From Grub To Ganja

How I used my online food-delivery expertise to build Dutchie, an online cannabis-delivery startup.

- Ross Lipson

Cannabis had just been legalized for recreational use in Oregon, so I and everyone else in my town lined up, sometimes for an hour, outside the busy dispensaries. When I finally got to the counter, I had mere minutes to read the menu and even less time to discuss it with the budtender and make an informed decision. It was a terrible customer experience.

That’s when it hit me: What if I could just go online, educate myself about the products available at each dispensary, determine which was right for me, click a button, and have them delivered straight to my home?

The concept wasn’t completely random. In my previous life, I ran and sold two online food-ordering companies. The first I helped start in college, after I noticed how much time students wasted looking through stacks of paper menus and calling restaurants for delivery. After graduating, I discovered there were no online food-delivery businesses in Canada, so my partner and I created GrubCanada, scaled it from coast to coast, and sold it to Just Eat in 2012.