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But with a handful of unpublished story ideas on his mind, he started a Substack newsletter to keep himself busy before starting graduate school.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.
Jay Wright has lofty goals for Little Beach Harvest as a business venture, but he also believes the tribally owned cannabis company can be a cultural inspiration and a force for further destigmatizing cannabis.
Jake Granger can take some credit for bringing delivery to Oregon’s legal cannabis industry. After operating a successful cannabis delivery company in San Diego, Granger headed to Portland, Oregon, to recreate the business as Potland, using a loophole in the regulations specifying that dispensaries that are open to the public had to be at least 1,000 feet apart.
Custom Cones USA was an unexpected, runaway success for co-founders Harrison Bard and Fredrik Rading. The wildly successful Washington-based rolling paper company ships throughout the United States and 47 other countries, serving about 18,000 clients that range from head shops to the Jordanian military.
Gary Perry was climbing the cannabis industry ladder when he realized the culture had much more to offer than just cannabis.
“There had to be something more than just industry,” he says.
Cristy Aranguiz is somewhat peerless in the cannabis industry. As CEO of Cannabis & Glass, she has helped build the company from a single store into a thriving multi-state operation with three retail locations in Washington, one in Oregon, another three in Iowa (under the brand Iowa Cannabis).
Eric Latta took his first job in recreational cannabis at Buddy’s in Renton, Washington, in 2014. Eleven years later, he returned to the store to help rebrand it into Kush21, the state’s largest cannabis retail chain, which Latta helped build from one to 15 stores during the past eight years.
The pandemic hit right in the middle of Eric Sellew’s senior year of college. He was living off campus with a few friends and smoking “more joints than we should have at the time,” when a simple observation changed the course of his life.