The Dawn of EOS

(First published on March 9, 2021, on Medium.)

I moved to Massachusetts from Sedona, AZ in June 2018 to start a marijuana farm. Three years later, we are days away from our first sale.

A good friend challenged me to write the origin story of our business. This story is far from over, but I have a thesis about how we got to where we are.

People exist in narratives, and humans only make sense of the world with characters, and motives, and plots, and outcomes. But, I’m agnostic, and often more skeptical than that, about whether any of our stories are real.

Still, it is difficult for the mind not to create patterns and stories even where there is only chaos. But sometimes, the stories seem to force themselves into existence. Sometimes things seem meant to be.

With that disclaimer, I offer this short story that is an incomplete handful of cherry-picked events strung together. I don’t know how it ends. I hope you can relate.

Human agency mystifies me, but I posit that if you want to make things happen in the world, it is simple, and everyone knows what it takes: consistent good habits, practices, and behaviors and a good team bound by common values and a vision.

I’ll backup and start this story a little earlier. After the financial collapse in 2008, I moved to Sedona, AZ so that I could study ancient Japanese battlefield martial arts.

I graduated from law school in 2007 just before the Great Recession. I was working as a tax attorney analyzing financial products. I was one of the first attorneys to be laid off in 2008.

My intention was to stay in Sedona for 3 to 6 months, then go back to work. Instead, I spent the next 10 years in Sedona training. Apart from family and friends, some hiking, snowboarding and other antics here and there, I dedicated all of my free time and focus to martial arts.

It was an ideal lifestyle. We lived in a beautiful home in sunny, Sedona, AZ. For work, I sold timeshare. I worked about 4–6 hours per day, I took a week off every other month, and I made $250,000 — $300,000 per year.

When I told my teacher my intention to start a weed business, he gave me an ultimatum. Stop, or I could no longer continue to train. For 14 years, this tradition was my obsession and a central part of my identity. In short, it was my religion.

So why did I quit my great job, sell our beautiful house, and face excommunication from my martial arts school to grow weed in Massachusetts?

In serious danger of sounding cliche and trite — I wanted to show my children the courage to abandon the familiar to make something beautiful in the world.

Within the incomprehensible vastness of time and space, it is nothing short of a miracle that you are alive, conscious, and reading this right now. The shortness of life, if you face it, can cause paralyzing terror. Alternatively you can draw motivation from the nagging, persistent question it begs:

What will you do with your precious time?

My answer is to create a beautiful, meaningful life. This includes constant self-improvement. But it must go further. Despite my skepticism about human agency, I feel compelled to strive to make the world better. And this includes generating wealth and prosperity for my family and for my people.

Even further, I believe food and farms are where we can address some of humanity’s most pressing problems, among them are human health and carbon gas emissions. And I believe part of the solution is in small, local farms. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond the scope of this story, making a small farm successful is barely possible. For years, I’ve shared a vision that marijuana can re-invigorate the small, local farm. (Other’s agree and have expressed it better.)

Massachusetts released the draft regulations for “Adult Use” marijuana in November 2017. They allowed growing marijuana outdoors with the possibility of connecting the industry to farms in Massachusetts.

So I reread Nassim Taleb and proceeded to convince my wife. She is amazing and agreed without too much thought or hesitation. On March 1, 2018, I resigned from my job, and my wife placed our house on the market. By June 16, 2018, our kids were riding their bikes to the buzzing of giant, New England mosquitoes and the smell of cow manure around our new home in Massachusetts.

When I started this project, I was not focusing on outcomes. I focused simply on good habits. Beginning on Monday, March 12, 2018, I followed a six-day schedule, which consisted of 1 hour meditation twice per day, study for 1 hour per day, 1/2 hour of martial arts twice per day, 2.5 hours twice per day of discretionary time to work on the business, 4 hours per day in three blocks of time with family, 1.5 hours per day of videography, and a 1-hr exercise twice per week.

I followed this schedule religiously for three weeks, then I adapted. My schedule needed to become more flexible with everything going on. Beginning in April, I set my schedule for each day the evening before.

Since August 20, 2018, I have religiously recorded how I’ve spent my time in 1/2 hour increments. This approach was influenced by Peter Drucker’s admonition to “Know Thy Time,” in his famous book, The Effective Executive.

(Currently, my schedule is largely dictated by the demands of the business, but I still diligently schedule work demands and tasks, meditation, exercise, martial arts training, study, and writing. And I continue, as Drucker instructs, to meticulously record my time, manage my time, and consolidate my discretionary time.)

Then things started to happen. Not always how I expected, but things definitely happened.

In the process of starting this business, I have learned that most people, even those who loudly profess selflessness and humility, secretly believe they are the author of all things good in their lives. As a result, most believe they don’t get all the good things they deserve when good things happen. I know I don’t. After all, I quit my job, I sold my house, I left my martial art school, and I dragged my family across the country to start this company. And when it is all said and done, I will have only a small minority interest ownership in the company I started. Sometimes it feels like I got screwed.

But then I remind myself: Human beings evolved as pack-hunting mammals. We have become the dominant species on earth because of our ability to work in groups towards common goals. Without my people, I am nothing.

Hence, from the start, I did not set out to create the perfect business plan. My strategy was to create the best team of individuals with complementary capabilities who could creatively navigate and adapt in a not-yet-existing, indeterminate, complex, and high risk industry. These individuals must share core values, including honor and integrity. Most importantly, these individuals require courage and unwavering determination in the face of many potentially catastrophic problems and obstacles.

Starting a business in an emerging marijuana market requires expertise in law, finance, accounting, operations, leadership, management, security, compliance, sales, and, of course, marijuana cultivation.

During my life, I’ve had the good fortune to gather diverse experiences and meet some extraordinary people that were perfect for this.

The Investor-Analyst. John is largely to blame for all of this. In November of 2017, John called me. He was a friend of a mutual friend. John has an extensive and successful background in real estate, hard assets, and capital assets. He is a CPA, has a BA from the University of Chicago, and an MBA from Yale. He reached out to me because our mutual friend marked me as “the person to speak with about getting into the marijuana business.” In retrospect, this was an odd choice as I had no professional marijuana experience. However, I study a lot, and I talk a lot of shit. Apparently, something I said stuck and made it through the relationship channels, as bullshit tends to do. John’s reaching out to me was the spark I needed. John is the best analyst I’ve ever known and a man of impeccable character. From the time we started speaking about this, we’ve argued over every idea like an old married couple, and we never looked back.

The Master Farmer. Backing up over 20 years, in April 1999, the day after college, I left my home in New York to live on a zen farming commune just outside of San Francisco. For 2 years I practiced Zen and worked on the farm. This is where I came to understand the existential importance of farming, and I met Matt. He has been an organic farmer for over 30 years having grown every crop you can name, including, of course, marijuana. Simply put, he is the best farmer I have ever met. Together, over countless conversations, Matt and I created numerous iterations of cultivation plans and set out to remind people it is possible to grow cannabis outdoors in the Massachusetts sun and soil rather than in a sterile hydroponic laboratory.

The Warrior. While living in Sedona, my martial arts teacher taught a 5-day close combat course. I was an assistant instructor. In 2009, Travis, who was a Marine Corps Sergeant at the time, attended this course. Over the years, I came to know Travis as a warrior, a fellow martial artist, a loyal friend, a brother of exceptional character. I knew security would be a central piece of this endeavor so Travis was the easy choice. Having never served, I am constantly surprised by all of the diverse skill sets he gathered during a 20-year career, including as a Scout Sniper, Reconnaissance Marine, US Marine Raider, and a member of the Special Operations community. He is now our Chief Security Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, Operations Manager, and Construction Project Manager.

Over these three years the four of us have faced the brink of failure many times and from many angles. For most of this time, we didn’t know if we would be able to convince the additional investors we needed of our way of thinking. Fear and doubt have been my close companions.

Today, over 20 more investors have joined our core founding team. Whatever ideas I started nearly four years ago, each person played a crucial role, and the ideas would be nothing but faded fantasies without them.

So far, this is the story I tell. It does not have a neat, clean beginning, middle, and end. This is more of a status report near the beginning or somewhere in the middle. I hope it is not near the end, but we will see.

I won’t leave you with any pithy aphorisms. I have nothing to add to the cannon of wisdom handed down through the ages. I repeat, human agency perplexes me, but it does appear humans intentionally change the world somehow.

You know how to do it just like I do. The only way to move the world, if it is possible at all, is to do the work, have courage and integrity, and surround yourself with the best people you can find.