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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

This makes sense. As a big player in enterprise, Microsoft is recognizing that there's a new industry that's vastly under served.

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Massively underserved. I live in Denver and have friends with ownership stakes in local dispensaries. The quality of their software solutions (mainly POS/Compliance) is laughable.

Edit: This (http://www.mjfreeway.com/) is the defacto standard. I kid you not it went down for 2 weeks ~a year ago after scheduled maintenance went wrong. At the time it had ~50% market share, this left dispensaries around the country doing all their compliance and POS by hand for weeks.

Amateur hour.

Hmm. I wonder how dispensaries are different than any other retail / pharmacy operation?

Can they treat the product like cold/allergy pills that have to be watched, or does there have to be legal information specific to each "SKU"/item-type???

Depending on the state, plants need to be tracked from seed to sale. That is just one aspect of it that I'm familiar with. I'm sure the compliance burdens beyond that are significant.

A combination of federal illegality (which affects banking heavily) and special compliance requirements necessitates custom industry solutions AFAIK.

But that's really no different from discrete manufacturing, where you have to track precious metals, hazardous materials, import/export regulations, etc. I wonder why the major players don't just make the minor adaptations so they can serve this market, too.

Likely federal law. Its not settled legally if providing services to recreational dispensaries can implicate your company in felony drug distribution. Its unlikely, but a risk. It may even cause issues with the bushiness main product. Things like insurance liability shifts and the like.

No "big name" company has wanted to test the waters.

Not that familiar with it, but part of the issue is that financial institutions above a certain size won't do business with them because it's still illegal at the federal level and they're afraid of the ambiguity. I wouldn't be surprised if that affected what PoS software they could use.

Large financial institutions still dont play nicely with internet porn, which really isnt that ambiguous legally. I think a lot of it is PR as well. They dont want to be associated with moraly ambiguous industries

A lot of this is a consequence of the George W Bush presidency, where the DoJ was encouraged to crack down on pornography using obscenity laws. From the histories I've read, one of the levers they used was informal pressure on financing institutions that served the distributors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_Prosecution_Task_For...

I place the blame squarely on the Obama Justice Department's Operation Choke Point. The previous task force was at least targeted towards specific, named, businesses and brought them before a court--not a blanket, de-facto ban caused by threatening financial institutions, directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

>> Amateur hour.

Dude, when nobody wants to be affiliated with your business or be identified as someone who's supporting your business, you have to do what you have to do.

It's not like companies are clamoring to support this industry. Yes, people are falling over themselves to invest in these companies, but with federal issues hanging over these places, the cash only aspects and how society looks at these companies (yes, this is slowly changing too) they are in a tough spot to find good software support.

I think the point of the post was that software can maintain such a large market share in spite of major reliability issues due to the unwillingness for developers to serve that market. "Amateur hour" was a reference to the quality of the software, not the overall operation.

That's a fair point

A friend of a friend was hired as a CFO at a dispensary, and pretty much had to create an entire accounting system from scratch. Cash management consisted of employees driving around to the store and collecting the money, as the armored car firms wouldn't accept their business. So he set up a subsidiary that went out and bought some armored cars and was able to safely transport the money, staffed with former military. .. they had the cash for it, so why not?

Why is that? Even software firms don't want to deal with weed?

Not so much the software companies, it's the payment processing companies that are risk-averse.

As a customer, these shops have to jump through some amazing hoops just to provide standard POS debit/credit. One store has to process all payments as an ATM withdrawal, and must give change so the "ATM withdrawal" will round to the nearest $5.

When you buy an accounting system there's a lot of customization that goes on to set up your chart of accounts, configure check printing, etc. They were apparently running the business off an Excel spreadsheet, so even Quickbooks would have been a step up.

Is this a problem due to not being able to buy physical/cloud infrastructure or developers with cannabis money or something else?

It's funny that you mention MJFreeway. Their one of our competitors.

I'm an engineer at [Greenbits][1], a marijuana POS system running on almost 50% of stores in Washington State. We were runner up finalists at [2015's Tech Crunch Disrupt][2].

Every quarter, we do visits to stores (some of our customers and those of our competitors). It's amazing to see the state of the industry and how underserved it is. I think part of this is that everyone, retailers and regulators, are still figuring out how to run things. The problem is nuanced because of differences in taxes for recreational and medical, tracking of the product "from seed to sale", and various weird business regulations. We learn a lot of these trips and always come back with a lot of ideas on how to improve our product for our customers and do what our competitors don't.

We are visiting Denver, CO in a couple weeks. :D

Also, this is a plug, but we are starting to ramp up [hiring][3]. Currently, we only have the Engineering job posting up, but we are looking for a lot of positions and more will be posted up within the next few weeks.

[1]:https://www.greenbits.com/ [2]:https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/green-bits-launches-point-... [3]:https://jobs.lever.co/greenbits?lever-via=_335J-YDmj

Just asking because I saw that the engineering position listed San Jose but it seems that there are remote employees and an office in Portland, as well. Are there opportunities for remote work for the current/future hiring needs?

We do support remote. For example, I'm actually based in the Boston area. However, we are trying to build out a team in San Jose and Portland, so there is definitely a preference for people in the west coast.

I used to work for a startup doing regular hospitality POS (cafes, bars, etc).

It's not just MJ POS systems, it's POS systems in general. I don't know what it is about them, but they seem to attract horrible software solutions. I see you've gone with iPads, we did the same, a lot better than the industry standard touch screen monitor.

You'd think that people wouldn't like the smaller screens, but we never got any complaints about it. I guess it's about how you utilise the space. I guess there is always the option to use iPad pros if you really want the real estate, although we actually had a couple of customers using iPad minis instead, I think it was for small stalls or something.

for those looking for an open source option, we[0] have been doing quite well with Openbravo[1]'s POS suite.

0. http://medicalcannab.is

1. http://openbravo.com

Why can't they use a run-of-the-mill POS? or a POS designed for pharmacies?

Microsoft might be the first to publicly announce it, but I don't think they are the only blue chip company aware of the industry. I've heard Phillip-Morris has been quietly buying out a lot of farms, anticipating federal legalization in the near future, especially since tobacco usage in the US is plummeting.

Do you have any source on that? The only reason I ask is I've heard that rumor many times over the years. In particular I had a civics teach in high school tell me how as a student he had gone on a tour of a Phillip-Morris (or some major tobacco company) facility and supposedly was told that they were amassing equipment to make Marijuana cigarettes because they thought it was going to be legal in a few years. Seeing how the man was in his late 50s that story has been going around for a while.

Philip Morris is a pretty big company with a lot of resources. It could just be a long term strategy that they understand might be necessary in the future and spend a small amount on each year to maintain.

Salesforce has several partners offering marijuana growing management software - through a branded resale of the SFDC platform, so $CRM is definitely in it.

This is not true. It's possible, perhaps probable, that Phillip-Morris employees have invested personally in the industry, but all retail states so far have strict domesticity requirements that no national corporation could satisfy. Colorado's even contemplating a law that forbids publicly traded companies from owning stakes in a licensed entity. But even if this weren't the case, it would make zero business sense for a heavily regulated, multi-billion dollar corporation to invest resources in marijuana right now. The revenue opportunity wouldn't register on their income statement, and would never come close to justifying the additional scrutiny they'd surely receive from regulators. The reasonable strategy for them is to wait until marijuana receives federal blessing and then acquire the best companies or teams available, or try to launch new products backed by massive marketing spend.

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