On a surprisingly cool evening this August, a crowd of well-dressed New Yorkers mulled about in front of Galvanize, a tech and entrepreneurial incubator in Greenwich Village. Inside, under bright lights, a single-file line stretched from the door, past a whitewashed cafe, to a table where guests were handed nametags and ushered up the stairs. The mood, equally awkward and anticipatory, wasn\u2019t dissimilar to the first day of high school.<\/p>\n
The crowd was assembled for a monthly event thrown by\u00a0CannaGather<\/a>, an educational and networking hub for New York\u2019s nascent cannabis industry. Although the main attraction was a talk by\u00a0Danny Danko<\/a>, High Times\u2019 veteran Senior Cultivation Editor, the opportunity to schmooze seemed to be the real draw. When cannabis goes legal in the Empire State, as Governor Cuomo\u00a0recently signaled<\/a>\u00a0it likely will, these will surely be among the people holding the reins.<\/p>\n CannaGather is the brainchild of Josh Weinstein, a bespectacled and boyish former high school chess champion and current tech investor who senses the opportunity that cannabis presents to his hometown. He started CannaGather four years ago, inspired by both tech meetup culture and \u201cthe triple-bottom-line opportunity that cannabis offers,\u201d as he explained recently. \u201cThere\u2019s financial upside, medical opportunity and social justice reform that is all baked into the cannabis industry\u2019s progression.\u201d Since then, CannaGather has grown dramatically; hundreds of people show up for the monthly events, and Weinstein has been able to nab guests like\u00a0Puffco<\/a>\u00a0founder and CEO Roger Volodarsky, as well as Aaron Smith, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the\u00a0National Cannabis Industry Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n At Galvanize, a cacophony of laughter and industry-chatter greeted guests as they ascended the staircase to the main event, where a bartender poured watery cocktails and sponsors hawked\u00a0CBD<\/a>\u00a0tinctures, vape cartridges and joints, including one $35 pre-roll that was additionally coated in both CBD oil and powder (currently, hemp-derived CBD is the only recreationally-available cannabis in New York State). Compared to similar events in California, the attendees were relatively diverse, both in terms of ethnicity and age; yet anyone looking for a classic stoner in their midst would be sorely disappointed. Near a bar loaded with platters of chicken wings and pasta, I ran into Joe Barnes, president of the Washington state-based\u00a0GrowLife Hydroponics<\/a>; with a shaved head, easy smile and sporting a blazer over his company\u2019s T-shirt, Barnes looked the part of an \u201cEntourage\u201d supporting actor. \u201cWe see the attendees of CannaGather as some of our future customers,\u201d he told me. \u201cNetworking around legitimate cannabis businesses is one of our top priorities as one of the \u2018picks and shovels\u2019 companies of the green rush.\u201d<\/p>\n Around 8 p.m., the lights flashed and the entire group wandered down the hall to a makeshift auditorium, where the talk began. After a few words from the event\u2019s sponsors, including Barnes, and an energized MC who bravely exclaimed \u201cCBDizzle\u201d without a shred of irony, \u00a0Danko hopped onstage, radiating impish charm. His talk, a sort of beginner\u2019s guide to growing (what he asserted was exclusively \u201cmedical\u201d) cannabis, elicited equal amounts of rapt attention and shameless yawning, even from a guy who was filming the whole thing on his phone. Danko\u2019s advice on the particulars of Home Depot buckets, for instance, wasn\u2019t terribly inspiring, but it was a good reminder that in New York, it\u2019s best to make no assumptions about the canna-knowledge of the canna-curious. Delvi Peralta, a first-time attendee in his 20s sitting next to me, pointed out that \u201cyou may hear things from other people [about cannabis] via word of mouth, but unless you come here\u2026 it\u2019s gonna be harder for you to see what\u2019s actually happening [in the industry].\u201d<\/p>\n Yet Danko\u2019s 30-minute talk was not without intrigue: at one point, he utilized the rallying cry that \u201ccorporate interests need us more than we need them.\u201d It was a particularly bizarre remark considering the corporate bent of those present: this was by no means the \u201ccounterculture\u201d that the industry once promised (and the event\u2019s MC dubbed the crowd); earlier in the evening, for instance, a representative of\u00a0Enlighten TV<\/a>\u00a0suggested building relationships with the fast food industry. Yet even if simply couched in a hunger for the Almighty Buck, the evening at GannaGather made clear that in New York, interest in cannabis is skyrocketing, and investors are thirsty for change. After the talk ended, the group moved slowly to an upscale pizza restaurant across the street for an afterparty. For better or for worse, it seemed like the whole point.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>,\u00a0would you ever want to work in the cannabis industry?<\/p>\n The post New York\u2019s CannaGather Meetup Fosters the City\u2019s Infant Cannabis Industry<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
On a surprisingly cool evening this August, a crowd of well-dressed New Yorkers mulled about in front of Galvanize, a tech and entrepreneurial incubator in Greenwich Village. Inside, under bright lights, a single-file line stretched from the door, past a whitewashed cafe, to a table where guests were handed nametagsContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,5483,136,1302,5484,5485,5486,5487,5488,5489,5014,69,5490,1419,208,3584,3150,362,5491],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28673,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28672\/revisions\/28673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: New York\u2019s CannaGather Meetup Fosters the City\u2019s Infant Cannabis Industry<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"