As the head of sales for Dove Robotics, Paul Parisi is responsible for bringing automation to Massachusetts cannabis operators. The company, which is an offshoot of parent company Calvary Robotics, set up its Fitchburg, Massachusetts, facility as a test case for outsourcing cannabis weighing and packaging.

Noah Dotson has taken his Washington-based processing company New Standard Labs from about $90,000 in annual sales to about $500,000 in just three years. Perhaps most impressive is that he’s done so with minimal overhead costs.

Green Lane Communication founder Michael Mejer is incredibly grateful to be able to keep his PR firm relatively small and focused on its 10 clients.
“I’m trying to mitigate any kind of downside risk by just trying to take that slow and steady approach,” Mejer says. “And so far, it’s been working.”

Kevin Pattah honed his entrepreneurial skills working in his family’s grocery and real estate businesses in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and started working in the state’s burgeoning medical cannabis industry in 2010.

Mallory Martinez is a sales manager for Artizen Cannabis. But she’s really got her eyes on her boss’s job.

“I hope he gets a promotion, and I can take his position,” she says. “Nobody’s going to stop me because it’s not just a job, it’s a career, and it’s a career that I really, really love.”

Dialed In Gummies president Max Vansluys has been instrumental in building the edible brand into a Colorado staple. The company has products in roughly 600 stores in Colorado, as well as 79% of retail stores in Ohio and is just now launching its products into Missouri.

As the vice president of sales and retail operations at The Flowery, Ilya Shmidt has both his hands full.

On the one hand, he’s continuing to build the company’s dispensary footprint in Florida, the largest medical-only market in the country, while simultaneously establishing the brand in New York, easily the fastest growing adult-use market in the nation. The two states could not be any different in terms of regulations, licensing models or political climates.

At 23, Michael Whittaker was living a double life. He was working as a police cadet, studying criminal justice and, at the same time, secretly participating in the illicit cannabis market with his wife, Jordan Mackenzie Whittaker.

“When it came down to it, I was like, ‘This ain’t for me,” he says of his short-lived career in law enforcement. “I’m going all in with the plant and see where it takes me.”

After numerous awards and hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to charities, PufCreative CEO John Shute seemingly surprised himself when discussing his personal career milestones.

When Jeremy Berke left Business Insider at the end of 2022, he didn’t necessarily intend on launching his own media company.
But with a handful of unpublished story ideas on his mind, he started a Substack newsletter to keep himself busy before starting graduate school. Eventually, with some persuasion from business partner Jay Rosenthal, Cultivated Media became a full-scale media business in November 2023.