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With the cannabis industry continuing to grow and mature we are starting to see partnerships form between businesses.  As the industry expands many have realized this is not a standalone industry, and cannabis businesses  are partnering with tech companies, beauty product companies, and more.  As these partnerships are formed business owners are discovering the value of working with others to achieve a greater success.  Harry Brelsford of The CannaTech Group sits down with  Socrates Rosenfeld of Jane Technologies to discuss the growth and partnerships within the cannabis industry.

Video Transcription

Harry Brelsford 

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the CannaTech podcast we’re debriefing on South by Southwest with Socrates Rosenfeld, Socrates Rosenfeldof Jane, how’re you doing today?

Socrates Rosenfeld 

I’m good, Harry, how are you, man?

Harry Brelsford 

Good. Good. Where are you located? I just saw you in Austin. Where are you today?

Socrates Rosenfeld 

Back home in, in lonely Santa Cruz, California.

Harry Brelsford 

Now that is lovely. Yeah. Good on you. So you know, you and I were having a conversation in the hallway that I wanted to share with the audience is, you know, I kind of come from the traditional IT background, and in particular, the channel with Microsoft partners. And you’re a tech company. And my question, once again, is, you know, why aren’t we seeing a Microsoft partner program with a tech company in cannabis tech or a channel partner program? You know what I’m trying to say?

Socrates Rosenfeld 

Yeah, exactly. I think it’s not a matter of if it’s just when. And up until this point, there’s been a real come massive fragmentation across the digital landscape in this industry, right? You had point of sales vying for position ecommerce vying for position marketplaces, etc. CRM. And as that’s is that landscape is now I would argue cleaning up a little bit, I think now these incumbents will be established. And from there, you know, we got to see which of these systems wants to be open source and which of them wants to be closed loop. And there’s, I think, an argument to be made for both. And there’s different strategies a gene, you know, we are building an open source ecosystem, because we saw what square and Shopify and Microsoft were able to do, and that’s grow the size of the pie, invite more players into the space and ultimately provide the most value back to these operators and to giving them almost an ala carte service, you know, hey, I want to use this CRM and this front end solution. And that’s what we worked very, very hard on at Jane. So I think you’re going to start seeing this harry probably over the next 1218 24 months, we’re already establishing an informal community of third party providers, we kind of already integrate with over 150/3 party software providers. And again, we’re trying to think about how do we how do we formalize this in the right way? I think what you see now is this concept of headless ecommerce now emerging, you think about what Shopify was able to do, right? You can use on the shop Shopify platform, you now have access to 1000s and 1000s of different vendors that can make your Shopify store as bespoke to you as you would like as a seller. There’s no reason why we wouldn’t be able to do the same thing here. In this space and Jane, we’re really, really excited with the launch of Jane routes in this headless solution that’s been quite successful, to start inviting other stakeholders from outside the industry into this space. And I would argue, perhaps we see a day where the same integrators into Shopify are the same ones integrating into Jane and I think that would be a pretty cool thing. So long way of saying this is this is happening, and we’re excited for it. I think the industry and the operators will benefit from this significantly, as long as we can build and continue to build an open source platform. Yep.

Harry Brelsford 

What I’m hearing you say one of your statements is back in the world of Microsoft, we talked about the partner maturity continuum, and it’s just what I’m hearing is maybe we’re just we don’t have the maturity yet for a Gold partner, silver partner and abroad.

Socrates Rosenfeld 

Exactly, it will formalize those programs you know, in a jane we take our position very seriously as you know, if we recommend a third party provider to a to a retailer we want to make sure that that third party provider number one understands the industry in number two understands how to build on top of the gene solution and so we are we are getting going I would say we probably have a dozen providers like that that we are informally working with and partnering with but as that program continues to grow that will formalize and you’ll you’ll see your you know James certified partnerships and

Harry Brelsford 

ons or maybe a little logo where you know the bad no go back to the days of logo Where were you were literally a Microsoft small business specialist you know what we were proud we were those golf shirts we love logo wear? Yeah,

Socrates Rosenfeld 

I think it’s all this the spirit of we got to get you some Jane swag, airy, but it’s all in the spirit of partnership, right? And we don’t have to be everything to everyone. We don’t have to be, you know, in quite frankly, I think those providers that are trying to be everything to everyone can’t provide the best solution for a single thing. Right. So let’s, let’s pick a let’s pick our places and let’s let’s be the best at that and let’s partner and in doing so I think we can grow a very A healthy, vibrant digital ecosystem for this industry for generations.

Harry Brelsford 

All right, well, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna check back with you. What do we say q4, let’s talk in six months and see how your progress is going. I sure appreciate your time. You’re a CEO. I know you have zero time. So thank you very much.

Socrates Rosenfeld 

Pleasure. Thanks for everything you do for the for the industry, Harry, and I look forward to checking back in with you in q4, man. All right.

Harry Brelsford 

All right. And I probably Oh, yeah, I talked to your PR people. Okay, I signed off on I want to get on your feed for press releases. Oh, yeah. I talked. I talked to the ladies right out in the hallway. So cool. Yeah. Great. Yeah, we’ve traded some emails. All right. Well, I gotta tell you about Santa Cruz. You’ll you’ll laugh at this. So my son is 22 finished at Cal Poly down in SLO and in FinTech, you know, so he’s a thinking man. And he got a job right away with Fortinet the security company in Sunnyvale. Right? Yes, yeah. And, and he’s got the girlfriend and so he’s living large. Like we probably all did it. 22 He’s running Russian Hill. But here’s here’s the point about Santa Cruz is the girlfriend comes with a beach house in Santa Cruz. So he’s hanging out on the weekends in Santa Cruz. I’m like, Dude, I didn’t even live this way at 22.

Socrates Rosenfeld 

So that’s an up for success. It sounds like

Harry Brelsford 

there we go, man. Alright, talk to you in six months. Take care of Take care. Bye bye