When his home state of Illinois began the transition from a medical-only market to allowing adult-use sales, Vib Gupta saw cannabis as a natural fit for his background in software engineering.

While longtime cannabis operators have grown particularly numb to ancillary business pitches, CEO Shahar Yamay has found considerable traction for his family-owned pre-roll automation company Hefestus USA. He credits the success to his company’s dedication to the market and its ability to fully automate any trend from mini joints to blunts and even infused pre-rolls.

Well over 3 billion cones manufactured since the company’s inception. More than 100 million cones produced monthly. Five times on the prestigious Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing companies in the United States.

As a liberal arts student in Portland, Oregon, Samantha Seagaard was already considering a career in cannabis, but she felt a responsibility to join after seeing the industry firsthand in 2007.

If Sabrina Aragon were to describe herself in one word, it would be “intense.”
“If it wasn’t for my intensity, I wouldn’t try so many new things,” says Aragon, the chief operating officer of High Desert Relief and Outlaw Extracts. “I always want to try something new. I like to explore. I like to travel. I love to meet new people. That’s who I am.”

People who have worked in cannabis for 10 years are somewhat of a rarity.
Those who have been with a single company in the cannabis industry for more than a decade are nearly impossible to find.

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.