Looking Back on 5 Years in Cannabis

Our journey started with a simple mission: to build the best software for cannabis. It’s been an adventure—combine the turbulence of the cannabis industry with the life of a start-up and you’re in for quite a ride. As we celebrate our 5-year anniversary I wanted to look back on our journey—exploring uncharted territory, learning to pivot as the rules of the game change, building the plane as we fly, and smoking the best weed in the world.

In cannabis years, 2014 was a lifetime ago. All legal cannabis in California was medical, with dispensaries operating under the Prop 215 non-profit collective model. Retailers were using manual systems like pads of paper and excel spreadsheets to record transactions or a Frankensteined compilation of software built for other industries. Data and records were destroyed rather than maintained and analyzed. Cash was king. California was the epicenter of both technology and cannabis, yet the two hadn’t converged. We wanted to change that. So on October 14, 2014, my 3 co-founders, Rick, Scott, Harrison, and I launched Meadow with a mission to build the best damn software in cannabis.

We started with delivery. Living in San Francisco, everything is delivered and on-demand so we thought this “last mile” was a great place to start—getting cannabis to patients in a way that was fast, convenient, private, and delightful. We gave patients the power to grab their phones and order from their favorite local dispensaries with professional delivery in an hour or less. Push button, get cannabis. Patients and dispensaries were thrilled to finally see smart, fast, and secure tech being built specifically for them. 

Our very first partner was Vapor Room, a landmark dispensary that has been operating in San Francisco since 2004. Vapor Room’s owner, Martin, took a chance on a new start-up with a big vision and has been an incredible partner every step of the way. 5 years later, Vapor Room is still a Meadow partner using our full suite of Point of Sale software and eCommerce tools. If you haven’t been to Vapor Room, I can’t recommend it enough.

Our next launch was Meadow MD—a platform connecting cannabis doctors to patients for a medical cannabis recommendation. The first physician we partnered with was Dr. Dan Price who has been an emergency physician at Highland Hospital & Trauma Center in Oakland for 14 years. His interest in medical cannabis arose from his own experience with chronic back pain and from seeing patients in the ER who could safely be helped by medical cannabis but instead were prescribed medications that often had limited efficacy and severe side effects. Our first model was built to test for product market fit, not for scale—we personally responded to and manually scheduled every appointment request, tracked routes throughout the Bay Area on Google Maps, and chauffeured Dr. Dan from Palo Alto to Walnut Creek for in-home appointments. Once we saw the enthusiastic response from patients and the growing demand we designed a telemedicine program so Dr. Dan could reach patients all over California. Legal cannabis in California started with compassion, and we found no better ambassador of that than Dr. Dan.

In 2015, we graduated from Y-Combinator as their first-ever cannabis start-up. Our experience with YC taught us to be relentlessly resourceful, to challenge assumptions, and to always make things people want. We started hosting happy hours and community events where we brought together entrepreneurs, activists, local regulators, and other stakeholders. We learned that if you’re not at the table, you’re on it, and there was room for everyone who wanted to show up, put in the work, and be a part of the community.

We worked hand-in-hand with dispensary partners and got to know the day-to-day of running a dispensary, nuances unique to cannabis retail, and the pain points operators were experiencing. This experience formed the foundation of our next launch, a SaaS platform designed to run both front and back of house operations for dispensary and delivery operators. There was a growing appetite to replace outdated software and third-party delivery services with a comprehensive solution for ordering, delivery, and compliance, and we were just the team to build it.

At the same time, efforts were underway to legalize cannabis in California for adults 21 and over. We waded through a number of competing propositions from various groups and eventually Prop 64 materialized. In November 2016, on an extraordinarily strange election night, it passed and ended prohibition in California. This shift to Adult Use in California signaled that there would be a simultaneous wave of both regulation and demand, and emphasized the need for more tools to help businesses with operations, compliance, and scale.

Meadow Platform evolved into a full suite of front-end and back-end tools. In a TechCrunch article titled “Meadow is the Amazon of Weed,” Josh Constine summed up what we were doing perfectly: “As pot sellers scramble to comply with complex regulations, one startup has built the full-stack of specialized commerce software they need. Meadow offers everything from an eye-catching digital storefront for teasing tasty plants, to automated patient records management for which you’ll go to jail if you screw up. That’s why Meadow is emerging as the Amazon of weed. But it’s not just the website where you go to buy the best buds from a variety of top local shops. It’s the AWS powering the back end of the THC trade.”

We continued to add new features to our software to help retailers sell products from their storefronts and delivery services, track customer habits, organize inventory, analyze data, and reward shoppers within one integrated point of sale solution. We currently have the most powerful and comprehensive suite of software available for California cannabis retail and eCommerce.

Our team has also focused on being part of the cannabis community, opening channels of communication, and building camaraderie by hosting educational events that bring together business operators, activists, local regulators, and stakeholders. In these past 5 years, we've hosted hundreds of educational workshops and attended and spoken at conferences all over the country.

In the summer of 2018, we hosted the first annual Meadowlands, a cannabis industry retreat in the heart of Mendocino. Our goal was to create a space where cannabis operators could share knowledge, build valuable alliances across the supply chain, and participate in educational, interactive, and wellness programming among the redwoods. Meadowlands has become a truly singular event bringing together a highly curated group of stakeholders and facilitating important conversations on everything from local compliance to the future of psychedelics.

Along with hosting our own community events, we have also leveraged our point of sale technology to power sales at some of the largest legal cannabis events in the state, including The Emerald Cup, Hall of Flowers, Secret Sesh, and Northern Nights, allowing retailers and brands to sell and track products directly from their booths.

Another focus for our team has been shaping and understanding California’s new cannabis regulations, because if you don’t know the rules of the game you should get out of the arena. The new regulations have evolved multiple times, with the only constant being change. With every new version of proposed emergency regulations we poured over the text, submitted comments, and showed up to public hearings to ensure that the interests of our partners and the community as a whole were represented. The changing regs created substantial changes to packaging, statewide delivery, lab testing, and a four-tier tax structure resulting in prices 30-45% higher than the previous era of Prop 215. Being part of this process gave our team insight into the shifting market, allowing us to anticipate changes and pivot our software to keep our retail partners compliant and one step ahead of the game. 

This understanding of California’s regulations also laid the foundation for our integration with Metrc, California's Track and Trace program, which is being rolled out as Temporary Licenses transition to Provisional Licenses. Every gram of cannabis is required to be tracked from seed to point-of-sale. It's the largest roll-out of it's kind and we wanted to make sure our implementation of Metrc set the industry standard for speed, reliability, and ease-of-use. 

The road has been long, but we’re just getting going. We are grateful every day for the opportunity to build technology that will create a modern framework for an industry that has long been sidelined. Through a deep understanding of both our partners’ businesses and needs, as well as the emerging and evolving regulations, we plan to continue to build the most comprehensive cannabis retail platform designed to bring efficiency, growth, and compliance to the legal industry.

The world is finally waking up to the potential of modern cannabis, just as we had hoped back in 2014. As we become fully recognized as a vibrant industry that is here for the long haul, we'll continue to push the movement forward, helping the industry work smarter and move faster. We'll continue to host community events because we know we're stronger when we work together. We’ll continue to make the best damn software for cannabis.

Before I sign off, I want to extend a special thank you to a few people: Oaksterdam University for creating a safe space for students to learn about cannabis, Debby Goldsberry who inspired us to build; Martin at Vapor Room for being our first and longest-standing partner, Alex Zavell and Hezekiah Allen who taught us that if you're not at the table, you're on it; Y-Combinator for taking on a cannabis start-up when few other mainstream investors would; Michael and David who were the first to show up at every happy hour and community event we hosted; the thousands of farmers who put themselves at risk to serve patients; MPP, DPA, ASA, NORML, and SSDP for their strength and stamina to fight for what is right; CCIA and CDA for facilitating important conversations and representing industry stakeholders—it’s an honor to sit on your board of directors’; our team of superheroes who fight every day for the success of our partners and a diverse, inclusive, and compassionate industry; and our partners—thank you for putting your trust in us, it’s an honor to serve you. 

Let’s keep going, together. It's been a wild ride, but we're just getting started.