
Before California cannabis had a dependable rulebook, John Oram was buying used lab equipment and asking unfashionably precise questions. His next experiment was larger: turn quality control, manufacturing and retail into one coherent company.
Steve Albarran is the co-founder and CEO of Confident Cannabis (now Confident LIMS), the laboratory information management software that quietly runs testing for more than 60% of the legal cannabis industry in the United States. A Mexico City native from a family of business owners, he traded a New York finance career - M&A banking at Lehman Brothers and Sawaya Partners, then his own growth-equity firm Left Lane Capital - for Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he met his co-founding team. Motivated partly by a wish to move money away from Mexican cartels and toward legal, ethical operators, he built the data backbone that lets labs, growers and buyers trust what is in a cannabis product. He is a member of the National Cannabis Laboratory Council.