![]() ![]() (In the pitch decks, the company favorably compared itself to WeWork.) In all, investors pumped more than $175 million into the company, which as of 2020 has been called Flow Cannabis Co., with Flow Kana the first in a family of Flow brands. In early 2019, Flow Kana announced a $125 million Series B, the largest-ever private raise in weed. But the biggest chunk, $15 million, came from Gotham Green Partners, a New York City–based cannabis private equity fund whose principals had made a huge pile of money on Canadian weed companies. Some of that money was from weed-specific investment fund Poseidon Asset Management some of it was from Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor and the guitarist from Moonalice. In July 2018, Flow Kana announced a $22 million Series A funding round. In interviews, Steinmetz, whose email signature identified him as “Founder & Chief Servant Officer (CSO),” frequently channeled Uber’s Travis Kalanick, referring to Flow Kana as a “technology platform.” ![]() In the company’s early days, its founders staffed tables at San Francisco farmers’ markets, handing out free organic apples and empty mason jars with instructions for how to place orders online that would be fulfilled by bicycle. The crowded field of startups already had an “Uber of weed” and an “Amazon of weed.” Flow Kana declared its aspiration to be the “Whole Foods of weed.” The business plan required marketing outdoor weed, generally considered inferior to the indoor variety, while also handling the logistics necessary to bring a rural product to urban consumers, while-somehow-also scaling up massively, reaping huge profits, and not breaking any laws. Steinmetz, a native of Venezuela, where he’d run a food-distribution company focusing on stevia before tech lured him to the Bay Area, and his cofounders, including Nicholas Smilgys, who’d managed inventory at a San Francisco dispensary, wanted to become very big while preaching the gospel of small.įlow Kana proselytized something its founders called the California Way: small-batch cannabis sustainably grown outdoors, rather than mass-produced indoors with energy-intensive lights and filtration that in California suck up as much as 3 percent of the entire power grid. ![]() Pacific time.įrom the beginning, there was an uneasy paradox at Flow Kana’s core. Join Chris Roberts and Alta Live on Wednesday, August 16 at 12:30 p.m. The crowded field of startups already had an “Uber of weed” and an “Amazon of weed.” Consistent with the theme, Flow Kana declared its aspiration to be the “Whole Foods of weed.” What did that mean, exactly? It wasn’t quite clear, but it sounded good enough to be transcribed by reporters from Fast Company, Vice, and others. That is, if you had your money in the right place at exactly the right time. The green rush was on, and for anyone too late or too poor to make a fortune in Silicon Valley, here was another “once in a lifetime” opportunity to get very rich very quickly. ![]() After years of other states (and Canada) creating what advocates and their allies in government promised would be a multibillion-dollar industry, it was finally California’s turn. Flow Kana had been around since 2015, one of a bevy of weed companies launched during the medical-marijuana era with the clear intent to cash in on future legalization. This was April 2018, and legal adult-use cannabis sales had begun in California that January. One of the last times I saw Mikey Steinmetz in person, the impossibly enthusiastic entrepreneur Men’s Journal and the Jewish News of Northern California dubbed the “king of weed” was dressed up like a cowboy, strutting around the 300-acre Mendocino County “cannabis complex” owned by his company, the “farm to bowl” startup Flow Kana. ![]()
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