired by FTD Companies in 2018. After honing his product and growth chops at startups like Nebia and Boosted, Powell joined FLOWER CO. as Head of Growth, rose to VP of Product Development, and eventually became CEO. Under his leadership, FLOWER CO. has scaled to $53.4M in annual revenue with a lean team, offering 40-50% discounts vs. traditional dispensaries through a Costco-style membership model sourcing directly from California cannabis farms.
Nico Enea
Nico S. Enea is a co-founder, board member, and distribution lead at NUG, Inc., a state-licensed, vertically-integrated California cannabis company he helped build from the ground up starting in 2014. Operating out of Alameda and Oakland, NUG has grown into one of California's most recognized cannabis brands, represented in over 80% of the state's dispensaries, with $28M+ in annual revenue, 150 employees, and a $15M Series A round under its belt. Enea also serves as Founder and CFO of Bloom Innovations Holdings LLC, a cannabis holding company managing diverse assets including property, IP, patents, and securities.
John Yang
John Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Treez Inc., the enterprise cannabis retail commerce platform he built from a single dispensary's pain point into a company processing over $4 billion in annual transactions across 600+ retail locations. A Shanghai-born, Reno-raised technologist who grew up troubleshooting computers in his father's shop, Yang applied a decade of Fortune 500 consulting experience to one of America's most underserved retail sectors, raising $76.7M in funding and turning Treez into the backbone of cannabis retail operations in over a dozen states.
Chris Emerson
Chris Emerson, PhD, is the Founder, Chief Scientist, and CEO of LEVEL, California's #1 cannabis tablet brand. A US Navy veteran and Chinese interpreter turned small-molecule chemist, he abandoned a Stanford postdoc in 2012 to spend four months living in a tent on a Mendocino cannabis farm - and emerged with a founding thesis that would reshape how the industry thinks about getting high. Instead of chasing THC percentages, he built LEVEL around effects-driven cannabinoid formulations using precise ratios of acidic, neutral, and degradative compounds the plant alone can't deliver. Two US patents, multiple peer-reviewed publications, and an IRB-approved clinical trial later, LEVEL is the top-selling cannabis tablet brand in California, now operating in seven states.
Carol Bartz
Carol Bartz is a trailblazing Silicon Valley executive who became the first woman to run a major technology company when she took the helm of Autodesk in 1992, growing revenue from $285M to $1.5B over 14 years. She later served as CEO of Yahoo from 2009 to 2011, famously emailing all 14,000 employees the night she was fired by phone, telling them she'd been let go. Known for her blunt candor, 'Fail Fast Forward' philosophy, and resilience - she delayed breast cancer surgery by a month to keep a professional commitment - Bartz transformed from a dairy farm girl in Wisconsin to one of the most powerful women in American business.