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What’s the biggest challenge facing the cannabis industry right now, and how are you and/or your company addressing it?
From a retailer perspective, we’re absolutely drowning in data yet starving for actionable intelligence. The POS systems we all run on were architected to satisfy state regulators first — compliance, seed-to-sale tracking, transaction integrity. Retail intelligence was, at best, an afterthought. Every dispensary generates enormous amounts of data and converts almost none of it into operational decisions.
I’m a co-founder and operator of a dispensary in Jersey City, NJ. But in my prior life, I built a data company that helped bring the residential real estate in to the modern age of data standards, API’s and real intelligence.
Over the last 8 months or so I’ve applied all of that experience to solving the data challenge in cannabis from an operator’s perspective. In doing so, I’ve built a POS-agnostic, AI-driven, Slack-integrated intelligence system that has changed the way we run our dispensary. I’m not selling software, just looking to share my experience and help other operators take ownership of their decisions.
Where do you see the most exciting opportunity for growth and innovation in cannabis?
The advancement of AI is creating opportunities for operators to build capabilities suited to their business environment that POS Saas vendors will never get around to building. Similar to the Proptech revolution of the early/mid 2000’s, opening data to innovation will truly unlock growth that has been locked up in proprietary POS systems.
What’s this really mean? What’s this really mean? Operators are no longer waiting for vendors to decide what’s possible.
I’ve written a white paper to give operators a roadmap of what’s possible — How I Learned to Stop Staring at Dashboards and Love AI: A Cannabis Operator’s Guide to Building the Intelligence Layer Your POS Will Never Give You (https://substack.com/home/post/p-196104532)
What’s one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to break into the cannabis industry?
Honestly, this is the same advice I give founders in any industry. Truly understand your core competencies — what are you really, really good at? Then, be equally open with yourself on what you’re really not good at. Then go find partners & build a team of people that complement the stuff you’re really, really good at. With a solid team anything is possible.
This sounds like basic fortune-cookie stuff, but the drive, passion and resilience it takes to be a founder often clouds perspective and sows the seeds of struggle down the road.
What is the most important thing you have learned from your experiences in the cannabis industry?
The most important thing I’ve learned is that emerging transformative markets rhyme. Cannabis in 2026 looks a lot like residential real estate in 2005, which looked a lot like the internet in 1998. Same fragmentation. Same locked-up data. Same massive innovation opportunity sitting right there once somebody decides to unlock it.
I’ve gotten to live through two of those waves now. Cannabis is the third. That’s what keeps me excited every day.
What do you want your legacy to be as it relates to the cannabis industry?
I’d like to help independent & emerging operators grow their businesses & make their customers even happier by embracing data & tech, not being afraid of it. I’d also like to find like-minded data & tech folks to work on building data standards like we did in Proptech, which led to an incredible wave of innovation that continues to this day.