AnnaRae Grabstein: 0:06

Hey everybody, welcome to episode 68 of High Spirits. I'm Annarie Grabstein, your solo host today, as Ben is out on the road somewhere in South Carolina. It's Thursday, november 14th, and I am thrilled to be diving into the future of cannabis technology with none other than Socrates Rosenfeld, the CEO and co-founder of Jane Technologies. But before that, I am going to check in with you guys about my week and some news. I have had a great week connecting with California cannabis leaders.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 0:41

Shout out to some of the folks that I spent time with at the Benzinga Cannabis Market Spotlight in Anaheim over the last few days. I saw friends like Dustin Moore from Embark, darren Story of Coastal hung out with the team from Ruckly, an up-and-coming distribution company. I picked up a really cool shirt from Lucia at Smoke Show. It was a really great event. I picked up a really cool shirt from Lucia at Smoke Show. It was a really great event. So thanks to the folks at Benzinga for having me and having all of us to talk about California cannabis. It's been quite the journey for all of us and it's nice to have an event like Benzinga show up in our state and highlight the issues that are going on here. So that was really fun.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 1:23

And then for a quick little news roundup. There's too much that has happened that I just can't not bring up today. Last night, many of us heard that Matt Gates was nominated for the US Attorney General by President-elect Trump, and you know Gates has consistently expressed support for federal cannabis reform. He voted for the MORE Act while he was voting for things in the House before he resigned, also yesterday, and he also voted for safer banking. Cannabis analysts think that he will be good for the industry, setting aside all of the hurdles that are coming with his potential confirmation in the Senate and some of the other political issues that people do have problems with, with former Representative Gaetz becoming the attorney general. So who knows what's happening for cannabis? I would say that this was a big surprise. We spoke with Hirsch last week about the election and nobody really knew who was going to be put up for attorney general. The fact that Matt Gaetz is the choice shows that Trump is really looking to surround himself with loyalists, but when it comes to the cannabis industry, I don't think that there have been any promises made either way.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 2:38

Some other notable news that I wanted to bring up Agrify. We have been paying attention to in a new way since Ben Kovler became the interim CEO, and GTI committed $20 million of investment into the company. So there was some interesting news this week when Agri-Fi announced that they were acquiring Seniorita, which is a THC beverage brand, from a company called Double or Nothing LLC. It's an all-stock transaction and Double or Nothing is founded by best friends and acclaimed winemakers, charles Beeler and Joel Gott, who have been really well known in the wine industry and have grown and scaled a number of different wine brands in the space. So this is really Ben Kovler and Agrify putting a flag in the ground that Agrify is going to be doing hemp beverage. So it's exciting to see this. It's interesting to see what will follow. Gti has mostly built brands, not bought brands, and so as this category expands, it will be interesting to see if this new Agrify hemp beverage company is going to be buying more brands or building more brands.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 3:50

A notable quote from Ben Kovler was that he said quote working with Joel and Charles made sense from the start. They have an unbeatable entrepreneurial mindset that we needed Agrify to win this next chapter of the cannabis story. I'm excited for them to join the team as we work to close the transaction and focus on growing the business. So it very much sounds like Joel and Charles are going to be part of the team at Agrify and most likely leading this new beverage effort that Agrify has taken on. So I think that that is enough. There is so much cannabis news, to be honest, but I've got a really great guest in the green room and I want to bring him on, so that is what I'm going to do and I will introduce him as well. Hello, socrates.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 4:40

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be on yeah.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 4:43

Yeah, thanks for being here. Socrates, you are the co-founder and CEO of Jane, a platform that has transformed cannabis, e-comm and digital access for consumers. You left a military doctor commander which sounds really bad and you to address the market's accessibility and quality issues, ultimately founding Jane with your brother to improve the cannabis consumer. Today, jane powers thousands of dispensaries and brands and I'm super glad to have you here today.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 5:17

Yeah, thank you so much for the introduction and love the show. It's just a pleasure to be on.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 5:22

Awesome. You have been building in technology for a while in cannabis and I would just love to hear, given your background, how you see technology transforming the consumer experience and industry operations in our space.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 5:39

In many ways. You know, cannabis is a when we were looking at this space almost 10 years ago, we've seen now this opportunity where you have so much demand around this plant, for obvious reasons, helps a lot of people, millions and millions of people. I think I read somewhere it's going to be upwards of $40 billion market this year, which is significant, and at the same time, you have this interesting way for people to shop for cannabis, which is at the retail location of a physical brick and mortar store which outside of groceries is becoming less and less common, right?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 6:20

If you think about any other package, good, more and more people are gravitating online. We've still got a long way to go, but you start your shopping experience at Amazon for most things. If you're like me, legalizing and, I guess, quote unquote, legitimizing the industry at a time when consumers were shopping online and were very used to shopping online for most things, and so when we were thinking about, ok, how do we position ourselves in this space? We love the cannabis industry, first and foremost because this plant helps people, including myself, people including myself but second was it was an opportunity to show the world that there was a new way for online shopping to be done, and what I mean by that is if we go back to this Amazon example.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 7:15

I love Amazon as a consumer. Right? Bezos and his team have said that you start with the consumer and you're working way backwards. They're obsessed with the consumer to the point where, if you're a brand on Amazon, it's a catch-22. One you can reach many, many people, but at the same time, you are losing out on the data and information that Amazon's capturing and Amazon's watching, and they've shown time and time again that they will create their own products, and they've shown time and time again that they will create their own products, and so I'm more of an Amazon shopper than a brand shopper. At that point In cannabis, we saw this opportunity for technology to be the bridge between the online consumer and the offline retailer.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 7:58

And this was from the beginning of the creation of Jane. You saw that.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 8:01

From the beginning. Yeah, I was a sad, sorry consultant before Jane and I was studying tech companies trying to compete against Amazon and at the same time, I was studying brick and mortar retailers big big ones like Walmart, cvs, et cetera who are also very concerned about Amazon. And here we had this confluence of variables in a market that allowed us to show could we create an Amazon-like experience for consumers? I love Amazon because I can search for anything I want, I can compare by price, I can read reviews from actual consumers who have purchased this product consumers who have purchased this product. I have so much wonderful curation coming from Amazon saying, hey, if you like this, other people bought that. Or if you looked at this, you might want to look at that. And we said, okay, can we build that for the cannabis consumer? That's how we can help contribute to the space on the consumer side and not or. And can we also help the brick and mortar retailer reach those online consumers. Have the curation on their website, allow for verified reviews.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 9:11

And here was this marriage that, quite frankly, we haven't seen. The online and offline world merge outside of restaurants, doordash, uber, eats, grubhub and I'm happy to talk about the differences between those ecosystems. But that's really what excited us almost 10 years ago and the mission has really stayed the same. And I do want to highlight that. Tech is one thing, but the power of the plan is really why we're doing what we're doing and it's icing on the cake to show the world and we have a lot of patents to our technology to show the the world. You don't actually have to build another Amazon to do e-commerce. You can actually support small brick and mortar retailers and drive online demand into the local neighborhoods, which we think was pretty cool.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 9:55

Sure Well, bringing up Amazon and just talking so much about traditional technology, I can't help think about the potential opportunity that was created for cannabis technology because of federal small startups like yours and others. Do you agree? Was that an opportunity? Because it kept the big guys?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 10:35

Absolutely. As a small startup, you have to pick and choose where you compete and the last thing we want to do is, you know, pick Amazon as a competitor or Shopify early on. We feel like actually I know this is maybe comes off as a bold statement that we position ourselves quite advantageously if and when those big players ever want to move into the space. We feel like we've been able to do the hard yards to put ourselves in a position that's going to be very difficult for them just to flip the switch and move in to cannabis because, quite frankly, it's different If cannabis allowed for the Ubers and DoorDashes of the world into the space overnight. I haven't met a local restaurant here. Where I'm at in Santa Cruz I know you went to UCSC there are not a lot of restaurants that are super stoked on DoorDash or Uber Eats.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 11:27

Sure, I'll push back a little. I mean, I know that Uber is delivering cannabis in Canada because it's federally legal. And then we've seen some of the big platforms come into the hemp space because they feel enough protection legally. So you've seen platforms like Shopify being like a major e-com platform. So don't you think that they will come when they feel that there's an opportunity, and will they be acquiring you or competing with?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 11:57

you, the argument is not if, it's when, but really the conversation should be on the how. And here's what I mean DoorDash and Uber I guess we're going to talk about restaurants right now. Doordash and Uber are extremely powerful logistics business. I know pretty intimately that Uber wants to touch anything that moves in this world Last mile freight. I would imagine they get into air at some point, who knows? But they aren't an e-commerce business and the reason behind that you know same with DoorDash is because they haven't had to be A restaurant's menu. Let's take McDonald's, for example. Right, I haven't been to McDonald's. I have a rule like if I eat McDonald's I've got to be at an airport. But wherever I am in the world at an airport, I know the number one value meal is the Big Mac, right?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 12:58

No, matter where I'm at and that's the Big Mac, and that never changes that Big Mac. A few things that Big Mac is not sold outside of McDonald's. It's not like Burger King or KFC is selling the Big Mac. That Big Mac's not changing day in and day out. It's always going to be the Big Mac. And so, as a restaurant or as Uber or DoorDash, if I'm a restaurant I can just manually update my menu one time and that will permeate and persist until I decide to change it In high frequency.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 13:33

Retail dispensaries carry on average seven 800 SKUs on their store shelves and those products are changing over 15% day in and day out. And you got to think like the one-to-one pomegranate gummy from Wild is sold across thousands of retailers. Well, guess what? The way those retailers code in that one SKU is going to be very different from store to store to store to store. Uber and DoorDash don't have to solve that problem and we have a lot of IP around our capabilities to cleanse that data. So that's one piece that's going to be challenging for the Ubers and DoorDash to figure out. They haven't figured it out in groceries either. Or alcohol, et cetera. They do the delivery, but if you've ever tried to order alcohol on Uber, maybe it's not the exact bottle of wine that you want, or you go to Instacart and you try your favorite cereal box cereal brand, and that's not always available. That's the reason why.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 14:42

But I want to highlight one last point on the how is the model? It's expensive to deliver products, to insure a driver and a car and all that stuff. It's a very expensive business. They pass that cost on to the restaurant and the consumer. It's very expensive to get a sandwich. If I order a burrito in Santa Cruz, it's going to cost me 30 bucks. On DoorDash it's kind of nuts. The restaurant makes very, very little margin as well, and it's not because DoorDash and Uber are evil, it's just because they have a model that is very expensive.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 15:23

If we go back to your original question as to hey, what would happen if Uber or DoorDash would have come into this space 10 years ago? Prices would have been margins would have been compressed for the retailer. And guess what, now, when I order from my local Mexican restaurant in Santa Cruz on DoorDash which I don't do anymore I call ahead and I go and pick up. That restaurant has no idea who I am. Why? Because DoorDash claims me as their customer. Is it fair? Is it unfair? I'm not going to be the one to decide that.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 15:57

What I am saying, though, is we don't think that we should be disintermediating the consumer with the local retailer. In fact, we should be the invisible bridge that connects them, and because we don't have to put drivers on the road, we don't have to insure those drivers. We are the digital infrastructure that enables this sale. We don't have to pass on so much cost to the retailer, and I think that's now, if you think about what Instacart, doordash, uber charges their supply side, their businesses that are on their platform. Very expensive, very cost prohibitive Cannabis hasn't had to experience that, which I think is a benefit and can probably be correlated to the fact that these big businesses couldn't move in at that point. Now we're entrenched. Now we've set the market paradox. So when not if Uber, doordash move into the space, they're going to have to figure out a way to navigate and enter in as partners in a balanced ecosystem, rather than the dominant player taking all the customers, taking all the data, taking all the margin.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 17:01

Sure, I hear you and I think you created a good delineation between kind of what is non-cannabis commercial e-commerce technology but going into cannabis technology and what's happening in the space already. I just saw a graphic a few days ago that was one of those technology market maps that shows all these different companies categories. Yeah, and I mean it is a vibrant ecosystem. There are a lot more companies than there used to be and there are companies that are focusing in certain areas and certain solutions, and then I'm seeing definitely a move towards more verticalization, meaning more solutions in one platform for companies to not have to be logging into different tools for their e-com or their POS or their CRM and it all being in one place, things like that.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 17:53

When you were just talking about one of the differentiators of the strategy of cannabis technology versus what we saw with Uber and DoorDash, you were talking about data and clean data. This is a constant issue in the industry because I think track and trace and batches have created a lot of complexity with, yes, maybe it's that same one-to-one pomegranate gummy, but there's a different batch number every single time it gets made again and potentially slightly different test results and things like that. How do you look at standardization of data so that it can become useful both within the tech stack that you're creating and managing, but also so that everybody can gain the best business insights from standardized data. What does that look like so?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 18:43

we have obsessed about this issue since day one. We have amassed the largest cannabis catalog in the world. We have 2 million plus SKUs, all catalog photos, descriptions, standardized taxonomy, serving size, flavors, terpenes. We have this hypothesis that if we could clean and organize an entire industry's worth of product information before Google, before the big guys move in Amazon, et cetera, that would allow us to unlock a lot of value for the industry, and I can get into those details if you want. We can automate e-commerce. We can tell stores exactly what SKUs to carry, how to price, what are good compliments, what are good substitutes. We have an advertising business which allows us to merchandise individual SKUs, like Spotify puts a song on your playlist based on your propensity to buy these products. Based on your propensity to buy these products. So if you're an edible buyer and we know you love wild and you've reviewed stuff for sleep, well, man, we can put the right product in front of you at the exact right time. Who benefits from that? Everyone. Everyone. The consumer benefits from that right Because you have personalization. The store benefits from that because they don't have to manually update a catalog. They can just draw from ours and they can understand down to the SKU level how their products are performing, and then ultimately the brand also benefits from this because they can target the right customers. And I use the word target. So if you and I had a tincture company very niche product, right why would I be spending advertising dollars, kind of spraying and praying, hoping that someone buys my tincture? Wouldn't I want to be able to be very efficient with my ad spend to put my tincture in front of a person who has the highest probability to buy that product? And you can only do that if you standardize the data.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 20:51

People talk about catalog as like this broad sweeping, like oh, we have a catalog, we have a catalog, we have a catalog. It's one thing to amass a catalog, it's a whole other thing to standardize that. And back to the example. Wild's going to get good plugs here on the show where that one wild gummy, that pomegranate gummy, against a single SKU on average, against a single SKU on average. There are thousands of ways to abbreviate that SKU misspell it, code it.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 21:25

Gti has a way to code it versus Cresco, versus a small retailer. We cleanse that through machine learning and we have patents on this now where we can identify and say oh, you spelled wild in a weird, crazy way, we actually understand that this is the wild pomegranate gummy. Let's load up your menu with that exact product, let's merchandise it for the brand and, ultimately, let's ensure that the consumer is looking at the right product and knows exactly what's on the store shelf without ever having to actually walk into the physical brick and mortar store. So that's what we do in terms of cleansing data, and we think it's the backbone of this industry. An industry with no data is really an industry operating in the dark, and we, like knowledge is power and numbers don't lie, and this is why we built this global catalog 10 years ago.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 22:16

And so taking this global catalog 10 years ago and so taking this global catalog concept into the larger technology ecosystem. The customers that you guys are building for most likely are working with other solutions. At a minimum, they're working with at least their state's track and trace tool and they are likely working with a bunch of other stuff on top of it as well. Are you sharing the standardized data? Is it connected to whether it's metric or biotrack in a certain state Like is it matching, or is this something that's just inside of the Jane ecosystem?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 23:00

No, we integrate with over 100 third-party software providers track and trace, crm, point of sale, virtual bud tenders because we believe that an open ecosystem is a healthy ecosystem where everybody can win. Closing that off is maybe beneficial to Jane, but it's not beneficial to the industry and we run every idea through the filter of is this a win-win or is this a win-lose? If it's a win-lose meaning Jane wins but someone has to lose we don't do it. Like, hey, if Jane makes a lot of money but you know what, this is going to mess up the dispensary, we don't do it. Hey, jane's going to make a lot of money but that's going to take advantage of the customer and exploit them just to click on something.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 23:40

We don't do it and we've left a lot of money on the table, because money and truth are separate from one another in my opinion, and we like to align with the truth and the truth is in order to build a legitimate industry that's going to last forever. It can't just be all about Jane. So, yes, we do integrate with multiple third parties. We have a point of sale now that we've been talking about verticalization that comes with this catalog, so it can cleanse all the state tracking stuff and the way you present this to the bud tenders or front facing to the consumer is ran through the Jane filter. But we share that information with the other third parties Because ultimately, again, that's what's in the best interest of the consumer, the brand and the retailer.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 24:24

I love what you said about truth, so I want to double click on that a little bit. And so, while we're telling the truth as business leaders, there's multiple things that can be true at once, and we can both be competitive in the marketplace with other businesses, but also be admiring what they're building and what they're doing, and taking ideas that we're seeing and incorporating them into our own business. And I I want to challenge you to tell us who you think either people or companies that you find are doing really groundbreaking or interesting things in cannabis technology specifically.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 25:02

You're really putting me on the spot.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 25:04

You know, we get inspired by everyone all the players really we have a saying at Jane that winning doesn't necessarily mean beating. Winning is playing your own game, and we get inspired by point of sale businesses that have been around for a very long time doing some really interesting things. For the bud tender, we saw this really cool user experience where the store can customize the way the flow of the checkout goes, which I thought was really really cool. I love a small company called Happy Cabbage out there. It's doing some really interesting things in terms of helping retailers understand how to discount and how to provide promotions to the right consumers at the exact right time. We like this small company called Jointly that's doing some really cool stuff as a virtual bud tender to help augment the staff and then also provide more curation for the consumer.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 26:09

There are a lot of different interesting providers out there and we draw inspiration from all of them, but ultimately, in a way, we like to play our own music. We really like to draw inspiration not just from cannabis tech but from all technology providers and and go in there and use that as inspiration. We get inspired by really cool innovative plant touching brands. Know folks that have the courage to not chase THC but really differentiate themselves through sun grown or you know lower THC products with CBG and other cannabinoids and, you know, integrated into the offering. We love that stuff.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 26:52

Yeah, just differentiation within the catalog is also probably nice, but within a sea of sameness.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 26:58

Yeah.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 26:58

Well, so, outside of the technology, of the cannabis technology space, I know that you guys are doing some, some stuff with AI, and you know AI it has been an emerging technology for the past couple of years. I think that all of us are starting to use it in different ways, even just in the way that we produce this podcast. I mean, I I probably have like 10 AI touch points before I publish this at the end of today and um, it's just been so incredibly useful and I haven't quite seen it hit the cannabis technology space in a forward way yet, and I'm sure you guys are thinking about this, working on it. What is the emerging technologies that you are most excited about and that we're going to be seeing within your development?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 27:46

Yeah. So I think really good AI should be invisible. Really good technology should be invisible like great design, right, like you shouldn't know that you are, that there's AI like happening when you fire up your Netflix and they're recommending shows to you YouTube, amazon, when you are. My favorite is Spotify. I draw the example a lot that I I'm gonna repeat myself, but this is what I do. I'm sorry, nra. So if anybody's like, oh, sock's gonna talk about music again, here we go I love music, so all day long let's do it cool, all right, cool, you love music, right, everybody loves music.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 28:30

music's like cannabis, deep down, everybody loves it. Yeah, you just, if you don't like it, you just haven't found the right song or the right artist and I say, yeah, don't I also love Spotify.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 28:40

I've been like a paid Spotify user since the day that I could be a paid and why do we love Spotify?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 28:45

right, it's a great, great way to curate and discover new music, new artists. It's almost like man, it's my own personal DJ. So if you listen to a song and I listen to a song the exact same song at the exact same time you might be crying and I could be feeling, wow, so happy. My wife loves music that makes me sad and she's like what are you talking about? This makes me so happy. And then I'll listen to music that makes me really happy and she's like what are you talking about? This makes me so happy. And then I'll listen to music that makes me really happy and she's like this really kind of bums me out. So music is personal, right, it's very, very personal.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 29:27

Cannabis is also extremely personal. If you try a strain and I tried the and you, we take a puff from the exact same joint you're going to feel slightly different, majorly different, than I am right, we're not going to feel the exact same way, based on our endocannabinoid system, et cetera. How we're feeling that day. What happened to us? That what we eat this morning, all this stuff affects that this morning, all this stuff affects that. Well, if Spotify can get it right in terms of putting new music in front of you that you had never otherwise thought that you would love. Why can't we do that with the plant?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 30:07

And so we've worked very hard for the past. You know, we built this catalog about 10 years ago. We've had a whole machine learning team here at Jane in-house for a few years now, and we've been working on various algorithms. One I'll talk about is what we've coined as MyHi. You know, myhi this is my relationship, my own personal relationship with the plant, and so how does that manifest? When you go on a menu, your favorite store's menu, you're in Petaluma. I'm sure there are great stores in Petaluma.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 30:43

No stores in Petaluma but in Sonoma County. Okay, I'm sorry.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 30:46

Petaluma In Sonoma County. If you go visit that store's website and it's being powered by Jane the products that you see will be different than the products I see. It'll just be merchandised differently, right? Imagine going into a grocery store. I'm the worst at grocery stores because I'm going to out myself. I don't really go to the grocery store too often. When I'm going there, though, I have to like go up and down the aisles and find what I need. Imagine if they were like oh, socks just walked through the door. He loves these brands. Here it is, just take it from the shelf and you're good. Oh, and if you took this from the shelf, here's some new things that you might like.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 31:27

Right, we can do. How do you determine when somebody walks in that store? What data are you pulling about the individual people? Here's the cool part, right? Is it just cannabis, past purchases, or is it like, oh, I was on the Sephora website or I was on the Whole Foods website and so now you can take that and-. I love the way you think we're not there yet.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 31:48

It's within the cannabis ecosystem. Okay, we're not there. Like, hey, follow in Anna Rae, because that's kind of creepy, that, oh, she went to Sephora and spent this credit card. But the cool part about cannabis and we do this online and now we're integrating this into the in-store environment through our self-service kiosk and our point of sale the coolest well, not the coolest part about cannabis the coolest part about cannabis is cannabis.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 32:09

An interesting little variable, though, in the shopping experience is that you have to show your ID when you walk in the store. So I go to a local store and I've been there 50 times and they treat me like I'm a new customer. Every time this is made up, the local store knows because I shop way too much. But right, that's not great. Like I've been there 50 times, you should know my name. You should know the last time I came here, you should know my preferences, what I like, what I didn't like. That would be pretty cool if we could empower the bud tenders. The staff at that brick and mortar location say hey, Anna Rae, welcome back. Hey, we have these products ready for you. We've got deals on your favorite brands. Hey, here's another product that we think you might like, because we know you love mercine in an edible format to help you cool out and go to sleep. Here are some other new brands that are coming out. Would you like to take a look?

AnnaRae Grabstein: 33:04

so I love this.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 33:06

I think it's so important, and I realize it because if I, I'm a pretty disciplined person and so if I sit down to watch netflix at the end of the day, I will go into it with a like okay, anna Rae, you're allowed to have 60 minutes of screen time, the same way I might talk to my seven-year-old and then you need to sleep because sleep matters. But at the end of that 60 minute show, netflix already just started this next show that they know that I want to watch and all of a sudden I am watching another hour of Netflix because Netflix knows me so well that they had an idea of what I might like to watch. But one of the things that I think is unique about cannabis is that I mean, I'll out myself. I would say that I am pretty polyamorous with my cannabis preferences and that like it's not like. Oh, I bought a gummy with Mersene one time and now, even though I loved it, I only want gummies with Mersene.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 34:02

It's like I want to keep trying different things all the time and some people are different. I was talking to someone when I was at the event this week who was saying that they have this one strain that they love to go back to time and time again, and 90% of their cannabis consumption is this one strain. I'm like on the complete opposite. I want to just try new stuff all the time. So so when you're trying to train a model to help the bud tender when I walk in the store or when that other person walks in the store, how do you create that technology? What is going on?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 34:38

We have a saying I was a pilot, so I was not smart, because the people that were really smart took care of the engines. And I'd ask, I'd be like to the crew chief, I'd be like, hey, crew chief, how does this work? And they'd tell me PFM. And it took me a while to understand what PFM stood for. The P is pure, the M is magic, and I'll leave it to your imagination what the F stands for.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 35:04

So that's how we say, in the machine learning world, there are millions, millions of data points that much smarter people are trying to figure out at the company. What I can say, though, is that, coming back to this music analogy, if you just love hip hop and that's what you like to listen to, and you're just listening to hip hop all day long Spotify is going to allow you to go deeper and deeper into hip hop. Right, they're not going to show you classical music, but if you're using your word, polyamorous to music, musical tastes, well, spotify is going to treat you a little differently. We do the exact same thing. So, like I'm not a big extract guy I don't, I don't smoke a lot of hash or diamonds or resin, so those kinds of products are further down in the menu, not harder for me to find, but less prioritized.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 36:03

I love flour, I like edibles, so those are prioritized up more, and it's not just hey, buy this again, buy this again, buy this again. It's would you like to buy this again? And hey, would you like to buy this again? And hey, would you like to explore. So it's um, it's really personal to the customer in terms of how we do that. This is why I uh, I don't get near any of those algorithms, because there are a lot more, much more intelligent people on that trying to try to figure that out and the data is coming back to you know, we do a pretty pretty good job.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 36:35

Yeah, it's the magic. I hear you Well, you're bringing up the other people and I, ben, and I, always like to think about leadership and scaling and growing companies, and you've been at this for a while. This is not a company that has been around for 12 or 24 months. You're close to a decade right Building this, and my understanding from when we talked before is that you have a fully remote team of 175 people. Is that right?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 37:01

Yeah, that's right yeah.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 37:03

And so I would just I'd love to dive into a little bit of the human element of building this thing. You've talked about the purpose and the mission that's really driving the creation and the growth and the vision behind the company, but what has it been like leading a fully remote team of 175 people While in this fast moving industry? How do you all keep up? What's the magic?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 37:26

What's the magic? I've led in various capacities. I've been really lucky and fortunate to be in positions of leadership since I was early 20s, leading platoons in Korea, the company in Iraq. This has been the most fulfilling and challenging leadership experience of my life, of my life. Challenging in the sense that it is remote and that you can't see people, you can't touch them, you can't. It's hard to feel over Zoom. You know we do a pretty good job of it, but there's something still like in part, it's like watching live music, you know, like there's something about it Fulfilling in the sense, though, that I feel like we've built such a wonderful culture and created a really safe space for people to be. And so why is this working so well? I think number one. You know if I'm a bad cook, I'll be the first one to admit it, but if you gave me really good ingredients, I can make you a decent sandwich and I'm not saying a cook makes sandwiches, but like that's, that's my level, right. But if you give me the best chef in the world and you give them bad ingredients, I think my sandwich will taste better because it has better tomatoes, you know, cheese, better bread, et cetera.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 38:56

In creating a recipe for a company the ingredients are the most important thing, and the ingredients are the people. And we take hiring. It is the number one. Most important thing that we do is attract, grow and retain talent, and we don't need the best people, we need the right people. We need people who are team oriented, people who are willing to operate in times of uncertainty, people who can take ownership when ownership needs to be taken, people who over communicate, people who understand that this isn't about just dollars and cents and winning and beating, but that there's an underlying mission to provide access to a plant that helps people, that what we do will set forth a standard that will be followed for decades to come in this industry, not just in the US but for the world. And we've done that. So that's that's kind of number one.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 39:56

An additional piece is leaders. I see too many out here in Silicon Valley. I say we're adjacent to Silicon Valley. We're not really in Silicon Valley here in Santa Cruz. You know this. It's a very different culture, but this is like hero worship of the guy, the girl, the one that's going to take us to the promised land. Make all the decisions. Elon Musk, oh, steve Jobs. Invented the iPhone. Oh my God, mark Zuckerberg, you're a genius with meta. That's BS.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 40:25

This is teams, and can you delegate empower? Take care of your team and they will take care of the company. I have some ideas. I don't have the best ideas all the time. In fact, I got a lot of bad ideas most of the time. But if you can create a space where people can feel heard and seen, they feel safe making mistakes, what are you going to get? You're going to get unbelievable ideas dispersed across the organization and not consolidated to one. That's why you got a lot of CEOs saying you got to come back to the office. I got to watch exactly what you're doing. Oh, I don't trust you. Oh, we can't communicate. Well, that's a sign of poor leadership here in a distributed workforce. At Jane, we have good leaders, good ingredients in the employees and the right culture that you can change the world the employees and the right culture that you can change the world.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 41:19

So the people, the retention of talent, fostering of leadership. But in terms of an operating system or how you create, I like to talk about like the rhythm of business, where people can figure out like the vessel for how to foster leadership and how to show up and what the expectations are. There's a lot of different frameworks out there, especially within technology. There's lots of different ways that people build and manage products. Do you subscribe to a certain system or have you created an operating system, either for yourself or that you mentor and train others on to help them learn how to be leaders?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 41:58

We have a program called we say the culture is our soil. At, jane, if you're into gardening, if the soil is rich, everything beautiful will grow from it. If the soil is toxic, you can get the best seeds in the world, but they won't grow. Maybe you've been part of those organizations before anyway, where you're like man, it's really toxic here and nothing's growing except for more toxicity. We, we, we do not subscribe to that. We, if we find a, a toxic person which is extremely rare I don be honest with you, I haven't found one yet at chain, you know, we say, hey, this is probably not a fit for you, you got to go. But in terms of, we don't subscribe to any like, I don't know traditional, we do this and this is what we do and it's, you know this, scrum or agile, it's just leadership, it's communication, often over communicating. We have touch points every single day, from the CEO all the way down to the org. You are checking in with your team to start your day every day.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 43:10

That sounds like an operating system. That sounds like a clear expectation. Beautiful, okay, this is cool.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 43:16

I didn't know. We had an operating system. We have weekly cadences, we have dashboards, we have reports. Every Friday, every Friday, the entire company comes together for an hour and we give an update on the business, wins, learnings. And here's the most beautiful one, and I hope someone steals this one day One employee, at the end of every closeout, will share what they are grateful for. Take five, 10, 15 minutes and the beautiful thing is you get to learn about your teammate in a capacity that's not transactional, and what we will start to realize is, wherever you're situated in the world north, south, east, west, city, rural, man, woman, old, young, black, white we're all grateful for the same things and that's what ties us together. And sometimes, most of the time, people say they're grateful for Jane. Some employees are like no, I'm not saying that, that didn't make my list, which is completely okay, but we realize there's something there that ties us together.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 44:19

Great culture creates resilient companies, and resilient companies can work in remote environments. Poor culture doesn't create resilient companies. And then what do you have to do? You have to micromanage, you have to consolidate, you have to control and as someone who's been part of those organizations, you know the army is kind of you. Could I have examples on both both worlds? I wanted to create Jane, where this was a place where we could treat you like an adult, like a mature adult, and that you want to be here, not have to be here, and I think that's paid off for us.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 44:56

Yeah, I will absolutely say that you have an operating system as someone that works with lots of companies.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 45:03

It might be not a framework of someone else's, but when I said rhythm of business earlier and we've talked about music and clearly you're a music fan I think that creating a rhythm of business is like. That is the operating system, and it sounds like people on your team have some things that they can depend on in terms of what the structure looks like and that, I believe, is one of those pathways to creating that safe vessel for people to explore and to make mistakes and to reinforce cultures that, when they can depend on the way their leaders are going to show up, they can depend on the expectations of how they're expected to show up. And absolutely what you said about checking in on what's going on in the business. To be able to get that cross pollination of understanding whether someone is in marketing or in product development, to be getting insights into things that are happening across the ecosystem of the business, to have better context and understanding of the way that their work relates to other pieces of work, can be really empowering Wow.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 46:04

That's cool, yeah, that you said that much better than I did, and now I can say, yeah, we do have an operating system here at Jane, so thank you.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 46:10

You do. Yeah, and it's one of those things I think is the undercurrent of companies being able to scale successfully, and certainly in the context of cannabis, where everybody has been chasing profitability now for the past 24 months or so and really focusing on being able to create cash flow. I will often look at a company's financials and they're asking questions about how do we get there? What are the moves that we need to make? I think the clarity on mission across the board and on what the objectives are to align around the biggest ones as a company depends on the team, and without that you're nowhere. So, really cool. Couldn't agree with you more Awesome.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 46:57

Well, we're getting close to the hour. There's a few things that I didn't get to talk with you about today. I think that before we move to last call, I would love to get your take on how much you are getting involved in policy there. You know we're on the back of this really complicated, divisive election that just happened. We don't really know what this new administration is going to be doing with cannabis, but I'm curious how you think of policy and navigating regulations and laws and planning for the future for Jane.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 47:32

You know this is our third or fourth. Actually. When we started, obama was president, then we went through a Trump administration, then Biden, now back to Trump. It's kind of our fourth run. Now, can I? I don't want to sound this is not kind of blowing off the question, but it does matter. It definitely does matter. It matters more broadly than cannabis, in my opinion, but for us it's not. If it's how we're going to do this, it's not. Oh, if Matt Gaetz does this or it's just like cool, whatever comes to us, we're not going to stop.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 48:10

We are committed to building, to playing our part it's not just jane to playing our part to make sure that this plant is given the legitimacy, the respect that it deserves. It's been helping people for millions well, I shouldn't say millions of years, tens of thousands of years, maybe millions, I don't know. Uh, long time, yeah, long time. And for us to get to this point when we started was colorado, was legal colorado, oregon, that was it. And now, look, we have, we're in 39 states. Canada's legalized, europe's going.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 48:50

We were when. Who was the attorney general when? Trump in 2016? Jeff, thank you. The dude from Alabama. Oh my God, we were so scared.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 49:01

Oh, what's going to happen? Oh hey, mission continues. We'll go figure this out, because we're not here to say, oh, let's just get to legalization and that's our exit. There is no exit for us. We're building this thing to last for as long as it could possibly last. We're not going to kind of sway and get so sensitive to kind of who's sitting in the seat. Do we pay attention to it? Absolutely, is that important? Yes, but it's not the only thing. And for us, the way we navigate it is we have an end state in mind or no end state in mind. It's actually kind of let's go, continue to do everything we can to expand the access to this plant and take care of businesses along the way, and the rest will take care of itself. And I know that sounds pretty trite, but it's the truth and this is how we we navigate. You know it's disappointing in florida, man, it's one of the I never understand us politics when you can get a majority vote and still won't pass yeah right, we know it's not.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 50:03

Oh god, florida's never going to legalize.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 50:05

It's like okay, it's when people aren't going to stop consuming cannabis in florida, and we know that it's when yeah alabama, it's when, south carolina it's when and we're in terms of profitability and getting there. We are committed to being here for the long term so that we can. I would love to to ring the bell and be like man. A 50th state, now legalized DC, is ready to go like federal legalization is there. We want to be around for that, and whether that's in a Trump administration or future administrations, the story is yet to be written and we're here for it.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 50:40

I love it. Well, that brings us to the end of the hour and it is our last call. So, socrates, this is your chance to leave a lasting impression on our listeners. Any advice, call to action, a message for those shaping the future in cannabis. What is your last call?

Socrates Rosenfeld: 50:57

In a very divided country right now. They I don't know who they is, but they've succeeded in dividing us between red and blue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Cannabis is truly one of the few things that unites us. Republicans smoke, democrats smoke, city people smoke, rural people smoke. So let's ensure that we stay united.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 51:28

I was so fortunate to enter this industry during the medical days. Where were there some folks who are just exploiting you know this like gray area? Of course, sure, and there was a lot of folks here for the mission to to really say, yeah, man, this, this plan helped me, so I'm here committing my life to help this plan. I was one of those people. I got to meet some really extremely impressive pioneers that we don't know their names, right val corral, dennis perrone, steve d'angelo, like debbie golds, like folks that really were on the forefront of this.

Socrates Rosenfeld: 52:09

Let's not forget what we're fighting for. It's not to make VCs a bunch of money only. It's not to IPO. It's not to win or beat the competitor man. Let's not forget why we're doing this. Let's not forget the veterans who need this plant. Let's not forget the people who are getting off of opioids because of this plant Thousands, millions of examples. So let's remember that cannabis truly is a healing of a nation. Let's not forget the why and if we can do that, this is how we're going to build an industry that lasts, because if we start dividing, we start trying to fight all the time, and that's the purpose of our business. We're not going to make any progress. So let's continue to remember our why, share that with the world, get inspired by others, but ultimately play our music and I have faith that the rest will take care of itself. You know, we're still standing here, 10 years, a few different presidents, and I don't think that's going to change moving forward.

AnnaRae Grabstein: 53:14

Nice. Well, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate you sharing and it's been a great conversation. So what'd you think, folks? Did you learn something as we wrap? Remember that the dialogue does not have to stop here. We invite you to continue these conversations with us. Engage with us online. Let us know what kind of conversations you want to have. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends, follow us on LinkedIn and other social platforms, and remember to stay curious, to stay informed and, most importantly, to keep your spirits high. Until the next time, have a good one.