2026-07-21
Alex Mazin could not raise the $20 million he needed to build a vertical cannabis operation, and he now says that failure protected him from years of headaches. He raised early, pivoted to a single store in Worcester, and has not raised since 2018, funding Bud's Goods' growth from cash flow while much of the industry leaned on investor subsidies to survive. In this conversation he lays out the contrarian playbook behind that: skip cultivation on purpose, curate instead of grow, and treat a dispensary like a grocery store rather than a traditional retail floor.Alex is the President and CEO of Bud's Goods & Provisions, a Massachusetts retailer and manufacturer that recently expanded into New Jersey. He walks through the pre-roll matrix built from monthly customer surveys, the automation win that made party-pack production 21 times faster, why he keeps his wholesale team at two people to go deep on the 70 accounts that make up 80% of the market, and the hard reckoning he sees coming for what cannabis stores are actually worth. He also makes the case that the whole industry needs to stop racing prices to the bottom and start raising them.21+ only, for adults in legal markets. Nothing in this episode is for sale. Listen to the full conversation on High Functioning.