Business View Magazine | September 2020

100 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2020 projects that I knew would make an important social change around drug policy and ending the drug war and the inequalities that come with that. And I’ve always been a passionate horticulturalist, mainly as a hobby. But even as an activist I found myself doing food security work in inner cities. “So in 2007, my partner Sara and I started a small-scale basement grow house here in East Oakland, which was a common way to get into the industry back then. Like a lot of people, we’d done back-of-the-envelope math to see if it would work financially. And we decided, wow, we’re going to do this; it’ll be a part-time job; we’ll be rich by the time we’re 30; and we’re going to retire. Needless to say, 13 years later, I’ve not yet retired. But we were naïve and a lot of people still have that perception that cannabis cultivation is an easy way to make a quick buck. We found out that nothing could be further from the truth.”