Weed Deliver: “Ultimately Nabis is creating the infrastructure for the space so as the industry grows, it doesn't break,” says CEO Vince Ning (with cofounder Jun Sup Lee) in their Rochester warehouse.
Former Meta and Microsoft engineers Jun Sup Lee and Vince C. Ning built Nabis into the country’s biggest marijuana distributor, delivering $1.5 billion worth of weed to dispensaries every year. Now it’s blooming in a fourth state.
In
a windowless room in a rented warehouse in Oakland in 2019, Nabis cofounders Vince C. Ning and Jun Sup Lee, a few of their employees and a friend they met at the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Luana Lopes Lara (who would go on to cofound prediction market Kalshi and become one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires), were counting $2 million in cash by hand.
The money was earmarked for marijuana excise taxes in California. San Francisco-based Nabis had recently launched as a cannabis distributor during the medical marijuana heyday of the country’s biggest weed market and it was Ning and Lee’s job to collect and pay taxes on the product they delivered to retailers. The duo had hired an armed guard to watch the door. Once the cash was counted, banded and bagged, Ning put the money into two suitcases, $1 million in each, threw on a Hawaiian shirt—he thought he was less likely to get mugged if he looked like a tourist, but in the end he looked more like a scrawny narco-wannabe—and headed to the state government building to deliver the money.
