Good morning, everyone. First of all, apologies for my shop voice. I hope you'll be able to understand me just fine. Today, I want to talk to you about networking and specifically networking at the good camp. Beyond all, networking work. Now, naturally, that title, I have to do it. Hello. Before we go any further, I'd like to ask a couple of ESL questions, so that we can make sure that everyone is picked this early in the morning. How many of you have gone to a previous work camp and made a connection through networking that has later benefited you in some way? No, that's about what I expected. And that's exactly why we're here today, to talk about networking. I'm hoping that next year, when we meet at work camp or when we meet at a networking camp, I'll be able to ask you the same question, and hopefully, everyone will be able to stay. Another question, how many of you believe that networking is beneficial? OK, that's good. Yeah, and general networking can help you get a new job or advance you further in your career. I want to make a note here by telling a personal story about an aspect of networking and that it's very unpredictable and its results. But hopefully, that will still inspire you to do it regardless. So I was 2,000 born. Our first kid was born, and my wife said that we should be responsible adults, and we should start tracking our expenses and our incomes so that we can manage our finances better. Now, what I heard was, can you make me something in WordPress to track our expenses? And I said, hold my vehicle. At that time, the WordPress REST API plugin, if anyone remembers that, was just picking up speed and everyone was talking about it, and everyone was getting it. So I thought to myself, what a better opportunity to try it out than a project where I don't have anything to lose. So I created a simple thing that incorporated sound features to keep track of expenses and incomes. And I was very excited. I was happy about it. I decided to share what I did with people on Facebook group, and I posted about it somewhere. And later on, someone contacted me on Facebook, and he asked me some more questions about what I did, and I explained that he sent me the code and everything as well. A lot of year later, he reached out to me again and he said, hey, I remember talking to you about WordPress, and I see that you have a company now. Would you be interested in working with us to do some WordPress development for us? And I said, yeah, sure. And a couple months into that, we started working on their SaaS platform and helping you all. And this turned out to be one of our best partnerships in our company. And it all started with me just willing to share my information, now being excited about it. So what I'm going to take away from this is when I went to post that on Facebook, I didn't want to the idea of, oh, I really hope this is gonna bring these clients and make me money. I want to share with the idea of, no, I'm excited about this, I wanna share. And accidentally that turned into a great partnership. So what I'm trying to say is the results from networking are super unpredictable. However, if you don't do any networking at all, then you're not gonna get any results whatsoever. So at least try. Okay, let's talk about the specific benefits of networking at work. I'm guessing that you're all thinking, well, what's so special about networking at work and specifically? Well, how is it different than networking online or at a meeting for other conferences? I'll give you my talk of three reasons as to why networking at work is special. You can find clients and employers at work. So the fact that you're meeting them at a work-in means that they are invested in the community, they're interested, and they're already sold at work. You don't have to do this, and you don't have to convince them that, you know, work-less can be your platform. And, you know, because of that, they are also more likely to be involved in other ways. They might sponsor some of their employees to work-less, work-score, and which is all right with that. On the other side, you being at a work-in means that you are actively trying to improve your skills and you are also trying to build a community which can be seen as great benefits from potential employers. I know that I, as an employer, I'm always looking to make connections when potential employers. And whether, you know, even if we don't have a position at the moment, I'm still happy to talk to anyone that would be interested in working in the future. And then when a position actually opens, and I met you at a work-in, then your application will probably come to the top of list. Number two, you can make general connections. No, it's not about work. It's not, networking is not just about work and making money, you know, that. It's about finding a place for yourself and the community. So, by being at a work-in, you can make friends that understand your work and understand your problems and the difficulties you're facing. And that can help with your work-life balance. And it can lower burnout, which is something that I will discuss here. I'm sure all of you have tried at some point talking about your work to someone that is not technical and they just said they're like, mm-hmm, yeah, mm-hmm. And, you know, being able to talk about it with someone that's actually interested in it feels good. So, it can also do the imposter syndrome because it can get a better understanding of the struggles and skills of those people. You know, sometimes we might feel like we don't know it or we're not good enough or something. However, being able to see other people and see that they struggle with the same things as well is very, very hard. And that, and that, of course. Also, you can create a network for yourself where you can refer your own clients when, for some reason, you cannot take them on whether it's because you're too busy or it's something that's out of your scope. You should always try to be helpful to your clients even if you cannot do exactly what they want.  So, it's very crucial to go to that network so you can send people that way. Send those in reverse as well. So, you know, people will start sending you referrals your way when they cannot take on the work of the client. Like, some of these referrals can come a long time after working. For example, I had referrals come around a year after I met someone at the work hub. Again, unpredictability of networking, it's a fun thing. Another example, one of our current employees got referred to us from someone that I met because of working. And he sent him our way and turned out to be a good fit, so that was very good. And finally, when you have a network of people that are skilled and experienced, you can ask them questions and you can, you know, when you need help with something you have someone to turn to and ask for help. Number three, you can increase your confidence when approaching new people. Now, I don't know how many people here have anxiety when talking to new people. He's having it, I have it still, but way less. And work camps is a great way to help people with that because work camps are a very safe space thanks to the great code of conduct. And, you know, all the attendees are super awesome, never once relaxed. You can approach people and talk to them about worrying about things. Also at work camps, there's nothing on the line. So, you know, it's only if you're trying to necessarily get a sale. So, you can just talk to people and relax. And that feels good. And you should not worry about making mistakes because people usually try to remember the positive things.  And also, people are here to network too. So, that helps when at work camps. If you wonder how to start a conversation just go to them and start on one line and say, hey, are you involved in work camps? And then we'll kick out the conversation and take you from there. So, why aren't people networked? Every time I go to work camp, I see people come and don't work. And they hang out with their friends. They don't talk to anyone new. And some people even speak that way. It's strange, but I get it. So, why aren't people taking advantage of the incredible networking opportunity? Well, these are three reasons. And we'll talk about each one of them. If you see work camp as company-bounding camp then you can do a couple of things to help yourself in it. You should break up from your friends or coworkers. No, it sounds difficult, but there's ways that you can do it more quickly. So, just find a balance, what works for you. You should set aside the time during the day to be with the people that you know and to hang out yourself. So, for example, you can hang out with your friends at lunch, but then at the coffee breaks, go somewhere else, talk to someone new. Add lectures, try to sit to someone you don't know. Add, like, half of the lectures that you attend. And, no, see if a conversation happens. If you're too shy or you have the imposter syndrome, there's a couple of things that you can do to help with that. You can start by approaching the sponsor booths. Work camps have great sponsors, and pretty much all of them that I've seen are always eager to start a conversation on whether it's to talk about their product or service or the game that they're running or, you know, just in general to talk. So, approaching the sponsor booths, that's the best way to start. People will try to leave the conversation there and say, you won't have to do as much of the work. You should come up with questions to ask ahead of time. You know, just think about what can I ask someone new, whether it's how they're both WordPress or something else. Just prepare some of these, get a handle of them ready so you can put them out of your head and keep the conversation going. Don't try to over-stimulate yourself, you know. If you feel exhausted, if you feel anxious, you know, stop networking, take a break. It's best to have, you know, good connections that are genuine, that are, you know, not forced, than to have some forced networking conversations. You should realize that the majority of people are feeling similar things. So, it's said that 70% of people will experience the imposter syndrome at one point or another in their career. And so, it's not just you that feels the thing. So, go out, talk about it, and that's one way to help, you know, yourself and others move forward. And if you want to estimate the benefits, well, you can set goals before coming to work. You should think about what you want to get out of WordCamp every time you go. You should not go just because it's a local conference or because you're an employer, what you're thinking.  You can do either of those for both or your goal can be something completely different, just think about it and make it, keep it in your head. Now, I'll talk about three WordCamp networking mistakes. Number one, trying to sell your services. I'm guessing everyone has had that experience of someone including their personal space, whether it's a phone call or ringing on the doorbell and trying to sell them a service that they don't need or want. And I'm guessing that most of you don't like that.  Don't start the conversation by saying, hey, I can make you a new WordCamp site or hey, I can improve your SEO. It can come naturally in the conversation later on but this should not be your opening line because people will shut down or they'll get defensive and it's not gonna go anywhere. Most people come here to build the community and to make future connections and not because they have immediate positions. Probably some WordCamps do have job boards which is a great tool. And if you're looking to get someone to do something for you or you're looking to find a job, start there. I'll actually advise you to contact the organizers in some way before the WordCamp. Hey, is there gonna be a job board at WordCamp? And if enough people show interest in it, I'm pretty sure they'll be happy. Number two, trying to talk with everyone. Again, it's not a great thing because you should try and have deep and authentic connections with everyone instead of just trying to go for all the people. You're not gonna meet everyone personally at WordCamp. Well, at least on the scale of WordCamp's field because there's like 500 attendees. So instead of spending two minutes talking to everyone with me, try and spend like 10, 15 minutes having an actual honest, good conversation with someone and that way they're going to actually remember you after WordCamp and that will help you potentially in the future. Not listening to others. So, you know, you might be nervous so you're trying to think about what you say next and you don't actually pay attention to what people are talking to you. Or you want to show your services like we said before. So you do all the talking. Both of those are on the extremes. They're not ideal. So what you should do is you should try to ask questions to the person you're talking to and actively listen to their answer. And that way, they'll see that you're actually interested in the conversation and so they'll be more likely to be interested in the conversation. And if the conversation isn't going well, just excuse yourself and go on. Sometimes it's not a great fit and it just doesn't work and it's fine. Again, it's okay to take breaks. You don't have to network all the time. Just if you start feeling it's too much, take a break, it's fine. Go talk to your friends, colleagues and you can get back to networking later or you can be done for the day. Just follow what you feel like and that would be a good indicator. I want to leave you with three tips that you can take out of this room and take on to the rest of the work from today. So they can network with more people. Use the hallway track. So for those that don't know, the hallway track is what we call the hallway outside. It's not an official track obviously but this is where all the sponsors are and people hang out in between lectures. And if you're not interested in a lecture, you can hang out there. And usually there's way less people, maybe no, in the case of work from Sophia, like excluding the sponsor books, I would say maybe there's 10, 15 people. So if you are shy or you have anxiety, that's a great time to start networking because there's gonna be less people, you're gonna be able to have a conversation because it's much quieter and there's not all of this noise. And yeah, just easier. And some work camps do have specific networking events. For example, work in Europe had tribe meetings which were organized by specific interests. Small work camps like work from Sophia obviously don't have that. So again, using the hallway track is a good way to engage with people. Number two, have a way to record information. No, I don't need to record it thoroughly. So you can either, you either have a place to keep business cards or have no plug or something on your phone. And once you're done talking to someone, you should take a minute to write down what you talked about and what you found interesting about this person, how you may connect in the future. And that will help you have that person reach out back to you or you need help. You'll know exactly what you talked about with him or her. Number three, you should not be afraid to share some stuff about yourself. Now, whether that's personal or professional, again, not salesy. You should think of interesting facts about yourself that will help you for memory. For example, I'd like to say that I'm a wannabe part of Paraglider, hopefully someday I'll be able to say that I am a Paraglider, but for now, that's interesting enough. And be ready to explain what you do and how that relates to WordPress because people will most likely ask you that question. Um, was that being said? My name is Nikol and I'm the lead developer and owner of Paraglider and you can reach out to me on Twitter, Nikol and thank you for your attention. And if you have any questions, we'd love to answer them. Are there any like regular things in your self or about this WordPress? I'm usually there. Well, I'm not originally from Sofia, so I don't live in Sofia, but I know that there are some meetups. If anyone can answer that question. We do have Sofia work with meetups, but recently they are not really regular. And we will try to fix that. The thing that you do as a normal or your team kind of provoke them to interact more, it has been semi-successful, I think. I think it's a part of partially mentality of a Bulgarian culture where people just don't seem to be as interested in networking. That's my observation. And so it's a little difficult to get your employees to, you know, nudge them and say that it's helpful for you. Yeah, I don't know if they're shy or I don't know if they don't want me to think that they're trying to find a new job or something. But yeah. What was the most successful or, specifically, the most successful in networking at the moment? How did you approach it? How did you do it? That was the one that I told the story about. That was, yeah, super random. I just posted about it. The person talked to me about it. I was frank. I was open, you know. I didn't, at that time I didn't try to sell my services or anything. I just talked about what he asked me and that left an impression on them, I'm guessing. And eventually that left you a great opportunity for us. I have a question. How and when did you get involved with the poor press? So right after graduating from high school, about a half year later, I started working at a local company that, luckily for me, was offering actual training because we didn't have any experience specific to web development beyond HTML. So they were working with WordPress and I joined the WordPress team and I was back in 2010 and I've been with WordPress ever since. Show it on the network. Well, thank you for your time again. I enjoyed working on the field today and I hope to see you at the after party.


Sometime last month it was brought to our attention by our lead investor or to be lead investor that they could no longer invest in NavVis and it was due to legal technicality because they had invested in a cannabis testing lab before and there's a small fine print in most states regulations. It's kind of an idea of separation of church and state where if you are a financial interest holder or an owner in a testing lab you cannot actually own an operating company and I think that regulation was probably written in with good intentions but it was certainly disappointing to hear this at the 11th hour we had essentially told everyone that this was happening and to go back and tell them actually our lead who's been vouching for this round is pulling out please remain in the round. This is Startup and Storefront, the podcast where we inspire entrepreneurship through truth. Today's guest is June Lee, co-founder of the cannabis wholesale distribution company NavVis. To anyone even remotely paying attention it's clear that the public perception on weed is rapidly changing. To date weed is legal for recreational use in 18 states plus DC while another 13 states have decriminalized its use. The winds of change are blowing and they're headed towards legalization on a national level. The only question is how long it will be until we get there. For many though the race towards market domination began long ago. June saw a budding industry with loads of untapped potential back in 2017 when he founded NavVis. In just four short years he's taken the company from a single van making once a week shipping runs to serving over 100 cannabis brands and almost 100% of California's licensed weed retailers. So listen in as we cover everything from why he had to initially hide his career choice from his parents, why big shipping companies like FedEx haven't gotten into cannabis distribution and why there's no brand loyalty in the weed market. Now back to the episode. Alright welcome to the podcast on today's show we're talking to June, founder of NavVis. Thanks for joining. Tell everyone a little bit about what your company does. NavVis is one of the largest cannabis distributors based in California. We have presence in Oakland and LA and we essentially transport products from brands to dispensaries throughout the state. And what made you want to go down the road of getting into the cannabis industry? You know I was mostly accidental so I was a software engineer before I got into the cannabis industry and was running an enterprise SaaS company and by happen chance I had a friend who owned a pre-roll company. This was right before at the cusp of legalization who needed help moving his products around. Vince and I thought it was one of the cooler things we'd been offered to or asked to do. So we decided to drive up to Humboldt and pick up some products and drive it down to San Diego, Oakland, a couple different places. So literally like transporting the goods? Yeah, yeah it became kind of a hobby. We thought it was really cool, made us feel really cool and was completely on the side and I think both Vince and I knew that there was something big happening in the cannabis industry and that something was going to happen and I think naturally being software engineers we're always looking for kind of systems and distributed ways of doing things and transportation basically seemed like an area where the problem wasn't fully solved. And then what was your first step? So once you guys are doing it yourself you're seeing the problem. What was the first thing that you guys decided? Did you quit your jobs right away and just start working out in full time? So I was running my startup full time. Vince was consulting at the time and Vince my co-founder and at first it was just a drive once a week and then it became twice a week, three times a week. It got to a point where it wasn't sustainable so we hired a couple of our friends to drive for us and then customers kept coming back because we had this very simple value proposition that if you called us we'd show up on time and deliver your products on time and not steal anything from your bag or your cash. So it was D to C or was it to a business? Always B to B. So at the time we would move products from farms to either processors, manufacturers or a company like Ease for example. Okay and are you using trucks at the time or is it just like your car basically? Whatever can fit in the trunk. Back in 2017 it was just my SUV. Okay and then at some point when did you guys go all right we're too busy we're doing these runs all the time. Did you guys think about raising capital right from the jump or was that something real like let's get some more traction? We wanted to get more traction so we bootstrapped the company with $6,000 each from the co-founder so we had $12,000. We purchased with that a dinky old Mercedes Metris which we later used for larger runs because the bags stopped fitting in the back of our trunk and it felt to us very much too early on to kind of really pivot our career. I think some context is you know I come from a very Christian conservative Korean family Vince is Chinese-American and I think the idea of us kind of quitting our prestigious full-time tech jobs were very difficult at the time so we only decided to make that full-time transition after we received our full state license and I think at that time we had something like five to ten regular clients that were shipping products with us. How did you tell your parents? I didn't tell my parents for a long time they actually found out through a series of articles that came out about us. I think the first major public... Good articles I imagine. Yeah generally positive you know these two young kids are doing something cool in cannabis was usually a theme I think in the early days in 2018. Did that help at all? Did that help you? Yeah I mean I very much feared the idea of going to my parents and explaining it from ground up because I knew that they wouldn't fully listen to me or you know they would think that I'm doing something reckless but when they saw it on Forbes it certainly spoke a little bit of credibility and you know made them think maybe there's something June is doing here. When did you guys apply to Y Combinator? We applied to Y Combinator a bit late in terms of the stage of the company. Yeah. We were part of the 2019 Winter Batch which means we applied sometime in mid 2018. Okay and you got in. Did it change your life? Did you love it? What was your experience there? Yeah it was great. I don't know if I would necessarily call it life-changing but it certainly provided a framework of building a company with intent so I think right up until that point we were just kind of doing whatever that worked trying to experiment change our services in a way where you know with the objective of more customers coming to us and asking us things to do but I think Y Combinator really allowed us to look at kind of zoom out look at the company from a company level and understand what are metrics that we didn't even track back then things like ARR, our annual run rate, burn, headcount, things like that. I think it gave us a lot more structure. Do you have like any or do you have a memory of like you're the best piece of advice somebody may have given you while you were there or maybe even your favorite like advisor partner. But the one that's most memorable is it came from Michael Seibel I think. That's my guy. He's the best. Yeah Michael Seibel CEO of YC, he's also our group partner. Oh you got super lucky. Yeah that's awesome. And I might be miscoding him and it's something to the effect of investors don't actually care about what you do. You have to be able to explain it in a way that's easy to digest and to think that you can kind of distill this really really complex thing that you do full time in a two-minute in a selfless arrogance. And so you have to really build a narrative in the story that can be digestible that's the most important thing. I've seen him destroy startups. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's like this is you and then he'll draw a line going right down like plummeting and he's like this is you tomorrow. And I mean silence. Yeah. At that point I'm surprised they made it into the Y Combo that air program. Yeah. I mean a lot of people you know they pivot when they're inside of it and they realize I would say like a third of the ideas kind of drop off. Yeah. And another one I'd say is he talked a lot about kind of making analogy to flight and pilots and apparently there are certain orientation of the plane that if you're in doesn't matter if you're a thousand feet elevation or 10,000 feet elevation you're going to crash. So regardless of how much money you have in the bank account or you know what kind of hype you're generating in the investor space if the company is structured in a way where it's spending too much money or if it's set up incorrectly regardless of how high you are it's very very easy and almost deterministic that you would fall. Yeah. This is something a lot of to have a lot of friends and we talk about this that have started companies. There's a point in time in a company's journey where you it's usually not a happy time but you kind of understand the mistakes you made but the course has already been set. Yeah. And now you have to live with these consequences and it's awful usually because it's too late. Like it's way too late in the game to kind of move but it sounds like for you guys that things are moving the right way direction correctly moving the right way. This is also why I say directionally correct a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I guess to kind of illustrate some of that now we're 170 person company two offices. We have a built out engineering team very capable supply chain operations team as well. We supply about a hundred distinct brands to essentially every single dispensary in the state of California and about 10% of all legal cannabis consumed in California comes off the back of our trucks. So I think that's a huge percentage. Thank you. Yeah.  There are a couple of big players. We're definitely one of the biggest. So the distribution market in cannabis especially in California is still very fragmented and there are three major distributors that control about 30% of the market and more 35% of the market and we're one of them. When you guys first started raising was there any pushback or did you have to kind of to Michael's point did you have to really educate them on what it was that they were investing in on the industry where things were going? Yeah. I think thankfully our messaging was easier than perhaps some other companies in our batch. So if you're developing something like a very obscure developers tool or back in the API it requires definitely a much more difficult and creative explanation. But our pitch was that we ship weed from brands to dispensaries and I thought that was a pretty simple enough thing to sell and I think especially in 2019 when we were going through YC there was a lot of enthusiasm about the new space the changing regulations and a rapid desigmatization of the substance itself. I think even five years ago cannabis is mostly seen as a recreational drug and something that teens abuse to get higher, et cetera. And I think I felt that firsthand grown up in Virginia but just in the last five years public opinion has shifted quite drastically. Yeah. The devil's lettuce. Yeah. You look at the number of states who have now legalized it and the trend is certainly moving towards national level legalization. Exactly. How many brands would you guys say you work with today? A little over a hundred. And what do you do for them? I know you guys do a lot for them but you get to just kind of disclose. So there are a number of services that we provide but essentially one is distribution and fulfillment. What that means is we'll pick up their product from anywhere in California. We'll warehouse it out of our facility and essentially upon their direction we'll pick and pack and ship out the order to the dispensary. So it's very similar to kind of like a traditional dropshipping model but on the wholesale side. Now we've added a lot of ancillary services on top of that to create value. One is a product called Navis Marketplace which is retailer facing. So all of our suppliers and brands can list their products for sale on a marketplace and retailers can place orders. There are some other ancillary marketplaces out there like Leaflink but I think the big differentiation that we have is that we're kind of like eBay is to Amazon Prime. Since we control the dispatch itself we can deliver the products within 36 hours which has been a big differentiator. The other products there's one called Navis Capital. We provide essentially inventory financing for our suppliers. It's very difficult to gain access capital in cannabis because one banks don't give you traditional loans like a normal business and even equity capital is very limited and you have to be able to tell a very compelling story to get that expensive equity capital. So we kind of serve as this bridge as a financial institution given the fact that we're a little bit more established we have access to capital and it's a good way to stimulate the sale. That's amazing. So if I'm a brand in this space would I exclusively work with you? Like I'm just thinking about I had a product company at one time and so it was like I have inventory here. I have some inventory on Amazon, right? And then so we had someone on the podcast created like basically a way to just connect all your inventory so it's all in one place. Is this the same problem in your space or no? A little bit different because it's regulated and there are certain requirements for how you need to handle the products. So in California there's Like a higher barrier to entry on that side of it. So you can't just ship cannabis with any provider. You can't FedEx your weed. So essentially there needs to be Why? What does FedEx not do that? Is it the legality of it? One is the legality of it and then there's kind of the justification for why it's set up that way. And there's a number of reasons. One is California really wanted to implement this thing called C2Sale. Essentially they wanted to be able to trace from the moment the cannabis plant was harvested to when it ended up in consumers hands. And when you have such strict supply chain procedures you need specialized groups that will kind of comply and disclose all those things and et cetera. And FedEx clearly isn't particularly specialized to do that. The second reason is there's concerns around cross-contamination. So people like weed now but they're still not really sure if it should be shipped next to baby products for example. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. I mean I think generally I think this will probably remain the case. The same way I think alcohol distribution for example is extremely specialized and not just regulated substances. If you're transporting hazardous materials like flammable gases there are certain procedures that you follow and licenses that you need. I was gonna ask if this is the same where alcohol, tobacco are also not allowed to be transported next to say baby products or if it's just pot. Yeah. Exactly, they specifically don't want to mix alcohol and cannabis because they're kind of concerned about the so-called cross-fatedness. I mean there's a big opportunity that obviously you're taking advantage of that. That's so fascinating. One of the things that I don't smoke pot but I do invest in pot stocks and the barrier for that and the problem with that has always been that at least when I started investing there was no brand recognition or brand loyalty in terms of consumers going like, let's say you go into a grocery store and you are a Coke drinker, you will always get Coke and there just doesn't exist something like that in the pot world. And so I was wondering since you deal directly with brands all the time, have you seen this start to shift is this a continuing problem in the industry and if so how do they overcome it? So brand loyalty is something I think is built over time and the industry is just simply too young for people to kind of have a Coke Pepsi parallel. I would say that strong brands in cannabis are certainly developing but compared to any other CPG it still remains extremely fragmented and sometimes we feel that we have found the brand for our category. So for example, for cannabis gummies there's plus gummies, cona, caminos, et cetera and they seem to be pretty stable as in they were in their place and then suddenly last year this organ brand called Wilde comes in and they took over the market, essentially took huge chunks of the gummy market from existing players and I think that really jolted people in thinking that no we haven't got to that stage on to that stage of customer loyalty that we thought we had. Is there anything that surprised you about the space that you would have never thought about or guessed? Yeah, I'm a consumer casually but I wouldn't by no means characterize myself as a power user. I think I was definitely surprised by the complexity of the products, the sheer diversity. So people talk about flour, pre-rolls, vape, concentrates, beverages like some of these larger categories but even within concentrates there are so many different variants and within it different types of extraction methods that people care actually very deeply about. Same with alcohol, I think you see these enthusiast wine drinkers or single malt whiskey seekers and there are very close parallels to that in cannabis but I'd say it's even more deep than alcohol is. For you personally, like are you still engineering are you still coding or have you moved on? I have, I still participate in our engineering meetings and I bought a roadmap but I have in myself coded in about two years. Nice, do you miss it or are you happy? You basically play like chief product officer kind of? Well, I mean my role is officially as president but I generally my primary duty is actually overseeing the business unit of our company. So our revenue, business development, new clients, structuring deals as well as running our operations which is consisting of 150 people, 50 trucks to warehouses so it's a lot of moving pieces and that in weird ways is very similar to what I learned as a software engineer managing distributed systems. Kind of it's like the art of doing a lot of things simultaneously at the same time. The levers, levers everywhere. And then the product side currently rolls up to my co-founder but we're very interchangeable and we have this kind of nice brain melt since we've known each other for such a long time we can kind of step into each other's shoes. Will you guys ever go like autonomous vehicle, like autonomous trucks? Is that sort of something that really makes the business pencil? Yeah, I mean we envision a lot of cool new things in the future. I think probably before autonomous vehicles we want to start experimenting with electrical vehicles, electric fans. And one of the things that we're doing there is currently electric fans are very useful for any deliveries within the range of up to 400 miles but after that it becomes very difficult to do. The problem with California is that it's quite large and there are places that are certainly more than 400 miles apart. So as our long-term strategy we're actually building our headquarters fulfillment center right now in Woodlakes which is kind of a 30 minutes south of Fresno. And that allows us to kind of sit right in between the five where we can access both LA and Oakland within 400 miles. So we're hopeful that's kind of these long-term infrastructural investments that we're making would enable us to do that. Autonomous vehicles I think that probably will come with how the auto industry evolves. Sure, when it comes to your warehouse are you using like any state-of-the-art technologies? Is it mostly machines? Is it mostly human beings? Right now it's mostly human beings. And I would say that our warehouse technology itself probably lacks behind state-of-the-art consumer goods by something like 10 years. And the reason for that is because we're simply just not at a scale where investing in a million dollar robot makes sense. We do have best practices, industry best practices like location-based inventory tracking. So across our 100 brands we're managing something like 15,000 distinct SKUs. And we intake and outtake about 70,000 units of products every single day out of each hub. So it's important that we for example have an organization system, warehouse management system that keeps track of where everything is. We also do things like wave packing which is just kind of an issue-standard way of packing a lot of different things are. And we have tools like forklifts, gravity conveyor belts and so forth, but it's certainly not looking like Amazon full phones. When you think about the systems that are already in place do you look at them from a software engineering perspective and go, oh, this is like really clunky, this is really bad, or are there pretty good sophisticated companies in that space that are making beautiful products to make sort of the management much easier? Oh yeah, I mean there are so many people making just extremely impressive product both on the software side and the hardware side to enable logistics and warehousing in general. And I think with the rise of e-commerce the investment in that endeavor has only increased dramatically. I do think that at Navis at least we have a tendency to try to build things ourselves because we are engineers and the use case for cannabis can be a little specific enough that the standard out of the box software may not address the concerns. I forget the company, do you remember the company that Amazon acquired? It was for their warehouses. Basically it was the thing that would- Picks up the drafts. It was these two guys who worked at this company that started it and they were both engineers and they would basically just track the movements of humans. And so they just put dots where humans were and then they just watched the dots move around all day. And then they were like, I think we can probably engineer this in a better way. And so they started, I think they quit their jobs at some point but they started going down the road of creating these robots. They sold it for several hundred million dollars too. About 900 million, yeah, and to Amazon. I'll be honest, it sounds a bit dystopian to think of it like that, to think of it like human movements. It was all about efficiency, right? They were just trying to make it like, and at first the thought was not so much to replace the human. It was more of like, how do we make these movements much more efficient? Because Patty is in that corner and for some reason she needs to grab gloves over here. That makes no sense. And so as they're going down this road, they're like, we think we can make these robots. But it was like these guys were, I think in their late 40s when they started the company, really cool story. And they're like, yeah, now we're like, yeah, now they're set. Now you go to an Amazon fulfillment center and you just see these shelves flying across each other at extreme speeds. They have algorithms to prevent them from colliding from each other. It's pretty amazing. And so you just closed the big round. Congratulations. Max was just here telling us about it. Do you want to share your story on how this almost didn't happen? Raising money in cannabis is definitely challenging and it's a different beast because essentially what we have is a technology company that happens to own some infrastructure and the license to actually transport the goods. And a lot of people ask like, why don't you just decide to be a software company? It would be so much more investable, easier. The reason why we did both was because it was what we felt was best for the customer experience. When you order something you expect to get it in a certain amount of time. And in a immature industry, it's really important that you control that experience. So we made that kind of tough call to be both plant touching and technology early on. But we kind of are now running into this problem where kind of Silicon Valley tech investors can't invest into our company because we're still plant touching and they may have LPA restrictions. I say they can't invest in vices or federally legal goods or whatever services in cannabis. And then we also have kind of a class more traditional supply chain investors who fail to see that we really are a technology company. They try to assess us only on the trucking aspect. And Vince McGo founder leads a lot of these fundraising conversations but it's really that conveying that message correctly and finding that intersection of people who's first comfortable investing in cannabis but also see our potential of being something potentially really scalable. We started raising the round early this year and frankly it wasn't a terrible time to raise. There's certainly a lot of enthusiasm around cannabis with the Democratic Party taking super majority. There's a lot of kind of promise and hype around like will cannabis get furthered and from a regulatory perspective in the next couple of years. And that led to kind of a quick rise in the public markets. You mentioned that you invested in public cannabis stocks although that enthusiasm has somewhat qualified because it seems like the administration has other priorities for now. But regardless, we were able to kind of find the interest pretty quickly. By February we had determined a lead who essentially started the due diligence process by March and April. We had a term sheet. We had all the legal docs kind of final. And the last steps were just kind of doing the paperwork and corralling the rest of the investors in. But sometime last month it came to our attention or it was brought to our attention by our lead investor or to be lead investor that they could no longer invest in cannabis. And it was due to legal technicality because they had invested in a cannabis testing lab before. And there's a small fine print in most states regulations. It's kind of an idea of separation of church and state where if you are a financial interest holder or an owner in a testing lab you cannot actually own an operating company. And I think that regulation was probably written in with good intentions. But it was certainly disappointing to hear this at the 11th hour. We had essentially told everyone that this was happening to go back and tell them actually our lead who's been vouching for this round is pulling out. Please remain in the round. And I think we really kind of pulled off this gymnastics. Thankfully one of our earlier investors rose up to the occasion and decided to take the lead instead. And the outcome at the end was favorable. So definitely grateful. That's amazing. So basically the growth rate for you is also tied to facilities, right? Somewhat, yeah. And so now you're in hyper growth entering this real estate world that operates at a snail space. And somehow you're just trying to get as much land and warehouse space as possible. And so what do your needs look like in the next year? So right now you have this 20,000 square foot place that you're doing. In Los Angeles we have a 26,000 square feet in Oakland. So all in all we have about 46,000. If the math is correct and our projections are correct and we continue to grow at the rate that we do by the end of next year we will need something like 150 to 200,000 square feet of warehouse space to handle the volume. And that would be to support about 20 to 25% of all cannabis in California. Now that's a big number. There's 40 million people in California and California is loved to smoke weed. And I see it as kind of a pretty large responsibility to enable the supply chain. So we're really racing on our end to procure the real estate, the licensure and the headcount. And it's not just the space. For going into a new city it's about talking to the government about the municipal taxes, letting them understand that we're bringing this new type of business to their city that we're gonna be hiring hundreds of people and actually hiring those people, training them and then getting it up and running really quickly. I definitely think that we've really trained our muscle in turning up a facility really, really quickly. So for example our Oakland warehouse which is 26,000 square feet opened in December of last year. And we started working on our LA facility after that opening. And we were operational in LA, moved in with licensure and approvals by April and that was certainly a gymnastics. In your experience, what's the reception been like when you approach a new town or city with like, hey, we're gonna bring this several thousand foot warehouse space in here. Are they generally receptive because of the taxes, the employment and everything or does it mirror the state of California's attitude towards weed overall? I think it depends widely. Generally it does mirror California's views in that there are more municipalities that are favorable to cannabis than not. But there are certainly also localities where they are absolutely and vehemently against any cannabis operation. So I think it's definitely a political matter. Assuming that they're okay with cannabis, I think generally we've been met with enthusiasm meeting with the city mostly because it means that we're bringing a lot of business and employment to the city and kind of so-called putting the city on a map in terms of their infrastructural significance in the California supply chain. So this problem is interesting because what's happening is there's a lot of smaller counties, smaller cities like the City of Ballard or Commerce as an example, and they're all like racing to change their legislation because there are actually are rules in place today that say they cannot be basically affiliated with cannabis of any kind. And even though I would call it like on the fringe of it to some extent, like you're not producing it, it's still unfortunately part of their bylaws. And so you have all of these cities changing it. What's interesting though, the opportunity, the way I think about it is there are some cities that control their own power grid like Pasadena and a bunch of others. And so what ends up happening is a company like yours can come in and really dictate terms because all of a sudden they're gonna get money, not only from the taxes, not only from the, let's say the jobs, but also just from the fact of you're using utilities at a way higher rate. And that's exciting. So you can almost get like the keys to the kingdom.  This is my ticket. I'm gonna ride the wave. And so, you know, they don't always think like that, but we play this game a lot in real estate development. And I think to my surprise, the regulatory bodies in California have been very supportive and favorable so far to emergence of companies like Nabis in cannabis. I think when Prop 64 was drafted and passed, they only had kind of a faint idea of how the supply chain was gonna actually play out. And for there to be an aggregating party like us, where, you know, we do funnel 10% of the market and hopefully more in the next couple of years through our system when we have built a system that's essentially auditable by the tax authorities to make sure that, you know, all the taxes are being paid. And, you know, it kind of creates a central point of responsibility that the state feels very comfortable managing. So unlike, I'd say, other industries that sometimes are inhabited by incumbents, it's been relatively easy to kind of get in front of the regulators and speak to them. But it comes to hiring. So Amazon was obviously at New York Times recently. All their practices, not very favorable. Big headline risk. When it comes to you guys, how do you view hiring for the warehouse space in general? Because it would seem like that's really not your world at all, right? Software engineers.  So we're definitely kind of exercising that muscle. Hiring is really important to us because, I mean, ultimately the organization is nothing more than the sum of the people that are part of it. And we have this dual challenge of attracting really tier one talent. An engineering team that would be a good engineering team at Facebook or a finance team that would be a good finance team on Wall Street and bringing them over to cannabis is kind of one big lift that we do. And that's by just really convincing them and echoing this message that what we're trying to do here is truly something unique. It hasn't been done before. And this is a great way for people to really apply their talents in a new space. On the warehousing trucking side of things, it's certainly a new area, but I think that there's actually a huge overlap of people who are passionate about cannabis and people who work in the warehouse fulfillment side of things. So we find that nice intersection. And they kind of naturally select because we review the candidates that we receive applications from. And it usually comes with the fact that they're open to cannabis. Cause, you know, if you're fundamentally against cannabis and the growth of it, then why would you come work out of cannabis? That makes sense. Yeah. And so it hasn't been that difficult. Training. Yeah, I think it's been doable. I mean, the thing that we struggle with now is, you know, when the companies, for example, grown about 50% from January of this year in terms of the total volume and revenue that we do. And we've grown about 180% since this time last year. And when you're a small company, when you have a team of 50 people, growing 10% means hiring five more people. But when, you know, at our current state, when we almost have 200 people, growing 10% means hiring 20 people. So really kind of building out that pipeline and, you know, being present at career events and, you know, approaching universities. And there's, there's some of the more scalable things that we're excited to do, especially with this round. That's awesome. What other things are you guys going to do with this round, do you think? I think about it, like, are you guys ever worried about, I don't know if Amazon would enter the space, but like a behemoth entering the space in a really meaningful way. Like that's got to be something that... It's something that really excites me because I just know that it would be far cheaper for them to buy someone like us than to build it themselves. Is that what your hope is, or do you... Yeah, that's kind of a good feeling. Well, I see that as a potential way this could play out. I think Vince and I both definitely build this company, not for an exit, but really focused on the fundamental value that we're creating. And I genuinely and personally believe that this is an opportunity and a problem set big enough that I could work on it for the next 10, 20 years. You know, if you think about how long it took after prohibition for alcohol to be as mainstream and widely distributed as it is today, you know, it took over 70 years. And I think with the advent of internet and these technologies, it might get accelerated, but I don't think it's going to be kind of played out in the next couple of years. For me, this is such a blessing because I've always wanted to work on infrastructure projects. And I felt that as a 20-something year old, there's always this huge barrier of entry, mostly around capital to play these sorts of, you know, infrastructure games. And I'm sure you feel that way in real estate, it's like, you know, you kind of have to work your way up to a certain point. And Navas kind of gave me this fast pass to running and orchestrating a trucking company at a young age. And I think I definitely want to make something of this opportunity. I love it. When it comes to like, so in my head, when I think about your distribution, everyone's wearing neighbor shirts. Is it like, what is it like if I walk into one of your centers? Yeah, so generally people will be wearing our shirts, our polos, but we don't enforce the strict dress code. I think compared to other warehouses that you might be in, we're more casual. And I would also say that our workforce is generally younger than an average workforce in other supply chain companies, because, you know, I think they're more young people that support and like cannabis than others. And people, young people coming out of college are really seeing cannabis as a career. They know that this is here right now and it's only going to grow for the next 10 years. So they're going to do something, maybe pick a box, you know, deliver a box at some point, but eventually go into really specialized fields like cannabis compliance law or, you know, tracking trace system and, you know, getting proficient with metric and these systems are something that people really want to do. So at some point, you also have a tremendous amount of data, right? You see these products moving. You see the market moving in certain directions. Is there any interesting data that you see taking off more than others, like our edibles moving at a pace that's like quickly outpacing? There's some interesting trends. I don't think as kind of broad as like edibles or things like that, but for example, we know that beverages are growing, is a rapidly growing segment of the market. And it's like CBD infused beverages or like THC? So we deal with THC infused only, cannabis derived. So there's, you know, hemp CBD business that we're actually legally bar from participating in because we hold a cannabis license. That's really fascinating. I want to touch on that a little bit later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it didn't start out as a big segment to begin with because essentially manufactured cannabis, I mean, when you want to make a beverage, you need a bottom line, you need a factory, you need a way to infuse liquid at scale. So it simply wasn't possible before legalization. And with the rise of kind of a sparkling water seltzers like Laquan, you know, White Claw and all these kind of segments, I think people are anticipating and pouring a lot of money into making the next cannabis seltzer. That would be the White Claw of cannabis. It's still a small segment. It's less than 1% of consumption in California, but it is something that we're definitely watching out for. For example, Nab is exclusively represents Papsu Ribbon and their seltzer line in cannabis. Paps has a seltzer line? A lot of the beer companies invested. That makes sense. I just didn't know Papsu Ribbon. Because it was the biggest market in terms of expansion versus beer. Right. And they're scared. They think that young people, young health conscious people aren't drinking enough beer and that they wanna pivot to zero calorie options in other forms of intoxication. That's certainly true. Yeah. Is it branded different than like the blue ribbon? They use the same logo. It's called Papsu Ribbon Cannabis Seltzer. So it's a very like blue collar marketing effort. That's a way I can see brand loyalty start to develop. Exactly. When recognizable brands come into the space, you've already gotten an affiliation with them. Exactly. Yeah. And then there are other categories that have been popping. Like in 2019, early 2020, we saw a rapid rise in the category called live resin. So essentially when vape pens first started coming out, they were all this lit chemically distilled product, almost like isolates of THC. And people started kind of developing some adversity towards something as artificial. So the whole concept of live resin is taking a fresh frozen plant and squeezing it, sometimes with solvent, sometimes without it. But the idea is to kind of get closer to the flavor of the plant itself. And now that's evolved into kind of live rosin or what we call solventless extracts where they only use ice and water and pressure to extract the cannabinoids from the flower. So that way you're really taking in the raw form and then translating into a vape product. There's like research papers that came out on like cannabinoids in like the 90s. And to think about what you're doing today, that's basically my lifetime is so insane. Yeah, if you go back 30 years. And I realize I sound like an old person saying, but it's like we had beam on the podcast is they make a CBD product. And so for them, like that's why I was like going through the whole, okay, there's no barriers to entry in this space, everything is built on brand or at least they're approaching it to build a brand first. They're going after the mainstream athletes. They basically want to be like the Coca-Cola in the space. And they're doing that via investors with big names essentially. So like the celebrity route and they're doing a good job. But we were talking about these studies and they were like not that long ago, 20 years ago. There's when the studies are coming out and now all of a sudden we've accepted that cannabinoids can like help in a meaningful way. And going back to what you said about not being able to hold a license in CBD or hemp because you have a cannabis license. Do you see that changing in the future? Or is that something that there's actually a reason for outside of just what we just discussed where it's like old philosophies that have come and aged poorly and we're really like smear campaigns from back in the early days. So I'm certainly not an expert in the hemp side of things but what I know is that there's been a lot of ambiguities legally as to how each state and the US should regulate hemp and whether hemp is should be even considered a cannabinoid or a cannabis product. And I think in 2019, what was it the farm after? US basically the US federal government said that hemp is fine, you can put hemp in products and each state and municipality can regulate how hemp is distributed actually. And in that kind of like time of ambiguity, I think a lot of people saw that as a business opportunity started up their hemp operation but California specifically has been really conflicted in how to regulate hemp. Right now I believe that hemp products are not allowed to be sold in traditional retail and they're actually banned from licensed cannabis dispensaries. As a licensed cannabis distributor we're not allowed to touch any hemp products either. So for now we're just kind of following the rules there. And I think hemp also is a different beast in a different supply chain in that interstate commerce of hemp is now essentially legalized. So you can bring in hemp from China, you can bring hemp from Mexico and essentially turn it into a product here. So it lends itself to a very, very different supply chain than a closed loop system like cannabis. Are you saying that there's not much interest on your part in getting into that? Not for now and there's a couple of reasons for this. And one is because I think that just substance wise cannabis derived products are more interesting to me personally than hemp. I think hemp has a very kind of singular effect or CBD as the main cannabinoid. And I think there's some marketing that's challenging actually the minimum active dose of CBD is almost 50 milligram and you won't find 50 milligrams in most hemp products. So in order to actually feel the effect of CBD you would have to chug five bottles of hemp drink which I don't think is a very reasonable and palatable experience. Second thing is that I think we well said. Yeah. Second thing is that we built out this software ERP and the supply chain very specialized for cannabis. And I think I don't normally talk about this with investors too much because I can sound a little, it could sound lofty but I do think that eventually NABIS could branch out outside of cannabis but even beyond hemp there are a lot of regulated substances that require this disclosures and submissions. Things I mentioned, hazardous gases, alcohol, tobacco, medical supplies. I think those are areas that we could potentially get into. Would you ever close the loop with just having your own stores? As in verticalize and actually own the stores on the supply chain? Yeah. That's actually contrary to what most people are trying to do. They're trying to verticalize and be a vertical company and to improve their margins. But I think ultimately we believe that a more exciting future for the cannabis industry is where products and brands compete. There's product churn and innovation and customers get to decide what products they want. And I think when you walk into a liquor store in Arizona, you could find great goose on their premium vodka cabinet and you can walk into a liquor store in Vermont and find the same thing. And you ask yourself, like, why is that the case? And it's not because customers like great goose. It's because someone decided that that was the premium vodka of America. And I think that is a very limiting view of how the market should evolve. And I think that when you verticalize there are a lot of temptations and just forces that make you want to remain still in favor of innovation. Well, listen, where can people find you? Whether they're looking for a job, whether they're obviously just closed around. So you definitely need to hire immediately. No, for sure. So our website is nabis.com, n-a-b-i-s.com. So you can read all about us and slash careers, all of our job postings, our mission, our value as a company is listed there. You can also reach out to me directly. My email is June, J-U-N, at nabis.com. Look, you've definitely, this has probably been the quietest we've ever been on a podcast. Yeah. Only because I know nothing about your space and I just find it so fascinating, but it's for sure very abundantly clear that it's the future. This was an information session for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you for talking most of the time. No, of course. Was that enough content? Was there anything else that I could elaborate on? No, no, that was, that was wonderful. Unless you would touch on anything, uh-huh. Every industry, I feel like, has something where, for you guys now that, like you said, the democratic leadership feels a very different way than the Trump leadership did. I'm sure it has kind of eased a little bit more, like when Jeff Sessions was the AG. Yeah, yeah. Where people like, so we tried to build a Jeff, jet fuel refinery. This is like 20, not 20s. Jet fuel refiner. Jet fuel refiner, green jet fuel specifically. And so what we wanted to do is we wanted to build a plant in Everett. So Everett's like right by Boston, and then you can just put it on a train and then put it in a tugboat, and then boom, you're just tugging it to Logan, which is like the most efficient way of doing it. Cause right now, so Logan, any fuel that arrives at Logan Airport, 90% of it's from war-torn countries. Oh, I see. And so we just wanted to basically make it local. In doing that, our pro forma was Mitt Romney versus Obama at the time. Barack Obama went very public around basically saying, yes, biofuels are the future. Mitt Romney said nothing. And this completely changed the landscape of our raising capital. And it just destroyed it. It was like in one setting that economics worked and the other setting, it really didn't. When it came to the election for you guys, was there any similarity where investors were like, let's see how this plays out? Cannabis stocks certainly performed very well after the Democratic supermajority. I think people are certainly a little disappointed at the speed at which cannabis legalizations being considered or prioritized. Essentially, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden said they have some more important issues such as COVID vaccination. And you know, some may argue justifiably so that take precedent over legalization cannabis. I think that, I mean, ultimately, we're not in a big hurry per se because one thing we know for a fact is that product market fit of cannabis does not need to be proven.  That's an interesting way of putting it. I mean, you're right, you're right. But it's like a fascinating, there's not many industries with that in excess. Right, so it's not like, you know, in the example of jet fuel or green jet fuel, it might be a case where the actual cost of production or efficiency might be slightly higher than traditional methods, but for moral purposes, it's something politically we should decide. Cannabis has a very opposite effect where like it is proven that people want this. So it's more the politics is controlling the speed at which it is being released as opposed to enabling something that wouldn't normally happen. Welcome to real estate development. Yeah, really, god damn. I'm always waiting on politicians even right now and it's infuriating because you have like real dollars, there's holding costs, right? And we're just waiting for someone to just go to the office. But we also want to make sure it doesn't happen too fast. That's true. I mean, there's something to, yeah. We want it to happen in our terms. And I mean, I kind of mentioned in my, in the company video, but we do see that the only viable path of, you know, scalable cost effective distribution is a national distributor that facilitates the movement across state borders. And that's just the inevitable future because it's an economies of scale business. What will you go after California? What's that? What state will you focus on next? Partly actually to answer your previous question around our raise, about half of it is going to be dedicated towards out of state expansion. We're looking at a couple of different states. New York, Jersey is particularly interesting to us right now. We also have to make sure that the municipality or the state that we're going into is favorable towards a model like ourselves. You know, do they allow consignment distribution? Do they allow, you know, what distributors to hold inventory for long periods of time? Like there are all these kind of factors that make our service more valuable or less in a certain state. But I think most likely New York, we'd love to kind of enter that market when it opens up a screen field opportunity. There's a big warehouse space in Sunnyside, New York that Brooks Brothers used to work out of. Oh. It's massive. Yeah. Massive. There was like seamstresses the whole bit. Oh well. Full of fabric. Yeah. No longer the case. Unfortunately you can't move cannabis across state borders. Even if we were to open up in New York, we could bring the software, the brand IPs, and the brands could be there, but the cannabis will have to have grown in New York. And same thing for New Jersey too.  Yes. Because interstate commerce makes it a federal matter. Yeah, it's inferior. Yeah, you're in real estate development. That's what you mean. I mean, it's massive inefficiency. Like Oregon, for example, had an overproduction issue where essentially a pound of weed was like just as valuable as pound of corn at some point because there was an excess of products and there are all these other states where there's a shortage and they can't do anything. Do investors know this? Like when you speak to them, they're aware of this basically your growth rate, not to some extent, but at least the national expansion is literally tied to the legislation. They know that? Yeah, yeah. I think generally, well, I mean, some of them do. Some of them I have to explain, but I think it's something that definitely comes as a surprise when I say like everything you buy and the dispensary in Massachusetts has been grown in Massachusetts. Right. Because that's how they built it. You don't see that in any other supply chain. Yeah, Massachusetts was early and they basically built it in that way on purpose. And it's not energy efficient to grow cannabis in Massachusetts. It's just cold there. And you have to build these massive indoor grows or greenhouses that has a lot of energy consumption. There's some studies that show that indoor cannabis consumes about three orders of magnitude more energy than sungrown cannabis. So like, why are we really doing it? Sure, there's demand for design or weed and people really like that indoor field because it's expensive. But I think eventually that will kind of phase out as cultivation techniques and outdoor definitely kind of matures and evolves. What are the coolest products that you've seen that someone uses cannabis with like that I would never think of? That you would never think of. Or haven't. Like I'm not, I would barely put myself in the recreational user. Yeah. So there's a really interesting company called Vertosa and they're not a brand. They manufacture these fast acting cannabis extracts that have been coated with some sort of polymer so that it binds to your body faster than standard cannabinoids do. And they go into a lot of beverages like Papster Ribbon can and so forth because when people drink something they want to feel the effect immediately. So there are a lot of these like tweaks being done like ways to chemically coat the cannabinoids to change the way that they're absorbed. I think that's really cool. And something people don't really appreciate or realize when they drink a cannabis beverage. And this is new technology, right? It didn't exist two years ago and it's being used. There's also a lot of studies in isolating different cannabinoids. So CBN around sleep has been explored more now but there's still a huge, I think, area of research that remains. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for coming on and educating us about everything. It makes my blood. Yeah, really it's such a foreign industry to me but I am fascinated by it because it's still in its infancy, very much so. This is like the thing I told you on the phone was like my buddy was a Wall Street trader in Chicago or not Wall Street but the Chicago trader and he is now in the cannabis industry. And when I spoke to him about it, he's an older guy but he's basically like it's the best space if you're smart. He's like there's been so much lack of sophistication in the space and now all of a sudden with your company, tech company, people with backgrounds that could help this industry accelerate are now coming in from all walks of life. So the finance, kind of like you mentioned, like if your team rivals Facebook's engineering team, if your finance team rivals some of the best teams on Wall Street, these are the things that this space is starting to see and it's a really exciting time. No, for sure. To be part of that. I might add like a recruiting sound bit. Do it, yeah. Yeah, I think if you're smart and you're curious about cannabis and you want to learn more, it's really no other opportunity like it. Essentially it's a market that's being formed out of nothing, California legal cannabis market went from $0 in revenue in 2017 to $4 billion in revenue in the single year and you don't really see that in any other industry and I think it's easy to make kind of comparisons to markets like crypto, but I think it's fundamentally different in that you're converting an existing behavior into the white market. So. What are some company perks? Company perks, you get statewide discount in any dispensary in California. What's the discount, how much is that? Usually around 30%, sometimes up to 50%. Wow, massive.  We also kind of employ partnerships. You can sign up for Flower Co, which is Costco of cannabis where they deliver next day cannabis to you for extremely cheap. Other perks, you get to see all the new innovative products before they hit the market. So some people in our warehouses are even more knowledgeable and enthusiastic about these things and they just love being able to be in the front line and seeing what the market will see in a couple of months ahead of time. And do you guys get to test them too? Like, do you get to try them a little bit? Sometimes.  Right, right, right. So our brand partners are generous with samples. Now people get me cannabis.  Yeah, so it's. I have a warehouse full. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's cool. And it's an intense working environment because the industry is changing so much. We have to respond to regulations and competitors. You know, I definitely kind of warn future employees. I'd like if you're looking for something chill and you know, you're riding on the co-tail of a cannabis industry, this is not the job. Well, thanks, June. Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks very much.


The Cavalcade of America sponsored by Dupont, maker of better things for better living through chemistry, presents Helen Hayes in Autobiography of an Angel. Before we begin our play, here's news for homemakers. Your Dupont dealer has a supply of coupons each worth twenty-five cents when you purchase one gallon or more of Dupont speedy-z wall finish. Speedy-z covers even figured wallpaper quickly, easily, and economically. You can redecorate a room for less than two dollars and seventy-five cents. And within one hour after applying speedy-z, the walls will be dry. Take advantage of the twenty-five cent coupon your Dupont paint dealer has for you when you purchase one gallon or more of this new, easy-to-use wall finish. And now for this evening's play. Tonight, our Dupont Cavalcade is the story of a young American who is fighting this war in the frontline hospitals and dressing stations in Italy. The story of an Army nurse, Lieutenant Anne Norris. But in a larger measure, it's the story of the thousands of skilled, selfless, sacrificing women who have been recruited for the armed forces by the Red Cross and who have gone into the unceasing battle against pain and death in all the war theaters in which our men are engaged. Dupont salutes the nurses serving with our armed forces with an original radio play written by Peter Lyon, autobiography of an angel, and starring Helen Hayes as Lieutenant Anne Norris on the Cavalcade of America. Do you think back to what you were doing two months ago? Two months ago would make it the second week in March. What were you doing? Worrying about your income tax? Writing a letter to somebody far away from home? When a lot happens to me, I find it hard to believe that a lot hasn't happened to everybody else. And yet the things that happened to me in the last two months, it's not exactly as though they had a beginning or a middle or end. I guess in wartime, things aren't that pat. Does this sound foolish? Let me start back two months ago. When I was topside on an LCI, a landing craft infantry, heading for our beachhead at Anzio, a second lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps, with the first lieutenant of infantry beside me, flirting with me, laughing at me. What you don't understand, Anne, is that I'm serious. Serious? You've been laughing at me ever since we got on this boat. Not really. Maybe I was kidding a month ago at the base hospital, but we've said a lot of things to each other since then. It's all very well for you. Going back after nearly a year of frontline service, but I'm just on the edge. I know just how you feel, honey. I remember the same... No, you don't, Larry. You were never assigned a duty in the rear as I've been. You can't possibly remember how it feels to be getting away from a rear base, to think of doing what you've been trained to do, to know you'll be good at it. Well, I remember a lot.  Well... And one of them is that when two people are in love as we are, they have a duty to each other, to realize they're a few hours. You still think I'm just flirting, don't you? What can I say to you that will make you see that I'm... Never mind. Don't be angry, Larry. And don't pout. Am I pouting? You're being superior. You're forgetting that I... I'm getting my first real crack at the work I came over here to do. Under fire, in combat, on a beachhead. Don't you see, Larry? Oh, I don't know. Maybe you're right. Maybe we should get married. Go to the commanding officer and tell him we... But I couldn't. Not now. Not when I'm just beginning to get to work, when I'm thinking every minute of how I'll be in those hospital tents, working on the men straight in from the front lines, with the guns right in my ears. I'm going to be nasty one of these days.  You think I'm acting superior now? Just wait till the day I see you on Anzio and pop the question again.  I won't mind if you're superior. Only we'll have missed all that time. How many more hours? To Anzio? Another couple. I'm going to be good. They'll see. I'm going to be something special. I don't think I can stay on deck with you anymore. It's getting me down. I'm sorry, Larry. I don't even trust myself kissing you. Even if it were proper here on deck. I think I'll just give you a salute and... Hope to see you very soon at Anzio. Very soon, Larry. Goodbye, Andy. I'll be saying I told you so too. You don't worry. Goodbye, dear Lieutenant Lawrence. That was at three o'clock in the afternoon. Fifteen o'clock, I mean. It was an hour later we got our first strafing. You wouldn't have been nervous. You'd have been too excited and too much aware of the people around you. Three planes. And they dive and then our planes drive them away. And another half hour and everybody's walking through the shallow water off the beach at Anzio, lugging their duffles, getting their brand new GI shoes all wet. Want a hand? Thanks. I'm Ann Norris, replacement. Glad to see you, Norris. We can use you. I'm Clara Lewis. This is Martha Corelli. She owns this country. The Commandant? Are you the Commandant? Temporary. The girl you're replacing used to be. She was evacuated last week. Forgot to keep her helmet on. I'm a little nervous, I guess. Those bombs scare you? Well, you'll get used to it. Fact is, they still scare all of us. Lewis, I'm going up to mid-center. Help Norris get her gear stowed away, okay? Right. Report to the shock tent when you're ready, Norris. Lewis will tell you where. Okay, and thanks. Here we are, Ann. Come on in. You'll learn to love every stone in this building when the jerry starts shelling again. I heard they shelled the town. Bless you. They shelled the town. They shelled the barracks. They shelled the hospital tents. Shell and bomb and string. The hospital tents? Sure. Now, don't get greener on the gills. This will be your bed. I'll be okay. I just want to get to work. You will, pronto. You want to change your clothes or anything? I don't think so. Thanks. Okay. Then let's go up the hill. I'll take you to the shock tent. Lesson number one, and you'll learn it quick. This isn't like working in a nice big hospital, even a base hospital. Wash up, grab a bite, lie down for a few minutes and get a nap. Maybe later. Right now there was work, an endless amount of it. For me at first in the shock tent, that's where they bring in the wounded to fill them up with plasma. That's where I got my first glimpse of our soldiers. Hey, a new nurse. Hiya. Hiya, soldier. I'll work on this side, Ann. You take the line over there. Right. Okay, soldier. How'd you get yours? I got in the way of one of them, 88s. 88s? Kind of Jerry rifle. Too good, they're making most of your work for you around here. Here comes a needle. Cross stitch? Nothing fancy. Hostile. That's it. Me next? You're in line. Where are you from, soldier? Right now, about a mile up the road. Hold it. And before, I'll guess, Ohio, you've got a Middle Western R. Hurt? Uh-uh, uh-uh, they're at us again. Bombs, is that what that means? Well, it ain't an invitation to the dance. It's no fun being late up here when they start. Here, adhesive tape to keep the needle in place. Next? That's me. Needle, steady. You could stand to shave, soldier. You look like the wrong picture in a before and after ad. Hold your arms still. 12 blood plasmas hanging from wires. 12 blood plasmas dripping life into 12 men. That's what the shock tent is. You can hear us, soldiers, high, nervous laugh. You can hear other sounds, too. Frighteningly close. On the other side of the tent, Clara Lewis looking calm. I caught a soldier's eye and watched him grin. A slow, sure grin. It was about that time that I smiled myself for the first time. Now, I was part of that beachhead. When you work in the wards, you work by yourself. Those are the long, lonely hours. You have a couple of enlisted men around to help you. Medics who bring in the men on litters, the same litters they've been operated on a few minutes before. From the heights above the town, the Germans shell us, just as they shell everything else. They don't play favorites. Set him down here, Lieutenant. I guess so. Easy. He's tough, this baby. I'll hand it to him. Look at his emergency medical tag if he wants some light reading, Lieutenant. I'll do that. Hey, what's the matter with you, Lieutenant? You okay? You're blind, O'Hara. Can't you see the bandage on her shoulder? Hey, what happened, Lieutenant? Nothing serious. They were shelling this area a while back. You want me to get another nurse to relieve you? I'm okay. It's just a flesh wound. Not very deep. Go on, soldier. You've got your work to do. Hey, O'Hara. Okay, okay. Keep your part of dry, Professor. The world ain't waiting for your sunrise. Three bullet wounds in lower left abdomen. Trapnel in chest and upper left arm. Scalp wounds and second-degree burns on face and neck. This boy was trying to break a record. What's that? Sorry. I hurt... You should be asleep, soldier. You're telling me? Just a second. Medic, you... Yes, Lieutenant? Get over to the dispensary and pick up some morphine. About four tubes will do. On the double. Yes, sir. Easy, soldier. We'll have you fixed up quick. What can you do about pain? What can you do? A lot of things. Do one of them. Just one. Take my hand. Hold on. Oh, mother of... One, two, three. Where's my gun? Where's my gun? Quiet. It's only a few minutes. We'll have you fixed up. Think of something. Concentrate. Try and remember something. Poetry or... Poetry. A poetry I know would curl your hair. Maybe I've heard it. Maybe that's why my hair is curling. Hang on. You like baseball? Try and remember the batting averages of every player on the New York... The New York... What do they call themselves rangers, isn't it? That's hockey. That's a girl for you. Here you are, Lieutenant. Four tubes, like you said. Okay, soldier. Hold his arm, my hair. I'll give you a few minutes, soldier, and it won't make any difference to you whether it's the New York Rangers or the New York Elephant. Hold it a harrow.  You figure you'll be relieved in a little while. So you hang on when it begins to hurt worse. Poetry. Roses are red violets. Oh, no, that's too easy.  I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. It's 3.30. You just got to hang on another hour, and then you'll be relieved and you'll be able to get some codeine and change the dressing. Poetry. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. He leadeth me beside green pastures. That's a good one.  It begins to catch fire. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. You are listening to Helen Hayes in autobiography of an angel on the cavalcade of America sponsored by Dupont, maker of better things for better living through chemistry. One of which is lusite, methyl methacrylate plastic, now being used for transparent bomber noses, airfield landing light lenses and compass parts for tanks. As our play continues, Ann Norris played by Miss Hayes and the other nurses are getting ready to take advantage of an unexpected free evening in their Stonehouse barracks, not three miles from the front. Yes, there are even parties on a beach head. A funny kind of party. Some of the time reminding you of a Saturday night dance at home.  Parties aren't late on Anzio. Guests leave around 1030. He never showed up, did he, Annie? Who? I had an idea you were looking for somebody all night. Don't worry, she was. You saw him, Lewis, the day she got here. The tall one with the black hair. I saw him. I didn't realize I was looking for it. I guess what I mean is I didn't realize it. I showed it. Stuck out all over you. We'd better be hitting the hay, kids. How's your shoulder, Norris? It's okay, thanks. It's only a scratch. Good. Well, good night, you two. Good night. Not much of a success to our party, was it? Well, I liked it. Did you? Didn't you? Martha, what's the matter? Nerves, I guess. I'll be boiling in a minute if I'm not careful. Hank, would you? Thanks. Do you any good to talk about it? I'm all right now. My husband, that's all. Still a little new to me. I didn't know. I found out last week he was in the Seabees. Oh, Martha. Is there a joke? I was just thinking. And you were kidding me about Larry not getting to the party. Up at four in the morning on a beach head. Your day has a pattern of work and it lasts 16 hours or 18 hours.  You work for days that melt into nights and back again. And you think the nights are getting shorter, aren't they? In the operating rooms, you work in a team. Surgeon, assistant, anesthetist, couple of enlisted men, couple of nurses. The surgeon is Captain Winthrop. Clamps. Come on, quick. Right here, sir. Sorry. Sorry for what? Nothing to be sorry about there. Jack, finish this light up with you. I'll be getting on with the next one. Right, sir. Take Miss Parker to help you. Okay, what's awaiting us, Norris? Two more fracture cases, sir. Four multiple wounds. Wipe off my forage, will you please? Thanks. Okay, anesthetist. Want the next boy in, sir? Yep, we're waiting. Okay, Norris? Me? Sure, sir. One after another.  Two or three or seven days' growth of beard. Young faces that have seen the front. Men that have crept up on machine gun nests or been too close to the path of a mortar shell. Ninety-seven point five. It's wonderful to have that statistic in your mind. Ninety-seven point five percent of these bodies will be healed. Only two and one half percent will die. It's more wonderful to know you're helping to make that statistic. Now that's it, Norris. Sir? You think we've earned a cigarette? Let's step out and breathe some fresh air and pollute it with a little tobacco smoke. I'm for that. Matter of fact, did you hear? You girls have earned yourselves more than just a cigarette. Oh, here, light. Thanks. What do you mean, Captain? The CO has put in for citations for each of you. It's no surprise, of course. Bang-up jar before them. That's very nice. I know we'll all be very gratified. Well, that's a curious reaction to being told you're going to be cited.  Looks very pretty. But by the time you're ten years old, you know it's made of tinsel. You're tired. Sure, who isn't? It's just, it's just the distance seems more than geographical sometimes. The distance from the ideals we heard about at home. Hey, now, Lieutenant, wait a minute. They're not so far away. What do you think of the kids we've been operating on? I'm serious. Think a second before you answer. I don't need to. I never realized before how, how this is going to sound phony. No prefaces, no excuses. Just say it. I never realized before how much dignity men have. Men. Boys. How deep their strength is. And I'm not talking about the physical strength. The griping you hear. You know what that is. Just a pressure valve letting off steam. But I'd never dreamed people could be so fine until I began to see them here on a beach head for the first time. Anything more? Yes, but I thought of the men I've seen back in there. That's what I think. Yes. And will you argue that this dignity has no connection with the ideals you say seem far away? Oh, I wasn't thinking about these men.  And all those words, the four freedoms, anything you want to point to.  You think the Jerry doctors on the other side of the hails there can say the same. Much less be sure of the truth of it. You think a scientist, a medical man who's watched the Germans murdering and looting can think in terms of the dignity you recognize? Quieter tonight, isn't it? Yeah. Are you ready to go back to work? Are you? More ready than I've ever been, doctor. Thanks. Two months on a beachhead, that's me. But there's just a little corner of your mind marked reserved. Reserved for the future you haven't got time to dream about. And if it happens to bump into you on the beachhead, it's just a fluke. Just the best piece of unforeseen luck you'll ever have. Here, Anne, let's sit down under those trees. For let's see, I've got 20 minutes before I have to go back on duty. 20 minutes away from war to say hello to the man you love. You still haven't answered my question. I wish everything was as simple and clear to me as it is to you. Love and so merry, night and so dead. What's so complicated? 19 minutes, really only 18. Then I'm back at work. What's complicated is the war. You know something, Larry? When I first got here, I was frightened. I was scared of what I'd do if I got wounded and scared of getting wounded. Yeah, and? I found out I wasn't the only one. And I found out that when I got them over their fear and their pain, I'd cured my own too. I know how that works. I'll tell you another thing I was in the first few days I was here. I was lonely. I missed you so badly, I'd cry sometimes at night, don't laugh. I'm not laughing. The point is, I ran into a lot of boys who were pretty lonely too, for the same reason. Talking to them, kidding them, getting their minds off what they were thinking about. You did the same for yourself. That's right, it works. I could even do it better because I... Gosh, it's a big job we've got. You can't take time off from this job ever, Larry. It's not easy to say this. You see how complicated it is. I see. You've got two choices, Larry. We can kiss and say goodbye or... Or I can give you my telephone number and you can call me up when you get to town again. This beachhead won't always be a beachhead. No, it won't. Let me give you my telephone number, dear Lieutenant Lawrence. I haven't seen my Larry since that day. If I... When I do see him again, it'll just be another lucky fluke. The war will take him away from me again. And if I don't see him, well, the war is a big place. Anyway, I know he's got my phone number. Thank you, Helen Hayes. Miss Hayes will return to Cavalcade's microphone in just a few moments with a special message for the nurses of America and their families. But first, here is Ted Pearson speaking for Dupont to tell us how the chemical compound phenothiazine is making possible more sutures for surgical use by our Army and Navy doctors. For wounded men who must have surgical care, Army and Navy surgeons must have surgical sutures. Doctors use a number of materials to sow wounds, and one of the most widely used is the gut suture made from the intestines of sheep. Cat gutters, some people call it. These sutures are needed now in great quantity, and of course they must be manufactured only from the intestines of healthy sheep and lambs. There's a parasite called the nodular worm that sometimes damages the intestinal walls of the animals and spoils them so they're no good for sutures. Sheep men in the United States are doing everything they can to protect their flocks against the parasite that causes this damage. And here's where chemistry comes into it. Six years ago, the Department of Agriculture suggested as a remedy against animal parasites of this kind, a compound called phenothiazine. Dupont was the first chemical company to manufacture phenothiazine, and this compound is widely used by sheep men today. Here's a report from a packing plant in Minnesota which will give you an idea of how effective phenothiazine is. In 1942, with no phenothiazine treatment, a third of their sheep and lambs showed a heavy infestation. But in 1943, with the farmers of Minnesota using phenothiazine, the figure went down to only 7%. Thus, more material for sutures became available. Phenothiazine, a chemical compound unknown and untried only six years ago as a medicine for animals, is one reason why there are more surgical sutures. It also means that we'll have more wool and more meat because it protects cattle and hogs too. We may even see the day and very soon too when the pasture lands of America will be practically free of a number of these parasites thanks to this compound. Phenothiazine is one of Dupont's better things for better living through chemistry. And now here is Helen Hayes, star of tonight's Cavalcade. I have been asked to say a few words to the nurses of America and to their families. I do so in all humility and no feeling that because I just played the part of a nurse, I can now speak as one. No, I speak to you as a woman and for this little moment as the voice of the Red Cross. Before me is a clock ticking off the remaining seconds of this broadcast. Around the world, there are other clocks ticking off more momentous seconds. Those that remain before invasion. This is another zero hour. In it, I appeal to every nurse, qualified for military duty to reexamine the reasons that are keeping her at home. I ask every nurse's family to weigh the comfort they feel at having their nurse with them against the comfort she can be against the very lives she can save in the final assault upon our enemies. The clock ticks on. The time is running out. You must forever live with the decision you make now. If you value the lives of our fighting men above your personal concerns, report to your Red Cross chapter tomorrow. Next Monday night, DuPont presents John Garfield in The Blessings of Liberty, the dramatic account of an American soldier and the deep personal meaning of the principles he fights for as he faces the enemy in battle. Cavalcade's orchestra was conducted by Donald Voorhees. This is Roland Winters sending best wishes from Cavalcade sponsor the DuPont Company of Wilmington, Delaware and inviting you to join us again next Monday evening when John Garfield will be our star. And now for your further listening pleasure, may we suggest that you stay tuned to NBC for the Firestone program, the Bell Telephone Hour and Information Please, which are to follow immediately over most of these stations. The Cavalcade of America sponsored by DuPont came to you from New York. This is the national broadcasting company.


Marissa Alexander, Michael Brown, M.A., M.B., one female, the other male, but both black. And by their blackness they are inextricably linked. They face the same character assassination, the same oppression, the same remarkably unjust criminal justice system. Marissa is still alive and her freedom is within reach. May we rise up to free her. For in freeing her we take one step closer to freeing the young boys who might one day be Michael Brown.