The Bossticks - Why The Way We Socialize Is Changing & How To Evolve Ft. Jake Bullock, Co-Founder & CEO Of Cann

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

#928: Join us as we sit down with Jake Bullock – Co-Founder & CEO of Cann, the THC-infused beverage company revolutionizing the way people socialize. Fed up with the negative effects of alcohol, Jake founded Cann – offering a range of microdosed beverages that serve as alcohol alternatives made with simple, all-natural ingredients. In this episode, Jake gets real how he is disrupting the social beverage industry, shares the brand's origins, how Cann gives you relaxation without the hangover, iconic celebrity support, & how they are shaping the future of a complex cannabis beverage space.   To Watch the Show click HERE   For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM   To connect with Cann click HERE   To connect with Lauryn Bosstick click HERE   To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE   Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE   Head to our ShopMy page HERE and LTK page HERE to find all of the products mentioned in each episode.   Get your burning questions featured on the show! Leave the Him & Her Show a voicemail at [phone].   Visit http://drinkcann.com and use SKINNY for 20% off your first purchase.

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Skinny Confidential, him and her show. Today we have Jake Bullock on the podcast. He is the co-founder. and CEO of Cann, the THC-infused beverage company revolutionizing the way people socialize. Can offers a range of microdose beverages that serve as alcohol alternatives made with simple, all-natural ingredients. This episode is all about carving out your own category, your own niche, creating a brand from the ground up, understanding a little bit more about what's going on with

alcohol alternatives. We also talk about alternative health practices, dry January, the future of social drinking, and how to build a business from scratch, like I said. Jake and his team have built an incredible company and an incredible brand and there's a ton of lessons in here for any aspiring entrepreneurs, brand builders, marketers, and anyone looking to build a brand that stands out. With that, Jake, welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her show. This is the skinny confidential, him and her. So grandmas are drinking THC-infused beverages. They are. It's pretty amazing. I mean, we started the company for like cool millennials that are young and want to be social, go out, you know, close down the dance floor, but be in a workout class the next morning. And And we kind of designed it around that, thinking that's who would love the products. And we very quickly found out that we were wrong about that. We first learned this from Brentwood moms. There were like women that were going into MedMen where we launched and buying out the entire store of Can. I told you I was shipping it from L.A.

To Austin when you guys first started. What year was that that you started? So we launched in the summer of 2019. Yeah, because I remember it was like a thing. If you knew about it in L.A., it was like, people were like, where do I get a can? Like, where are they? And you, I think you had like, a driver would show up where you'd have to go to a dispensary. And it was like a rare item to find.

Yeah, because we launched in the dispensaries, there was also like delivery services. It was really hard to get. And they, the model is a pretty challenging model, the dispensary model. Often they were out of stock. They didn't really care about beverages. And especially ours, because it's so mild, it's not going to get anyone high. Most people go into dispensaries to find products that get them high. And so we were kind of an afterthought.

And as a result, no one could find the products, but people love them. And so they would reach out to us on our Instagram. we would be like driving around LA, dropping it off. I mean, pretty much anyone that asked us, we would give them product because we were trying to make it a thing. And it was amazing to hear these stories of mostly moms in Brantwood. We first found them in Brantwood, and then they appeared when we moved to NorCal and they were at Marin.

It was like these moms. We kept like, what is going on with moms? And what we found is that actually young moms were like our killer customer because if you have a young child, like a two-year-old waking you up at five in the morning, you do not want a parent hungover. And that strategy of like a couple of glasses of wine the night before. just like falls on its face. If I could like, if I was painting, like if I was a painter and I was painting like someone

said, hey, can you paint hell? I would, it would be me hungover with my children charging in the morning, screaming at me to make breakfast. And it feels like I'm like landing on the beach in Normandy. Like explosions going around. I can't figure out where I am. I don't know which way's up. My head is pounding.

Feel like I'm sweating. I'm about to throw up. And the kids are like, let's get going. Every parent listening knows that feeling. it is the worst. So true. And because the kids are like that, right? Like, it's, it is also the case that you still need something at the end of the day.

Like, it's not like you can just be like, okay, I'll stop drinking alcohol entirely and like, you know, relax with a sparkling water, right? And so that's where this fits in perfectly because you're going to get a mild buzz. It will help you relax, help you unwind. It will help you, you know, giggle or laugh with your partner watching TV, doing something with friends. But then you wake up the next day, ready to go. I would love to take this episode, like very how I built this. Okay. So let's go back to when you first decided to launch this company. What was the epiphany that you had to start this brand?

Yes. So I had grown up in Colorado. Colorado was the first state to do this funny sort of cannabis dispensary thing for adults. You could go in with your ID and get access to all these new products. And I wasn't living in Colorado at the time when that happened. And so it ended up becoming this interesting thing where I had friends when I would go back to Colorado, be like, oh, will you smuggle out, you know, X thing? It was always like a gummy. People seemed to like gummies. So I'd be smuggling out these gummies, which was a trip. Like they're like Sour Patch Kids. They actually, I think, probably were. Someone was buying Sour Patch kids like in bulk and spraying them with weed oil. So you would get some that were sprayed on the ends that were like double-dosed and some in the middle that were underdosed. It was like Russian roulette playing with these products. And also not very adult. Like if you think about this like new intoxicant that's going to change the world, it's becoming legal and all these markets.

And it's like you're biting the head off of a gummy bear because you eat the whole thing, you get too high, right? That seems a little silly to me. We have pretty good evidence. I had done a bunch of boring things for this. I'd worked in investment. banking, management consulting. I met my co-founder at Bannon Company. I went to bank capital and invested in consumer brands. And they taught us how to think about these like new categories, right? You use analogs. And so we have analogs for this. What are other mild intoxicants? Caffeine,

alcohol. It's like great. Okay, how do we consume those as like human beings? Well, we've consumed them over thousands of years of human history through drinks. Presumably, we will do the same with THC and CBD. And that was kind of the insight that I had of like, okay, it's going to be a beverage. Now, the problem is there were beverages at the time. If you went into the Colorado dispensaries, bottles like this, sugary lemonade's 100 milligrams of THC. Like it's not even, charitably, this is like for a medical patient. It's an insane amount of THC to consume. Our idea was, well, what if you made them more like the potency and strength of beer, right?

Or a glass of wine. How would that work? How long does it take the body to metabolize a glass of wine? That's about an hour. Okay, well, how much THC can the body metabolize in about an hour? And we found that that was two milligrams. So if I drank a 100 milligram bottle, I would have just been in outer space or what? Okay.

This is important. So you would have had a really uncomfortable, probably anxious and paranoid experience. You would be fine. Like in a couple days, you might be foggy the next day or two, but you'd be fine, which is important because it is so much less toxic than alcohol, right? If you, you drink a fifth by yourself. If you drink a bottle of whiskey on your own, you're going to the ER. You're not going to be fine.

And you may not make it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that person's a lightweight. I'm just kidding. So when you decide. to launch this, you designed the product, in my opinion, towards females, it seems like. It's a good question. So we didn't intentionally do that, right? So we're two men that started

the company. We're queer men. So we were like kind of gays and girls from the start. But the idea was that this was going to be unisex. Like we wanted it to have broad appeal. Like we were building a global mainstream brand. There was definitely like a pretty. And this is intentional, right? If you think about it seven years ago, these marijuana dispensaries are opening up everywhere. It's kind of a scary thing. If you walk into them, and a lot of our customers have never even been into a dispensary, but you walk into one of these dispensaries, and you see some bizarre stuff. It felt like a little seedy.

It felt like a little seedy. You know, even the really nice ones still had like gloopy yellow, you know, extracts in little containers. And you're kind of like, oh, yeah, don't touch that. It was kind of intimidating, too, because they had these huge guards with guns. Yes, you got to show your idea. Like, is this, it might be had it to some list. I never went into this dispensaries because I was scared, Lauren. But they had, I'm just kidding.

They had all, they were all over L.A. when we were there. I mean, there's places like Med Men and the others. There was like billboards everywhere. Like literally, I remember one day over, it felt like overnight there was just like 100 dispensaries. And that must have been around like 2018, 19 period. That's probably right. And so we wanted to kind of meet that with something completely different, right?

It feels approachable. The cans are little. Like you can drink the whole thing. Don't worry. This is not the pot brownie experience you had in college that you're afraid of, right? This isn't the Sour Patch Kid head that you had to buy it off of. And by using the colors, like the pastels, the line art illustration that we have all around the can, you know, it's signaling, appetizing. If you actually play around with it, we love this idea that like as you consume the product, that takes on a little bit of an interesting character to it, right? You're following it. There's like movement upwards. The whole point was being approachable. That is so true because I remember drinking one of these and staring at the pink can. So that's all strategic. Yes.

It reminds me of those things you used to look at when you were little and you'd have to. like squint your eyes. I forgot what those are called. What were those called? What were those called, Carson? The things that you would look at a painting. Carson's like a decade younger. He has no idea what we're talking about.

But you would look at a painting and it was like. It was one of those, it's a painting where if you looked at it, it looked like the same thing, but then all of a sudden, like a dinosaur image would present itself or like a shape or whatever. Yeah, there's like vibration from how. It's going to drive me nuts. Someone needs to DM it to me. Okay.

So what was your first moment that something major happened? for the brand that you guys were like, we're on to something. So we, it's funny, when we first launched, everyone kind of told you like, the way that this works is you go to a bunch of small stores and you build up a following, you get into the small stores, and then you take that success in sales and you go to the big ones. We kind of did it the opposite way. Our first sales meeting was with MedMed. At the time was the largest dispensary chain in California.

And they became our first customer. They saw this and they were like, we're in their sort of like kitchen cafeteria area. We're having this meeting. It's going well. They pull one of the head buyers over and says, what do you think? of this, try the product. We had samples on hand. They loved the taste. And the head buyer says, yeah, this is great. Let's put it in the June, the June reset. This was like April. We were not ready to manufacture for June reset. And so we had to basically go underground for the next six

weeks and make enough product just to get them the PO. We launched in MedMen. After three weeks, they said, and this was to directly answer your question. After three weeks, they were like, great, the test went amazingly well. You sold out in all the stores. We want to extend you to all of our remaining stores and were like doubling the PO per store. So it became really big, really fast on the California dispensaries scale. And then a month after that, we launched on East, which was the largest delivery platform. So right off the bat, we saw that there was like real traction. These dispensaries were trying to solve a similar problem that we were addressing, right, which is how do we get a new customer in? The stoners are coming. They found the dispensary is fine. But how do I bring this into the

mainstream? What about Kate Hudson? What happened with that? We were very lucky from the beginning, in large part because no one could find these products. We were in L.A. And if you think about it, people in entertainment care about what goes into their bodies for all sorts of different reasons. Some of it is health and wellness reason. Some of it is like if I have a call time super early the next morning, I can't be hungover. I can't have puffy red eyes. Or they have had an experience with alcohol in their life that they've kind of moved on from, right? There's a lot of people in recovery as well in the industry. So this fit really well in L.A. in that like entertainment community. Anyone that reached out to us on Instagram with a blue check, no matter who they were. And the whole

city trades on proximity to fame to some degree, right? You have this like, I'm so-and-so's hairstylist or I'm so-and-so's this, whatever. Great. We were like, we don't care. We'll give you the product, but we incessantly followed up. My co-founder was amazing at this. He would text back being like, did you give her the product? Did she like it? What did she think? What's the feedback? We're new. We're a startup. Like we love as much feedback as you can get. And are almost like a level of harassing so that, you know, most these products don't make it to the talent, right? I think you guys harassed me. We probably did. This is a long time, long time ago. I was like, what did you think? Can we send you more? Smart. And it worked. And

what started happening is it would snowball. So I think Ruby Rose was the first, like, famous person through a hairdresser, got the product, loved it, reached out to us. We kept giving her more and more. And we did this as almost like a regular strategy and very slowly started getting kind of like in these circles and people were talking about it. And because it was so hard to get, because all the dispensaries were always out of stock, it became this thing that like, oh, you have to reach out to the brand, they'll drop it off. Kate Hudson was one of those early people. I loved the story, you know, saw the premise up behind it. And we got her to invest.

So it actually started with Gwyneth Paltrow. She was our first, like, really famous celebrity investor. We went to the goop offices in Santa Monica. It was actually kind of hilarious. My co-founder had been, she had been his babysitter in New York City, like, years ago. So we walked into the office. Well, Palo was his babysitter. Yeah.

In New York City when he was like two years old. And it had nothing to do with how we like got the meeting. But when we walked into the conference room, she was like, hello. Like, I'm Gwinneth. And we said, hello. And Luke, my co-founder said, We've met before and she's like, oh my God, did we have sex? And we're like dying laughing.

He's like, no, you were my babysitter. And she's like, oh, okay, great. What was she doing babysitting? Amazing, right? There is a funny story about how her mother, she wanted a landline and she wasn't allowed it unless she paid for herself. So she was really young. Really young, yeah.

So it's like a teen. Okay, I get. It makes more sense. We convinced her somehow. She actually really liked the rhodes, the liquid packets because something you could add to like a tea at night and it would be kind of lemony and delicious and help you fall asleep. Once she invested, It was amazing for us because all the other famous people that reached out, we said,

well, we'll give you the same deal that we gave Gwyneth. And that one could be like, no, I want a better deal than her. She's wildly famous and created this huge empire. That was how we got Kate Hudson to invest. She invested. And then maybe about a year later, we wanted to do a holiday campaign. And we were like, would you do something with us? And she was like, yes, I would love to do something with you.

She had a vodka brand called King Street Vodka. And we're like, what if we do this kind of fun, irreverent holiday sort of cheer thing where we do cranberry sage can, which is our seasonal flavor, holidays, and Kingstreet vodka. So we put the two together, had like a whole winter wonder scape inside of a house in L.A. She brought her friend Baron Davis. They went to Crossroads together, who's also an investor in Cannes. And the two of them had this, like, fun sort of like high school reunion, drinking can and vodka. So in the early days, was it mostly angel checks like this?

Just different, you find an interesting individual and say, okay, come on the cap table, do a check. Or was it institutional? Yeah. So as you can imagine, THC is a challenge for some of the big funds, right? because they have these clauses and their documents that say we can't invest in anything that's illegal. It's like, okay, fair enough. So we couldn't really get the like traditional big folks, but we were able to convince some real consumer venture investors. Imagineing Ventures is one of our earliest investors and has been a great partner to us. They've invested in things like skims and Farfetch,

which have done really well. So we got folks like that. We also were able to get some of the marijuana specific funds. So like their mandate was just to invest in cannabis companies early on. So we had a little bit of a balance. We tried to do one foot in consumer and one foot kind of out. And that helped pretty well. But we also had all sorts of restrictions, right? And what we could do from an advertising standpoint. And as a result of that, being able to leverage celebrity influence and their megaphones was a big part of scaling the brand in those early days. You mentioned off air that people were literally throwing money at you guys. Yes. How is that changed over time? Yeah, it's funny because at the time we didn't really, like,

if you would have asked me five years ago, I would have said fundraising was so hard right now. we were in a different interest rate environment. There was a lot more capital floating around. And when that changed, it became so much harder, right? Back in five years ago, everyone said, all that matters is growth. Just grow, grow, grow. We want to see your sales numbers doubling every year or more than doubling. And we did that.

We kind of did like, you know, 200 grand in the first year. And then we did $3 million. And then we did $10 million, right? And it's like, that was really hard getting there. And then the whole world changed, right? And it was like, okay, well, we actually were fine with 30 to 40% growth, but you need to be profitable. What about your unit economics?

Like, can we talk about growth, gross margins. We didn't even look at gross margins for the first three years. And we were kind of lucky that we were able to do that because we were in a capital raising environment where as long as we kept growing, people would write us checks. That is crazy how much the landscape has changed now. Well, it also... Now they're like, give me your firstborn. A lot of those companies, though, that were doing that just like growth for the sake of growth with a lot of, you know, free-flying capital got crushed when it turned because they couldn't write the ship and they couldn't get profitable because they were just, they were too far gone already.

I just think that it's an important story to tell because depending on the cycle you're and I think for young entrepreneurs that like in a weird way, raising capital was like glamorized. I think at that period of time for all of us that were doing it then. But and I think if you're a first-time entrepreneur like just raise, just raise, just raise. But when it flipped, it was brutal for a lot of those companies that were stuck in that cycle and couldn't get to profitability. They just lost their companies. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

I mean, I get this question a lot from entrepreneurs that are just starting out asking sort of like, how did you think about the fundraising environment? And it's sort of good news and bad news for them. The bad news is that it's changed dramatically. The good news is that I've had the experience and wisdom now instilled in me that it's never either of them, right? It's never just growth. It's never just profitability.

It's a multi-objective function. You need to be focused on both of them. They both matter to some degree. And that balance is really kind of your job to go figure out. And it has a lot to do with what's going on in the world and the opportunities that are in front of the business. When I think about it all now, I just think that like the goal of the CEO, is just to, yes, to your point, you want it to grow, you want to try to be profitable,

you don't want to lose much of money, but like I look at it as like, you just want to survive longer than everyone else for as long as possible. And over time, like, it starts to get, and what I also say is it's much easier once you get to profitability to squeeze out more profit. I know that sounds very counterintuitive, but like to, it's, I think the hardest thing is getting to that point. But once you're there, it's actually like not so hard to jump the profit up. Yeah. Because you're working with house money at that point. I think that's right. And you fix, once you fix some of those fundamental problems, right, like to your point, a lot of those brands that survived through the easy capital flowing days, but couldn't make it after that

was because there's something fundamentally wrong in their unit economics. And it's usually, you know, these D to C companies that built a business online and they were able to acquire customers cheaply. And then when they weren't able to do that anymore, the whole model unraveled, right? I think I talk a lot of times about how our business is really a retail business. I mean, we sell products online. It's usually because of availability. People can't find it in their local liquor store so they get it from us online. But if you can get it in the local liquor store, that's way better. The customer's doing the shipping for us. It's going to be a better service. They'll get it today or maybe if they're like DoorDash and GoPuff. They can get it in an hour. And that's a lot better

than waiting for three days for it to come in the mail. So we're really building this business now for retail. To your point, like once we got gross margins to a point where they started looking really healthy, it was almost easier to keep pushing them up. What are the challenges of being in the beverage business. Beverge is really hard. Right. When you layer on natural, we're a natural beverage, no preservatives, we don't put any of that junk in. When you layer on a highly controlled intoxicating ingredient, it gets a lot harder.

You really stacked everything against you. So we have basically all the sort of structural issues would tell you these products are going to be hard to make money off of. And they are. It is not an easy game, particularly in the retail environment, right? Like there's all sorts of crazy stuff that happens on grocery shelves and liquor store shelves in terms of marketing, slotting fees, things you have to pay to just show up before you can even start selling product, right?

And so all those things kind of latter to make it really, really hard. But on the other side, you have a bunch of benefits, right? We drink beverages all the time. It's how we've socialized for thousands of years of human history. People want drinks. And so those things kind of, you know, need to weigh each other out for you to be successful. Can you sell online? We can sell online.

It depends on the state, I think, about like 35 states allow it. Can you do paid ads for THC? We, it's a little tricky. Sure. Because we, so we haven't talked about this yet, but we extract our THC and CBD from hemp. So what does that mean? means that right now we are federally legal. It's not a controlled substance. This is not like the marijuana you would find in a dispensary in California or any other state. That allows us to do a

bunch of things we wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Although in the bill that just reopened the government from about a month ago, there was language that said in a year they're going to basically ban all these canned products that are derived from hemp unless there's a change in the regulation. So November 12th of next year, the cap of allowable THC from a hemp product goes to 0.4 milligrams. So what are you going to do? We're trying to change that. I would say probably most of my time in the next three to six months is going to be in Washington, D.C., working with lobbyists, working with industry associations, trying to stop

this ban from going through. They gave us a year. So the important thing is, it's not necessarily a ban in the traditional sense. Usually when Congress is like, this is illegal, you know, for loco, flavored vapes. It becomes illegal immediately, right? In this case, they gave a year largely so that the industry of good actors could go out and find I love how you're looking at solution. We have to, right?

Like, it's existential for the business. And we also know, like, so many consumers love these products. So we owe it to them to our business, our investors, to go fight for this. What's interesting, Congress isn't trying to ban my, like, cute two milligram pink drinks, right? They have good reasons for trying to restrict hemp products because there are highly potent, 200, 300, 500 milligram. Often they're, like, in gummy candies marketed towards kids, sold in guys. stations, bad stuff shouldn't be in the market, right? So we've got to kind of fix those two things.

Let's keep the bad stuff out. Let's let the drinks that people love. And adults, again, like the faces we're talking about the moms, the grandmas that love this, they love these products. Like, let's allow them to keep. I got a good idea. Yes. Get some champagne glasses and pour it in champagne gosses and pass it around to Congress when they're making the decision. Oh, you should be a lobbyist. Hey, Congress. Bring me. I'll pass it around. They'll be laughing. I think they would be... I think they would love that. And give them a little light, love, laugh, light, dance, love.

You have to try the products, right? To your point, like, if you get this experience, this is not scary, right? A lot of people, myself included, have an experience with THC when you're young. What was your experience? No, no. So my experience is I was never a THC user. I never smoked. And so what happens is like somebody passed something around in college.

and it was probably way too potent and way too much. I can't picture you high. Have I ever seen you high? And next thing I know, I'm like on the floor looking up trying to find God. Wait, how many times do you smoke weed? Like, I don't think I've ever seen you smoke weed. Like maybe two or three times in my life. But I used to give you gummies sometimes and you've tried this.

Yeah, yeah. But that's what I'm saying. So I got scared off smoking it because I probably had too much given to me by somebody who was like, oh, let's see what happens. this guy and so you don't know. And I think a lot, a lot of people have that experience. And then I know other people that I've like never had a bad experience. Like it just, it just works with them right away for this. What is what is the typical experience someone can expect if they're like, hey, I had, you know, I'm a little scared. Like what? How potent is this stuff? Right. So the first

thing is we have an endocannabinoid system. That's like important. We don't have an alcohol system. Like part of the reason alcohol is so toxic is it the metabolites of alcohol really poisonous to liver and to the body and it goes into the cells in ways that that's not what's happening here. So we're already sort of starting from a place as a little bit more mild. Your experience that you had in the past of getting way too high, it's almost all potency based. And I think a lot of times, you know, the most approachable THC products that you may seem like just like looking at them, oh, gummy, that seems great or a cookie or something like that. How bad can that be? Or actually some of the worst because of the way that the body absorbs them. You know, smoking, we know smoking

things is bad for you. Like we're that generation. Oh, I hit that bong when I was in seventh grade It's so hard. It might have been out of an apple. I was so high. I was literally in outer space. I can't believe how high I was. And also, what's the other one? What's the big,

that's a bomb, right? Yes. What's the big long one? They used to have those big, long, huge glass shaped like penises that you would put your mouth over. And you don't know when you're that young. Like, you don't know that you shouldn't be inhaling all that. It gets you so stone.

This is nothing like that. literally. What the hell were you doing back then? It's literally like, this is what it's like. That experience that I just shared is like drinking a bottle of vodka. Your experience is like having a beer. Yes, that's exactly right. That's how I would explain it.

I think it's pretty close. It's like everyone that had grain alcohol like ever clear in high school, right? Like that's the equivalent. What's the green one? Absent. Absent. Yes. It's meant to be really, really mild.

It's like a gentle sort of like, floaty buzz. Also, your body will metabolize it in about an hour. So similar to a glass of wine or beer, you can have another one if you enjoyed that experience. If you didn't, you'll feel it subside. Because it'll dissipate it in your system and then you can come back to it. Well, like, if you're drunk or you're too high, you can't go back. If you take an edible, most of that is going to be absorbed through the lining of your stomach and your liver. It's too late. Like what's ever happening happening. It's also why it takes like an hour or two for those to kick in, sometimes even longer. Well, that's why people also get in trouble because they think it didn't

work. And they'll take another one and it's all downhill from there. These you'll feel in the first 10 minutes. I also can't do a pot brownie because I'm like a two brownie kind of person because you taste it and it's not hitting and then you'll have another one. What you're just saying? You want to just keep eating the brownie. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. What to you when building a team makes a good employee?

We've been having this discussion a lot. You obviously are building infrastructure with what you do. What makes a great employee? Yeah. We talk a lot about attitude and effort. It's kind of amazing. Right. If you think about a startup, I had never.

been a CEO of a company before. I had no experience in that, right? I'd done boring sort of finance things before starting can. And so the bet that I sort of made was that I could learn things really fast. The things that I didn't want to learn or were hard for me to learn, I would find somebody that knew them, right? So I could hire people. And I would show up every day working really hard with a good attitude. And that's the model we've always used from the beginning. It's like people that are young, hungry, they want to learn. They'll figure it out. Like, we're all figuring out. I'm figuring it out every day. And so I really like that profile, we're like that bet. One of the hardest things about getting bigger as a company is at some

point you have to start hiring people that like know what they're doing. They've done it before and you're asking them to come do it again with you. And we're sort of going through that transition now. We just hired a VP of sales who had done this with other brands, did it with Beatbox. That's really cool. They just had an amazing exit to A, B, InBev. Starting to kind of move away from that has been hard for me because I want to go get the person that's like young and hungry. We still have those. Don't get me wrong. Many of them have grown into bigger roles at the company. I think too as you scale, it's an that not everyone wants to scale with you. Yes.

And that's sometimes hard when you have someone who's worked for you for a long time that doesn't want to do new systems and doesn't, and wants to keep doing it the old way. Or is threatened because more senior people are coming in that have more experience and they're like, wait a minute, I was the person that was on top of the organization before, but now there's somebody coming. And by the way, that even happens to the CEO, right? Like you get people that are like, that person probably knows more about selling and that category than you do. Not that you're running the company, but that person's been doing it

their whole career. Yeah, it's been a really big challenge. You have high energy people. They learn a ton. They grow really fast. One of the things we can offer people as a startup is you're going to work really hard, but we will give you one of the best concentrated periods of learning in your life. You're going to be doing things that at a big company, you wouldn't even touch. You would have a boss, your boss's boss would be in charge of it, right? And I'm telling you you're in charge of it. That's kind of exciting. Those people are the ones that are going to be the most kind of threatened by having to hire over them. Often you have to do it. There's no way around it. We try to explain to them that really you're teaming with this person. This is my gift to you to like continue your education. You're going to learn so much more from this person than

you've learned from me. Some of them buy it and that's great. Others leave and that's also great. Yeah. If you're on a team, you don't want to be a gatekeeper. You don't want to be a moat. No. That's not, you can't scale if you have someone that is a gatekeeper. The way I've framed it over and here and in my experience is that if the business gets to the stage where you're bringing in those kind of people, then it's creating an opportunity for the company to scale and get bigger and create more opportunity for everybody in the company. It's not a limiting fact. It doesn't limit someone's growth or opportunity if the company is now in a position to get someone with more experience that's going to create more opportunity and growth for the company. It just means that

there's more lanes opening up for everyone in the company. Yeah, I think that's right. And we're also not trying to build a big company for the sake of having a big company, if that makes sense. We're still a startup, right? And so that ethos permeates the entire operation. And what we're trying to do here is a very specific goal. We're trying to make CanFamous to some degree. We're trying to build a global mainstream brand. We want to make a great company. But we also want to exit this business at some point, right, for our investors' sake. And so it's almost, it kind of contains the journey to some degree. And I tell this to a lot of junior employees, which is you want to be here for the whole story. Because you're putting in all the work in the hard early days, don't miss out on the fun part, right?

when we get really big and we go do something exciting with the business. Jake, I have a random question. Yes. You graduated from Duke University and then you got your MBA at Harvard. Stanford. Oh, you know what, if I'm being honest, I mix the two up. Sorry. Yeah.

Okay. Stanford. They're both like in the same league to me. If you could go back doing what you do now, would you have just thrown yourself into a business or would you have got gotten those degrees. The undergrad degree I definitely would have. I wouldn't have known better and there's so much about life that's like keeping options open. I went from there to learn a ton.

Like the fundamental business skill set that I have, I got because I went to college, Duke, and I studied finance and then I went to investment bank and I learned that. I wouldn't recommend staying in investment bank for more than two years, but it's kind of like going to Army. You learned a ton and you never want to do it again. But there was some real value there. I think the harder one is the MBA. And the only reason I would say I would keep it was because,

I went to Stanford. And there was such a culture there supporting entrepreneurship. You could have said, save the money, start the company, keep working, make more money. We made things easier, right? And I thought through all those. But what was amazing at getting to Palo Alto, it had almost this ethos where people would say things like, well, you know, there's two types of people in the world. There's founders of companies and people that can't be founders. It's like, which one are you. It had that pressure almost in the other direction, which usually business schools don't do. They're like, yeah, we'll train you to be a general manager at a big company. You'll kind of de-risk your life. Where Stanford was the opposite, which was like, I have enough started.

So if it was Stanford, you would have kept it. But if it was not Stanford, you would have just throwing yourself into the business. Yes. I think I'm, I'm more mixed on the generic MBA, but the one that I got was necessary for me to do this. Like, even just the emotional support, like it was really hard to graduate business school without a job, right? All your friends are taking these cool jobs or talking about great it is. I moved home to my parents' basement. I was like buying health care on the exchange, which is like an impossible task. I don't know how people do it. and and like needing to be at my parents' basement because I needed them to like buy groceries because I had no money. I had to like fly to meet investors in New York City to try to get them

to fund the business. Like it was very challenging time period. I was super lucky that I had been, you know, kind of through that education. I had a lot of skills and things to fall back on. I had a network, right, that I could go fundraise from. But it was really, really challenging to go through that process and be like, it would just be easier to take a job. Go back to private equity. You'll make so much money. Like that was constantly in the back of my head. And I think one of the things that helped me get over it was, you know, if I went back to private, equity and was hit by a bus one day. Someone would just step into my role. Like, nothing would actually change in the world. Like, you think you're in this big finance role and you're doing all

this stuff. But the reality is you're just a cog in a big machine. With Cannes, like, if I didn't start this company, like, I don't know that anyone would or they would start a worse version of it, which might honestly be worse, right? And so that I kept kind of having that drumbeat in the back of my head of like, I need to do this, I need to do this. And Stanford really supported me, you know, through the coursework, through the people there from that culture to take the jump. I think the discussion around college in degrees now is challenging because on one hand, I think if you have the opportunity to go on the path that you went on with a great school that facilitates that kind of ambition and that kind of thinking as an entrepreneur,

I would have loved to have something like that. I went to the University of Arizona, the Harvard of the desert. Right. Not the same. And if you want to be an entrepreneur, that sounds great. But I also now I have my experience where I've always been entrepreneurial. And when I think back at my honest, not to bash you of A, it was a fine good school. But for an entrepreneur, for me is like, did I need that?

No, I probably just went and partied and had fun and gained some independence. And fortunately, my parents were able to support me and pay for it. And so I don't know what else I would have been doing. But do I think it actually helped what I'm doing now? Honestly, I probably don't need the degree, right? I probably didn't need it. And so I tell people, like, if you're in the position where your parents aren't funding it and you're going to do that, and you are at the core an entrepreneur, maybe not.

But then on the reverse of that, if you're somebody who wants to go and work in an organization and learn, like maybe it's a really hard discussion. I think blanketly though, if you're a young person and you're not getting the opportunity to go to a school like that and it's going to saddle you down with a ton of costs in debt for a long time, I don't know if in today's world with AI and all the things that we have at our fingertips to learn and the access we have.

have that I would recommend it. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, no, I don't think that's crazy. And I think AI is a good point, right? Like a lot has changed in the educational environment, you know, since I was even in college. And I think everyone is a little bit different, right? Like, I can kind of give advice to people like me, I think, because I sort of, you know, have a theory that if you're similar to me, then you'll have gone through similar things. And I really needed that support. Like, I wouldn't have been somebody that was naturally jumping into entrepreneurship, like, because I was sort of just like taking on crazy risk, right? You have to know yourself. You have to know yourself. I think that's really key. And like, you know, to get from banking to management consulting to private equity, like it's a pretty risk adjusted path, right? And for me, the challenge was, am I going to at some point fight for myself? I'm going to fight to be happy? And I need that. Meaning risk adjusted, you could always go back to one of those finance jobs and know you can take care of yourself and do. Yeah, they're very path dependent, right? Like, you know, the whole ecosystem is designed to go from one step to the next step and they tell you what you need to do to get to that step and it's pretty clear, right? And it's based on your capabilities to some degree. But, you know, it's based on your capabilities to some degree. But, you know, but

They teach and train you along the way. And so, you know, that path is really strong and has a hard pull. And also as you get older in life and you have costs go up, you have a mortgage, you've kids. Like it really dramatically changes, you know, what you can do. I was lucky that I kind of caught myself right before that point and said, just do it. Like, what do you have to lose? How do you feel about leadership?

What do you think makes you a good leader? Yeah, it's interesting. Like I said, you know, I didn't have any training in this other than sort of just like normal life stuff, right? And as I look at what I do every day and the impact that I'm having, it can be really hard to know, right? Like, am I getting the right feedback? Am I a good leader? Like, I don't actually know the answer to that.

You get different bits and pieces, right? We're a remote company. So, like, often I find myself, like, speaking out into the void, like, into a computer screen to 30-something employees. And, like, they, like, thumbs up button you or something. It's, like, kind of a weird experience. Like, is this going well? Like, how is this landing on the team? Sometimes, you know, people will call me and say, that was amazing meeting.

You did a great job. And it's like, okay, good. Maybe I'm figuring this out, right? I think humor is such an important part of leadership that is often not talked about. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff we could go down if you wanted to make a list, right? But what is often not on that list is like, do people actually enjoy you and your presence and talking with you? Are you able to kind of like deflect from tension and stress?

It's going to come in no matter what. These kind of high stakes things we're doing often, not always, but often. And so, you know, kind of having one of the things we did from with a brand from the early, early days was, you know, we're ultimately selling something that will alter your experience. We can't take ourselves too seriously. We're not trying to be like the Barneys for weed, right? We're trying to be fun and irreverent and quirky. Like, can you take that as a lesson in your leadership as well, right?

Something goes wrong. You could get really mad. You could scream and yell. We could find the right throat to choke. Or we could kind of laugh it off and figure out how to never make that mistake again, you know? I've tried to balance my style more in that direction. This is one of my favorite question. I just run around choking people.

Yeah, yeah, throat to choke. It's an amazing phrase. Michael's a great leader. Carson, don't laugh. I'm going to get over there. Michael's did a really good speech at the Christmas party, I thought. Thank you. You're a great leader.

This is a question that I've been asking entrepreneurs that I'm super interested in. You might say, Lauren, I don't have an answer. How are you using AI creatively within your business? It's a great question. We're starting to use it to some degree. Very formally, as a brand, a lot of our output is marketing content, right? There are some things that we want to have real human beings, like real life. It has, there's like an editorial element to it.

There's a spirit to it. You're trying to capture friends at a pool in the summer, drinking can. Like that's really, really hard to do with AI. But there's also a lot of stuff like our product photography, pictures of blood oranges, which we use all the time, all of our ingredient photography, like a machine can do that better. And actually a photographer, we're going to take those photos and we're going to doctor them up so much that like a machine's actually a better position to do that. If I outsource all the ingredient photography to a machine, then I have more money to spend on capturing that moment at the pool with friends, right? or that like connection between two people.

I knew you would have a good answer for this. I think that's how we're approaching it, right? There's a bunch of technical tools and other things we're using. But I love that example because it shows you how you can take these tools. And you're not going to lose the character and the texture and the emotion of the brand. You're actually investing more in it. But you're shifting where those dollars go. I've been using it as like a psycho assistant.

So I'll go to it in the morning at like 6 o'clock and I'll say, six o'clock learn maybe seven okay and i'll say like while i'm brushing my teeth and like setting up my day on my vibrating plate i will say to it i'll say hey chat i have a really gnarly day today and i'll screenshot my calendar and put it in and then i'll say look at this day and tell me all the times that i have to leave you know that i can be running late so make sure you buffer it i also would really love to get a cold plunge sauna in where do you think it's most strategic and i'll be like build out my day in the most efficient way knowing me. And it literally will give me an exact play by play of my day and when I should leave. And it helps, it really helps me have clarity for

each day because it shows you exactly what to do and when to do it. So it's been like an assistant. I'm going to seal that. That sounds amazing. It works so well. And if you're, you know, when you wake up and you feel overwhelmed, maybe you're hungover because you didn't drink can, you can, you can go and you can say, I'm a little hungover. I need you to like help me make sense of this day, it's a ball of yarn and you throw everything at it. Was that this morning? Be honest. Yeah.

This morning, I should have had a can last night. And I had like three margaritas instead. Yeah, that'll do it. We had some of the teammates in from the East Coast in. So we all went out last night. Not super late, but in a, in a parents world, like 8.30, I'm like, we're, right. Right, right. We're pushing past bedtime here.

Bethany Frankel has been a huge supporter of you, which is really cool. How did that come to fruition? It's kind of a funny story. So the team, without telling me, sent her product. And then at some point was like, okay, we have to tell Jake. So they call me up and they say, so don't freak out, but we sent product to Bethany. She, like, does these videos. I had seen some videos.

So I was like, oh, God, you sent it. Like, what if she hates it? Like, she will literally broadcast the hate review, right? And so we're like really nervous. Finally the video came. And it was like, it was sort of like a beginning, middle end. I'm going to try this, like, walking us, which I love. Like, telling the story is like what we love.

And at the end, she's like, I like it. I really like it. And I'm like, she said, like, that's not good. We want love. Like, she's like, no, no, no. The team was like, Jake. Like, it's amazing with Bethany. Like, we were so happy about this.

We continued to send her can. We actually had an emergency request. She had a massage. She was like, I think she was in New York. Needed it before a massage. So we, like, couried her can to get it in time before the massage. And has been a great supporter and we're excited to keep working with her on. It's really cool to see organic stuff like that.

That's awesome. What do people get wrong about cannabis? I think a lot of things. I think the biggest thing is that, like, potency matters. The strength of it really, really matters. We were talking about this earlier, right? Like, cannabis is this word that's used to cover all this ground. And it really shouldn't, right?

If you think about it, a 2 milligram drink like can is so different than a gummy, than a vape, than any of these products you've got a dispensary, than the massive penis-shaped bong, right? Like, we're talking about very different experiences. And you can't even, I mean, you can kind of use the alcohol analogy. I think that's a really good one. Like, you know, you've got Everclear on one end and you've got, you know, a hard zeltzer on the other. but it's so different. And potency really matters.

And part of why people love these products is they're so low potency that you don't have to worry about all the scary anxiety, paranoia, long-term health effects. I mean, this is really mild stuff. And I think that is like the ideas we thought about it the very beginning was we want social occasions to have beer, wine, and can. We named it can. I was on a run in Palo Alto. There's like this dish.

It's like a big hill. And I was thinking about what to call this company. And I kept thinking about beer and wine. And I was like, we are creating a category here. What is that short, four-letter word that's going to describe the category of products that I'm creating? And can. It was like, obviously, it's cannabis in a can. Like, this is so on the nose.

But, like, I kind of like on the nose. And it stuck. And now we think about beer, wine, and can at all social occasions. How do you manage to just stay in your lane? Because it can get distracting. Yes, like, people that ask me, oh, would you ever create a psilocybin drink? And, like, what about this? And what about that?

Focus is so hard. And I want to do so many things. because once you kind of nail this premise of like, oh, yeah, let's just make it really low potency. Let's make it approachable. Let's make it fun. Like create a brand says something about you when you buy it, right? That's the hard thing to do. We somehow manage to do that. It's like, why not?

Why not go into this category? Go into that category. And I do do this. Like there's a lot of stuff on our cutting room floor that like, I'm sure the ops team is like thankful that I killed. But you have to focus. It's so important. Like at the end of the day, when we started seven years ago, we were in a garage in Venice Beach.

That was like once we raised the money, we moved out there. and we put this big kind of like, what is our main thing? I think we stole it from the innocent company, the innocent juices. They're like, keep the main thing and the main thing. It's like, okay, they maybe stole it from somebody else. What is our main thing? And we had some options, right? Are we trying to mainstream cannabis?

Is that what we're doing here? Are we a social beverage company? And ultimately, we decided we are a social beverage company. So every question that comes up to us is like, is it a drink? And if it's not one of those two things, then we don't do it. We're going to do a live taste test. We're just going to have a sip. So we're not going to get like.

We're trying to try. Okay, so first we're going to try. So it comes in two sizes, both individual servings. This is the 2 milligram, 4 milligram. This is the 5 and 10 milligram. And it's THC, CBD. Yes, we put CBD and THC in them both. The CBD really helps to mellow out the THC even more than the already low amount.

The high boys are kind of like our play on tall boys. So it's like a little bit stronger, a little bit taller can. This is the holiday one? Yeah, that's holiday. Cranberry sage. The one that I have been drinking before that I love is the great. fruit, Rosemary, so I'm going to have a sip of this one first. It's lightly sweetened with agave, lightly sparkling.

The cranberry is really good. I've tried this one. This is the main one, right? I think I just love the grapefruit. It's delicious. We don't use any preservatives. All of our juices are freshly squeezed, so never from concentrate. What does it remind me of? Our all natural flavors. Really good.

Something from like childhood that it reminds me. Are you going to say like your aunt's house? Almost like a ruby red squirt. Okay, okay. Yeah. No, but not as sweet. Not a sweet. A spindrift?

The grapefruit one you're holding is 35 calories. I think the taller boys are 50. Ooh, the blood orange is good. Blood orange. We are the largest importer of raw blood orange juice from Cicely. Cisley is the best place in the world to get blood orange. It's incredible. That might be my favorite.

I thought I was going to say grapefruit. Rosemary, you guys. But I still like the grapefruit. But I like the, but I like them. It's beautiful. Really cute on my nightstand. Yes. You can see it on YouTube.

The grapefruit rosemary. It has two milligrams THC plus four milligrams of CBD. and I'm going to have to say, though, if you're going to try one, I think I would start with the blood orange. There you go. It's one of our most popular. Like I said, the Sicilian blood orange juice makes it. It's something about the volcanic ash in Mount Etna that changes the way blood oranges are grown. They're a different color. Like, the actual blood orange juice is a different color. It's like a vibrant red. Yeah, we take the flavors pretty seriously. It has to be good. It's amazing how many food and beverage products aren't good. Like, how is that possible? Before you go, why does cannabis drinks hit differently? This is circled on my note cards. People want to know this.

So you're absorbing, unlike an edible, right, which we talked about going through your lining of your stomach and mostly your liver, you're absorbing it immediately through sublingually through your esophagus and your stomach. It's a liquid. So there's more surface area. It's going to get in your system faster. That is good because it means in about 10 minutes, you'll feel the effects of it. You'll start feeling effects. Does it make you hungry? It could make you hungry, but, you know, it's going to.

It's not going to make you like wildly hungry, right? You're going to feel kind of like light, floaty. It won't lower your inhibitions in the same way as alcohol, right? You won't have that like drunk eating thing. You also won't have the like biological need to dilute the alcohol down because it's poisoning your liver, but that you'll start absorbing it faster. That's also important because it will subside in about an hour. So your body's working through it quicker.

And edible is the opposite, right? It's going to be much more slow because of the density of it, be that there's less surface area. It's a solid. And that also means you're going to absorb more of what you want, which is the, Delta 9 THC and the CBD. It will give you that kind of like like giggly, floaty feeling instead of vetables. Once it breaks down into hydroxy 11, which is like a metabolite of THC, you're going to feel more like body high and stoned, which we don't want. We want that like euphoric feeling.

I'm a big fan. I've been a fan from the beginning. It was really cool to interview you. I think that you're, you've created an insane brand. You guys gave us code skinny. I would start with the blood orange, you guys, if you're going to try it. It's a great little mommy mock tail. And it's legal and you can get it now in 37 states.

You said 35? Yeah, I think 35 states, maybe a few more now online, and then 30 states in liquor store. So depending on where you live, it's here in Texas, too. It's here in Texas. Yep. Code Skinny, you get 20% off your first purchase on drinkcan.com and it's D-R-I-N-K-N-N. I will say, though, yes, blood orange, but you also don't sleep on the grapefruit rosemary. There's something nostalgic about that one, too.

I don't know what it is. I also like how it's little. Yes. So it's less? It's very pretty and pink. Yeah. We leaned it at the brand, we leaned into that color way because of how beautiful it is. I think we need to do something funny with toddlers with this. I like that.

Mm-hmm. I think we should. Because there's all of a sudden at 8 o'clock, there's 4,000. You mean? The parents of the toddlers is what you mean. Exactly. No kids drinking. No.

Just disclaiming. This is 21 plus adult beverage. By the way, if my son saw this on my nightstand, he would literally drink the whole thing. Which is why it's not, you're going to have, we're going to have to have to, I call my magnesium water vitamin water. He would think it's vitamin water and drink the whole thing. Yes, we don't want that. No, we don't want that. That's not what we want. Locked with the alcohol. I'll call it icky water. Yes, there you go. I mean, they're adult sort of savory flavors. These aren't pleasant to kids, right? There's meant to be like a little bit of like a savory.

They're pretty good. I got a say. It tastes great. Yeah, they're really good. Everyone go follow at drink can on Instagram. Thank you for coming on the show and enlightening us about cannabis and TXC. Congratulations. Thank you for coming on. Thank you.