In 2015, my brother-in-law, who had been growing medical cannabis since the mid-1990s, called me to ask whether I'd finance a potential opportunity. Five months, 1,331 company names and several hundred spreadsheet lines later, we co-founded Canndescent to cater to the premium, adult-use, cannabis consumer.

At the time, my brother-in-law and I felt a deep calling to build Canndescent. I was the Santa-Barbara-living, Upper-East Side-born, Hermes-wearing, Harvard MBA who had been building start-ups all his life, yet hadn't found his business unicorn. In contrast, he was the long-haired, highly tattooed, plant-growing savant with lifelong ties to the cannabis industry, who still wanted to prove he was among the best cultivators on the planet.

We had basically been training independently to build Canndescent our entire lives; together, we decided to attempt to disrupt the market and deliver solutions to the high-end cannabis consumer.

Back in 2015, our detailed, market audit revealed the following consumer pain points in California and much of the United States:

1) scarcity of exceptional cannabis flower

2) products with identical names delivering inconsistent outcomes

3) confusion and intimation over thousands of strains names and technical jargon

4) branding with misogynistic and counter-cultural tones

5) opacity with consumers unable to identify or know their grower

6) toxicity with a significant portion of flower testing positive for pesticides and microbials

Identifying these problems, we set out to create Canndescent with a simple value proposition: 1) superior flower quality, 2) consistency, 3) ease-of-use, 4) aspirational lifestyle, 5) transparency, and 6) health and wellness.

Fast-forwarding to 2017 and $10 million in investor capital later, we've aligned thousands of operating choices to deliver against this value proposition.

To cultivate consistently exceptional flowers, we operate a municipally-permitted facility in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., that monitors and regiments seven environmental variables down to the electrical conductivity in the grow medium. We standardize cultivation "recipes" by strain, use six sigma techniques for quality control, and routinely update our several hundred pages of proprietary standard operating procedures. We harness organic pest management and test products to ensure they are always microbial free. Just-in-time, we harvest fresh flowers every 10 days and hand-trim all product under a jeweler's magnifying lense. Furthermore, we jar-finish flowers with humidity packs in child-resistant glass to preserve the structure and freshness.