True, the industry is beyond its ground floor days, and that means people are shrugging off the social stigma that’s been long associated with cannabis in general. And the people growing the industry tend to fall into two categories, according to Kochman: those who have been embedded in the industry historically and those who follow traditional routes to secure jobs in the industry. But therein lays a problem. The people who have been embedded for decades might know how to grow a superior product, or synthesize better oils, but they lack the knowledge of how to grow and scale a professional business. It begs the question of how you populate the middle space. What happens in those situations is people like Kochman find themselves in a unique position to in effect craft the rules for the future of the industry. And the entrepreneurial side of things comes into play when thinking about how to build the future. For example, Kochman realized that the oil Open Vape was using in their vaporizer cartridges was going to be a dominant force the industry over. The innovation, then, is set to hit across the market vertical of delivery methods, or ingestion. To that end, the founders of Open Vape wanted to be a cornerstone brand of the cannabis industry, and that’s what attracted Kochman to their team. To date they’ve been able to innovate and scale by nailing down some nuances that all entrepreneurs should remember. These founders of Open Vape realized they needed to bring in experts, pass off the wheel on projects suited for said experts, and keep their ego in check the whole way. There’s no reason for companies to in-fight here, they just need to look for strong partners and keep pushing forward together.
