9 things you didn’t know about Simplifya

The 9 Things posts by employees are the most visited pages on Infused, so I thought it’d be interesting to do the same post on the company. It’s a lot more challenging – as employees, some of us from the beginning, we already know a lot about our employer. But that’s also why this is a fun task. I think I’m up to the challenge, but you’ll have to let me know in the comments!

One

Quick, which US president had the shortest tenure? William Henry Harrison, the sometimes forgotten 9th POTUS, died of septic shock 31 days after his inauguration.

Which former Simplifya employee had the shortest tenure? We have not one, but two former employees who hold the record at just 13 days! First names only to protect the … well, last names are sort of beside the point here.

• Andrew was hired to work on Simplifya Verified. We were migrating to a new database and had just started working with Hub, so we needed to make a quick hire. Marion said he had the perfect guy, knew him from way back, yada-yada. Less than two weeks later, he said he could make more money doing bookkeeping and quit.
• We hired Spencer as a salesperson in part because he had great work experience. But at a happy hour to which we’d invited several licensed operators, one of his former employers showed up and uh, let’s just say he didn’t check out. We fired him the next day.

Two

Early on, we thought consultants would be a huge sales channel for us. It seemed logical, especially in Colorado where the market was predominantly small “mom and pop” shops that couldn’t afford to hire a compliance officer, that the market for compliance consultants would be lucrative. We weren’t the only ones – back then, there were several companies marketing compliance software. Adherence, CannaScore, and Complia, to name a few. We were all looking for consulting companies to partner with.

We put together a special pricing package, reseller incentives, and even a training program conducted by yours truly. Our partner list included 5700 Consulting, Consigliere, ICS Consulting, Make Green Go, iComply, Cannawyz, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. Heck, even Vicente Sederberg and Greenspoon Marder were on that list!

But most of these so-called partners expected us to send them business. They were enticed by the prospect of easy money in a booming industry, then slapped in the face with the reality of having to sell. And in a business model based on non-recurring project revenue, they found it difficult to survive. Today, most of those consulting companies have since bit the dust. Same for all three of those competitors I mentioned.

Three

We used to have an internship program with DU. The director of the university’s career placement office said we would get the “cream of the crop” as one of the few cannabis companies to participate, so we were excited to work with them.

But the excitement soon wore off. It was a chaotic process – in fact, it didn’t seem like there was a process at all. After the initial meeting, we heard a lot of crickets. Then students would reach out asking for their start dates – without having been interviewed. After we cleared up the miscommunication, we started doing interviews, but students would show up not knowing what they were interviewing for. We were asked to do some interviews just for the sake of giving the students interviewing experience. When we agreed, one student ghosted us.

In the end, we hired Rachel Sall from the MBA program. She did some business development work, fulfilled her commitment for a semester, and then moved on. She was super nice and did good work, but it wasn’t enough to offset the experience. That was the end of our relationship with DU’s placement office.

Four

Marion and Brooke got a few seconds of fame in a web series called Weediquette, which later aired on the Viceland channel. Season 3, Episode 7, titled Dank New World aired near the end of 2017.

The opening scene shows some of Colorado’s cannabis elite mingling in a fancy penthouse suite in Denver. You’ll first see Brooke at 1:20 and Marion at 2:09, good shot of them together at 2:37. You may recognize some of the other faces as well. Most prominently, Keegan Petersen (RIP), CEO of Wurk at the time, is the guy who makes the toast. Halston Puchek (now Halston Trabucco), also with Wurk, gets a nice glamor shot on the balcony. She’s standing next to Christian Sederberg, one of the founding partners at Vicente Sederberg. I’m sure Brooke and Marion can name just about everyone in the room – the cannabis community in Denver was very tight back then!

Frustratingly, everybody ended up feeling somewhat used by the producers. They created this image of wealthy cannabis business owners drinking champagne in penthouses, and then contrasted that with skyrocketing real estate prices and Denver’s homeless problem. Most of the episode focused on a young couple with a baby moving to Denver from out of state. Spoiler alert – an entry-level job at a dispensary doesn’t pay well enough to support a family.

Five

Back when we had an office, there was a corner of the kitchen that we affectionately referred to as Beerf Ridge. It was a cold and refreshing place with lots of beer. But not just any beer. It was a carefully curated list of fine craft beers selected by our staff. Every month or so, I would take orders from our many beer drinkers and it turned into a game to see if I could find these rare and obscure beers. I had many consultations with the staff at Argonaut Liquors!

When it was time to close the office, I let Luke Ewing take the beer home on the condition that he host a party. Later I asked when he was going to do that party. He said he already did and it was a great time, they drank all of the beer, he just didn’t invite me. So I fired him and that’s how he ended up at Eaze. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Six

Also back when we had an office, John used to keep the other refrigerator stocked with La Croix sparkling water. The variety pack included something called pamplemousse. I’m sure Caroline knows “pamplemousse” is French for “grapefruit,” but I didn’t know that at the time. In my mind it conjured up images of pimples and moose, which was enough for me to avoid this flavor for weeks.

One day near the end of John’s shopping cycle, there was only one La Croix left – the dreaded pamplemousse. I closed the refrigerator and went back to my desk.

After a particularly “dry” Reg Affairs meeting, I resigned myself to the pamplemousse. Despite the image in my head of Bullwinkle with acne, I cracked open the can and took a sip. “Wow, this shit is pretty good!” When John replenished our La Croix supply, guess who hoarded the pamplemousse?

This experience of moving from disgust to addiction left quite an impression on me, so much so that pamplemousse became the password on our office wifi. And because I had to rotate our wifi password quarterly, I embarked on a string of pamplemousse-related passwords. A few of these cryptographic gems: highvitaminc, orangepomelo, pithisgood4u, and forbiddenfruit.

Much to the relief of all, a pandemic rolled into town and forced us to close the office, removing the opportunity for me to educate people on the almighty pamplemousse.

Seven

One of the first events organized by our Corporate Social Responsibility Committee was a neighborhood cleanup through a local non-profit called Extreme Community Makeover (ECM). It was a long day of hard work in the summer heat, but we had cold drinks at Odell Brewing afterward and it was a great bonding experience.

Later, I got a postcard from ECM thanking me for volunteering. It was a picture we had taken that morning – thankfully, from before we got all dirty and sweaty. Despite the porta-potty in the background, the picture has some sentimental value and has been on my desk ever since!

Eight

Google Workspace is an old and trusted friend for us, but it wasn’t always that way. Early on, we bought Office 365 licenses for everyone. The first drafts of audits were done in Word, but Emily (In-House Counsel) and I quickly decided it would be much more efficient to draft in Excel.

The audit spreadsheets were shared with others for edits and comments, both internally and externally. At the time, we worked closely with staff attorneys at Vicente Sederberg, and also sometimes with clients who were helping us develop the audits module. Right away, we ran into problems where the edits from one person would get overwritten by another, comments would not be visible to some users, saving the spreadsheet would return a “conflict with another user” error and not get saved. We ran into similar issues with other shared spreadsheets we were using for sales tracking, marketing emails, and more. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing hours of work because someone else opened the same spreadsheet and worked in it at the same time.

I had used Google Workspace – back then it was called G Suite – at my three prior companies, so we didn’t waste much time and quickly switched to Google. All of the user conflict errors went away immediately and we haven’t looked back since. I’m sure Microsoft’s collaboration functionality has since improved, but we have no reason to test that. “Too bad, so sad” Mr. Gates, you had your chance and blew it!

Nine

Before Marion landed on Simplifya, he was considering Accomplie, a French word meaning accomplished. It’s the feminine version of accompli, which you may have seen in the phrase “fait accompli,” meaning something that was decided before those impacted knew about it. I confirmed with Caroline the feminine version is appropriate when referring to a company. And shout out to Caroline for whipping up a logo for this brand that never came to be.

The name was suggested by one of our founders, Jordan Wellington. If it seems a bit off-target to use a French word with a snooty connotation to sell compliance software to cannabis businesses, you’re not alone. When Marion asked John what he thought of Accomplie, John said something to the effect of, “I don’t think it’s possible to pick a more pretentious name.” It was a classic case of founders coming up with a name that says more about what they think of themselves than what the product is or does. Thankfully, more practical minds prevailed.

There’s probably another story about how Marion chose Simplifya, but this is the story of how he didn’t choose Accomplie. And to be fair, if Jordan were still here, I think he’d shrug and say something like, “No bad ideas when you’re brainstorming, right?” And he’d be right, but it’d be a pretentious way to defend your bad idea. 😉