Fundraising Is Everyone’s Job: Buzzkill Founder and CTO, George Farquar, and President and CEO, Jeff Heimburger

Startup Tri-Valley Podcast

Buzzkill Labs, Jeff Heimburger & George Farquar 

 

Yolanda

Greetings. We’re here today with Jeff Heimburger, CEO at Buzzkill Labs, and George Farquar, Founder and CTO at Buzzkill Labs. Gentlemen, welcome.

George and Jeff:  Thank you. Thank you. 

Yolanda

All right. So first of all, you have a very provocative name and an interesting name. So I know all our listener is dying to know. Tell us about your company. Your name. Who? What? Why?

 

Jeff

I’m going to defer to George on that one. 

 

George

So when the company first started, we were actually C2BN. And that was a company to be named. And we stuck with that for quite a few months. And then Buzzkill Labs came up as an idea and we weren’t going to do it. We were just playing around with it.

Then we had three officers from the Livermore Police Department visit us and we threw out that name and they’re like, You’ve got to have that name. That is the name and you should stick with it. And at that point we said, we’re going to be Buzzkill Labs. 

 

Yolanda

All right. So what does Buzzkill Labs do? 

 

George

We are modernizing drug testing for legalized worlds.

We take a small sample of saliva and we give an answer. If you’ve recently consumed cannabis within 15 minutes and why is that important? Well, there’s a lot of people that are using cannabis now in California. It’s a multibillion dollar market, and there’s no current tests that allow us to  identify if someone’s recently used cannabis. The current tests that are on the market are a 30 day test, and a 30 day test just really isn’t very useful in a state where cannabis is legal for recreational use.

Yolanda

Great point. So, so in addition to law enforcement, you’re finding that this is more valuable, mainly just for people being able to allow their staff to do their job

George

Employment is really becoming the biggest market. Employers need to be able to hire people on Monday that legally consumed on Sunday, and right now they don’t have a deterrent. And this is, as Jeff and I have been discovering, a really big problem, because if companies don’t do drug testing, they can hire the employees, but then their insurance won’t cover their work on workman’s comp policies. 

Jeff

Yeah, the current technologies, urine testing, screening, which is that there’s a variety of problems with that. Right. So one is clearly privacy issues and it’s very difficult for it to be an observed test. So if you go out and Google clean urine, you will see an amazing billion dollar market for adulterated urine and drug testing products. 

Yolanda

Wow. 

Jeff

You can stop at a 7-Eleven and pick up a kit to adulterate your drug test. So that’s one of the issues that both insurers, workers comp insurers and employers are dealing with that oral fluid samples help resolve.

But the problem with oral fluid samples is if you test with the same technology or tested with urine, you’ll get the same results, which is the past use, as George mentioned. And so the real innovation, what we’re doing is the way we process the oral fluid samples and though the way that we detect only the THC parent and compound and none of the metabolites with no serious cross-reactivity with CBD or other cannabinoids, which is really a George could comment on how difficult this is.

 

But there’s over 100 cannabinoids and it’s really difficult to tease out just the parent compound. 

George

That’s an extremely difficult problem unlike alcohol, which is extremely volatile and you consume large quantities, you take milligrams of THC for a standard dose and it’s just a really, really low concentration and it’s a tough problem, especially with the near neighbors.

A lot of other things are easier to test for. For example, there’s great tests for pregnancy because there’s no adjacent pregnancy hormones, but there’s hundreds of adjacent cannabis compounds.. 

Yolanda

So you’re taking something that’s really important to detect that’s really, really hard to detect and a sample that’s relatively hard to work in compared to urine. 

George

The sample is not particularly hard to work in,  it just varies a lot, which is interesting.

If people are in different hydration levels, they have different thicknesses of saliva. That’s the best way to put it. So it does change a lot. There’s a lot more variables, variability in the consistency of it, but it is, as Jeff mentioned, it’s a much easier sample to collect. 

 

Yolanda 

Okay. Yes, Yes. And harder to adulterate

 

Jeff

For sure. Yeah.

 

Yolanda 

So, with your approach, you have the integrity of the sample  and much more useful and usable data, it sounds like. How did you get to this point? Like how did you come up with the idea to work on this? 

George

Well, this is my third startup. After I left  Lawrence Livermore [Labs], I spun out a company and then that’s off and running on SafeTraces. And then I had a second startup which we were looking at doing water testing.

And towards the end people kept asking if I could test cannabis. And I was fascinated. This was right as cannabis was being legalized in California, for the first time in my life, an entire market went from illegal to legal. It was just fascinating to do, but I didn’t want to do anything on the plant side. It just didn’t really interest me.

I have a background in working for the federal government. Plus, in California, it’s going to be cheap. Eventually all the margins are going to go away. It’s called weed for a reason. And so thinking about it for a while, I discovered this problem that there is no test for oral fluid and THC concentrations for recent use. And so that’s how that’s how it was born.

 

Yolanda

Right. So, Jeff, how did you get to be involved in Buzzkill? 

Jeff

So I met George, one of our key investors through our previous CEO, who had been a contact of mine at previous companies, another Tri-Valley company actually called IntegenX. Yolanda and I were talking already that I’ve been with. So in my 20 plus career in the life sciences world, I spent ten of those careers working here in the Tri-Valley, even though I live in San Jose and commute up and were three different companies.

 

So I think that speaks to the environment here, particularly for life science companies. 

 

Yolanda

Amazing. 

Jeff

But so I met Tom Olenic who was the previous CEO. I met George and Josh through Tom and when he indicated that he was leaving for his own reasons and that it was a great opportunity that he fully bought into and invested in it and asked if I wanted to come in and join.

And so I consulted with George for a few months. We kind of figured out if we were going to be able to work together, found it to be a good fit, and decided that the opportunity was too good to pass up. 

Yolanda

Amazing. And that kind of. So you guys, George, you found a problem that you were very interested in and that you understood and could address in a specific way.

And Jeff, it sounds like you had a history of working with startups here in the Tri-Valley and through a personal connection you kind of found Buzzkill and George and, and everything vibed and you said go, but coming… stepping back a little bit for each of you, what about your experience in the past do you think prepared you to get Buzzkill to this point, which is by the way, congrats, leading a successful, oversubscribed series in kind of a crummy fund funding environment?

Jeff

So I’d say that’s an understatement.

George

Yeah crummy is not the word I would use. 

Jeff

So I’d say that’s a really good question. I’m not sure anything can really prepare you. To me, it’s a little bit like being a parent. All right. And you say what prepared you? Well, a lot of things, you know, help you learn skills and things along the way, but you’re not really prepared until you have a child and you figure out that you’re responsible for it.

I think a startup is similar. And so going out and raising money in an environment after the March of last year, kind of the debacle in the marketplace and all anyone was talking about was hey, VC’s dead. And what we found is I think there is an interesting positive to that for us because I think in some ways in a normal investing environment, a startup is a very high risk venture and other investments are reasonably safe with different levels of safeness right in return.

And when the market got overturned like that, I think in some ways the risk profile of a startup was not as different from other potential investments. The returns are potentially fantastic. So I think in some ways I would argue it made us more attractive and we were. It was not an easy path and it took us a while, but we got to the point where the interest was high and we decided to extend the round because the interest was so high and we did oversubscribe that round.

Yolanda

And so that’s amazing. So congratulations. 

Jeff

Thank you. 

George

I completely agree with Jeff. You just really can’t be prepared for a startup. But amazingly, I think the thing that prepared me the best for Buzzkill was my time working for Lawrence Livermore National Lab. So very rarely do you hear Lawrence Livermore prepared me for a marijuana testing company, but it did, and it was because of the type of work that I did. It was all field deployment work. It was to actually… we had to have things that worked. It was not academic. So we drug these out in the field and with the hopes and the intent of making people safer. And it was also a lot of trace analytical work similar to what we’re doing in Buzzkill, very difficult problems to solve. And that really prepared me and that’s exciting. 

Yolanda

So you’re really your technical work Lawrence Livermore Bizarrely prepared you to do the kind of innovation you needed to do to create the sensor you’re making for a Buzzkill? Absolutely. I mean, Jeff’s heard it  multiple times where I tie my world of high explosives, counterterrorism and marijuana together around breath analysis.

And it seems bizarre, but those things really have a lot to do with each other. The vapor pressures are similar and the techniques of one of our competitors does breath, but we have a really good handle on that. Because of my national security work at Lawrence Livermore. 

Yolanda

Amazing. That’s an unexpected similarity.

George

It is. It’s extremely unexpected.

Jeff

I think that, again, is an understatement, Yolanda.  I guess for me, you know, my background, my education is engineering, but my background is mostly commercial in the life sciences side and running cross-functional groups. And so I had the good fortune of starting my career with Abbott Diagnostics in an environment where I got to see where it works at a Fortune 100 very successful diagnostic company and and got to learn some of the best practices at scale and parlayed that later into Roche Molecular Systems right here in theTri-Valley  and then some small companies like IntegenX, and I saw what it takes to to start that and to grow to become something that resembles those successful large enterprises. And I think all of that, it helped me to understand that I really enjoy the startup environment. I like the starting points and growing that up and that I think it helps, though, to have a vision for what that looks like in the end game. 

Yolanda

So it sounds to me, Jeff, like seeing that Fortune 100 environment was incredibly helpful for you and kind of staking some goalposts as you enter the startup scene. And, yes, you have that challenge and it sounds like the energy that you really like in the startup and at the same time you’re taking that Fortune 100 experience and saying, this is what scale looks like. 

Jeff

Well-put. And I think what you learned to from the very large scale companies are both the things that are done well, the world class pieces and also the pieces that you don’t want to replicate.

And so I guess you have the opportunity to start, you know, afresh with some of those things. 

Yolanda

Right. That’s amazing. So you’ve both parlayed your experience into getting Buzzkill to where it is now and coming back a little bit to the Raising the Series A. I’m curious, you talked a little bit about what’s fundamentally about your company and the environment allowed you to to raise such a successful round.

But I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about the Tri- Valley itself and your location. You know, you’re not in Silicon Valley. You’re here in the Tri-Valley. How it did or didn’t contribute to your success. 

Jeff

George, you live here. I’ll let you comment on that first. 

George

Well, to start with, the original location where we were, we started by asking was less than eight blocks from my house.

So that made it really, really easy to pop in and do things, especially with a young daughter, to get things moving. So you can’t. It’s very rare you’re going to be in Silicon Valley and be a block away or, you know, a ten or 15 minute walk. So that makes it amazing. It’s also a really amazing brain trust here when you think about it.

We have Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Sandia, a lot of biotech companies and our advisors come from this life sciences world and we have a lot of resources here in the Tri-Valley

Yolanda

Great. 

Jeff

Yeah,our investors really are from all over too. But a couple of our key investors are here in the Bay Area and, and I think that really helps.

And just getting to the Series A a little bit, one of the things that and that we’ve been very clear about is that we are not as a company taking a position on legalizing cannabis. It tends to be a very controversial topic. But one of the things that we’re pointing out, folks, is it is inevitable. We see that legalization of marijuana is happening. And so whether one is pro or con that that is the ultimate reality, it is happening. And so our message to the world is for that to be safely administered and to be acceptable to the public at large, there do need to be some checks and balances against abuse. Right. Just like with alcohol, with other drugs. Right. And so that really seems to resonate because we were really pleased to welcome Poseidon Ventures, which is a large cannabis fund, very well known in the cannabis world as a key investor, in this round.

And so I think that just kind of solidifies both the pro cannabis as well as the folks who are really interested in more of the limitations side and into what we’re doing. 

Yolanda

So whatever, wherever you stand on legalization, the fact of the matter is measurement is necessary and you’re preparing for that. That world, which is actually where we are right now in California and in many other states.

Jeff

And when we talked about the comparison of the startup to parenting before and I think everyone could agree, no matter your position on cannabis, you don’t want your kid’s bus driver to be high when they’re driving down the road. 

Yolanda

Right. Exactly. But that’s very true.

So having the experience that you’ve had recently with raising your series A, what advice would you give to current Tri-Valley founders who are raising funds?

George

It’s really, really hard. And failure is what you’re going to do most of the time. I mean, you are collecting a series of No’s. The absolute worst thing you can get is a maybe. And I think that’s really important to think of, but it’s really, really difficult to be aware of that. And I think another really important thing is Jeff and I have worked amazingly as a team on this, and I see so many early stage companies where they go, Oh, that’s the CEO’s job.

No, this is everyone’s job. It’s the founders, it’s the CEO, the CTO, and all of the employees need to talk to everyone. They know it because you never know where the next check is coming from.

Jeff

Yeah, I think particularly in the very early stages and what my kids are involved in sports has made sports analogies and I say, you know, if you are if you are a professional baseball player, if you get a hit 30% of the time you’re up, you’re likely to go into the Hall of Fame your career.

And I said raising money is similar to that. And my background is a lot in the commercial side, and it’s very similar to the sales process. A lot of it is just persistence, right, in a numbers game. But I think the difference is a lot of people who come from where I do are very focused on the marketplace and making arguments around the success of a product or a portfolio or a service, right?

And so it takes a little bit of a shift in thinking to think about what it is actually an investor is  looking for. And it is a little bit different than what a customer or potential channel partners are looking for. And so I think you have to adjust your mindset a bit to think about how am I going to communicate this to an investor about what they’re looking for in this versus somebody who is interested more in the product?

Yolanda

That’s interesting. So what do you think are investors looking for that’s critically different from a customer? Because I can see the temptation would be to just treat everyone like a customer. 

Jeff

Well, I think one of the things I’ve learned and I’ve learned this partly from George, who’s done this more than I have, is understand the investor that you’re talking to very early on and understand what their expectations are for a timeframe of investment, for the return of that investment, what they typically what kind of investments they typically make both in size and in timing and at what stage in a company do they typically invest and do you  fit that mold? And  that and that helps you really refine how you’re communicating them and also to figure out what your odds are of that being a successful discussion or whether you think about that is more something you’re going to keep warm and table for a later discussion. 

Yolanda

Right? So it’s really in some ways similar to the sales process where you really research who you’re talking to, but stay incredibly tailored and focused.

But their priorities, an investor’s priorities, are naturally going to be a lot different than your end user or your purchaser. Yeah, I think that’s a good analogy. 

George

And every investor is different, and I think that’s really important too. Some may invest in a company like Buzzkill because they just believe that this is needed. Some are interested in this is just a great story, we want to be part of it. And some see the you know, most see the huge returns that we’re going to get right.

Jeff

I think the one shared thing, though, is the return. 

George

Yes, that is definitely shared.  

Yolanda 

I can imagine that that’s true. 

So what surprised you the most as you’ve gone through the process of building Buzzkill labs to where it is right now?

I’m interested in from each of you, where the surprises have been, especially because you both do have so much experience. 

Jeff

George, you started first. So why don’t you kick that off. 

George

The surprises, there’s so many surprises. I think that day that I had to tell people to stop doing work because you can’t do saliva testing during a global pandemic. That was a shocking surprise.

Yolanda

That does seem like a doozy.

George

So that really bogged us down for quite a while because people can only use their own samples. So that was an interesting surprise. 

Yolanda

How close to the pandemic did you start Buzzkill? 

George

We started about five years ago. So before the pandemic, we’re making great progress and then boom, And it wasn’t the things shut down, it was that we’re handling the saliva.

And we didn’t understand anything. Yeah. So that was a surprise. It was a surprise teaching elementary school next to the lab that I set up in my garage. And that was an interesting thing. So a lot of it is  COVID related. But I think how the teams come together, it’s really been a great surprise. We’ve had a good team the whole time.

We’ve got great employees and Jeff’s good to work with. It’s even our investors are all part of the team. So that’s a nice, pleasant surprise because yet in doing startups in the past you get one bad apple and things are really, really tough. You work at a place like Lawrence Livermore and you have one bad apple. You just don’t interact with that person, right? But in, you know, four or five person company, that’s the that could be the end of it, right? 

 

Jeff

Yeah, I agree with George. I think the team is the most important piece and the chemistry there and it’s more important to the startups on this with larger companies because like George said, people, to  be blunt, people can be mediocre and survive at large organizations and find a place to fit at a startup.

The chemistry has to be great. Everyone has to lift their weight. And I think another important piece was that you can be somewhat narrow at a large organization. But with a startup company, we need to wear a lot of hats. And like George said, everybody’s involved in the fundraising process. Each of us has to wear a number of hats on any given day.

And for some people that’s a great fit. And for me that’s really fun. But for some people that could be very frustrating. So I think part of it too, is identifying whether this is something that you really want to do and understanding what that means. 

George

Yeah, the team is just amazing. A great example is a few months ago we had a major oil and gas company that was going to come visit us and we didn’t know when that was going to happen.

So the day was over. I was actually already at home and Marcus was in the lab and Katrina, I got them both on the phone. She was,  Katrina  was actually driving to work. I mean driving home from work and I said, we have a major oil and gas company coming tomorrow. And she said, hang on, I’m turning around. 

Yolanda

Wow 

George

So when you have a really early career employee that just knows this is a time for me to turn around and go back to the lab so we can get ready for tomorrow morning. Right. And if you have to ask, it’s not going to be a great place to be in a startup. 

Yolanda 

Yeah. So I just want to follow up with that. So it sounds like the team has been really key, and it’s been a little bit of a surprise that you were able to pull everyone together and find such a great team. So I’m curious if you can look backwards a little bit and say, what did you do right to get this team  

 

George

Got lucky. I think, you know, luck is a huge part of it. But like when Jeff came on board, you try to do a speed dating period where we spend a lot of time together, interact a lot, and challenge each other’s ideas. That was important. When Marcus came out for his interview, we brought him out after he was finished with his post-doc on a recommendation from another startup founder. He spent the majority of his interview putting in ceiling tiles in our lab space on a ladder. We were talking and the really great thing is he actually found someone with a key to the facility, and because he wasn’t finished by the end of the interview, he effectively broke in and finished the ceiling tile job the following Saturday after his interview.

And I’m like, “That’s the guy I need on the team”, someone who is going to get this done however it needs to be done. And so sometimes you just see those things and it’s really important to make sure that everyone really pitches in because it’s insanely hard. There’s no other way to put it. A sane person wouldn’t form a startup and leave the stable government job.

It’s just,  it’s a little nutty to do that. But I love it. 

Jeff

And I think we’re a little bit unusual as a startup because I live in San Jose, in Silicon Valley, and most of the startups there, it seems, at least on the tech side, are very young founders, very young teams, and that business is a lot different than this, where they’re not necessarily even producing a product.

It’s more, you know, a software product in most cases. And I think for us, because I’m further in my career, George is probably mid-career and then we have some people that are very early in their career. And I think in a lot of ways that’s a very good mix because, you know, a lot of us have enough background and experience that we’ve made some of the mistakes that a lot of people who are just getting started haven’t, and that we’ve seen the things, some of the things that have worked and haven’t, but also because we’re in a startup environment, have that are too were also open to things we don’t know.

I think that’s the kind of mix that really creates the best chemistry on the team and gets us further along faster. 

Yolanda

Right.  So it’s that diversity of experiences that’s really allowing you guys to gel and propel each other forward, and it sounds like also just a deep seated sticktoitiveness that everybody shares. That’s great.

 

So, you know, I know we talked a little bit about why that Tri-Valley, and  a lot of it is location for you. I’m just curious about any other resources that you found in the Tri-Valley that really helped your success?

George

Well, I think it’s true to the Tri-Valley and all of California is that people help startups. I mean, if you go and ask for help, it’s amazing the advice we get from other founders that are busy, other companies, lots of resources in the tri-valley because of the science companies.

So there’s a huge eBay market and other resources you can get and borrow and loan, including in some lab spaces such as, you know, Daybreak Labs. Fantastic. And I guess to add a little bit to that, without Daybreak Labs, we probably wouldn’t have started because it allowed us to keep our overhead incredibly low when we began. And it allowed us to kind of grow up.

And we’re still using some of the Daybreak [Labs] resources today. So that’s really, really, really critical for us to be able to basically not even on the bottom line as a beginning, have rent really matter to us.  If we had 100 or 500 square feet, because it was small enough that salaries were significantly bigger, then it really allowed us to keep really lean, which I think is critical.

Jeff

Yeah, I, I would echo that. I think the Tri-Valley offers a focus on biotech that doesn’t exist in a lot of other places in our life sciences. Um, and, and that is, that is different because in the life sciences role, we’re operating a laboratory and you know this Yolanda , from a lot of your background that you have to have biological processes and chemical processes and physical, mechanical, software, electrical things that have to happen in order for the product to work.

And all of those things have to happen simultaneously and all come together in a way every single time that provides a reliable result. And that’s what we’re working on. And I think creating an environment to support companies who do that is a little bit unique, right, because of companies that might need lab space and also need a bunch of other equipment that wouldn’t typically be in a commercial office building.

Right. I think that was really helpful for DAYBREAK Labs and for the environment here in the Tri-Valley, which I find uniquely welcoming to the life sciences space. 

Yolanda

That’s good to hear. So I know, as you know, I know. I know I put a lot of effort into trying to make that the case where people who need that, especially that lab space and particularly highlighting the focus in the Tri-Valley on life sciences.

And so it’s great to hear that you actually lived it. It’s not just a dream. 

Jeff

I’ve not only lived it, I’ve commuted it for ten years!

Yolanda 

So now you know you’ve had this successful raise and I’m curious looking at the next few years, what you see as the sort of opportunities and challenges and then where the again, like where does that intersect with the Tri-Valley and how it can can help or needs to grow in order to help you, you know, seize those opportunities or, you know, stalemate some of those challenges?

Jeff

Wow. Well, there’s a lot of challenges as there are for every startup. I think speed to market is one of them for most startups, and the same for us. And so we’re primarily focused as George much on the employer market, the workplace safety market for THC and other drug testing. And that market is changing so rapidly because of things like marijuana legalization but also because of other things.

For instance, last week, two weeks ago, the DOT put out a final rule authorizing the use of oral fluid in DOT testing. And that has been in the works for, I don’t know, ten or 15 years. Right. And so that becomes a real tailwind to our business. The other thing that has happened is California passed AB 2188, which goes into effect in January and a number of states have passed similar legislation. We are getting up to double digit states now, I believe,  that prohibit discrimination against employees for legal use of cannabis, legal within that state , on their own time.

And, in fact, California’s went so far as to prohibit testing that picks up metabolites, which all urine testing does. Right. So that goes into effect in January. And so employers are really scrambling to figure out how do I comply with this kind of legislation. And that just piggybacks on the dilemma they had from the beginning, which is, you know, I’ve had friends of mine call who are heading large construction companies that say, look, if I test with urine-based testing, I don’t have enough people to do the work because, you know, it’s widely used now legally.

But if I stop testing, my insurance company is telling me they’re not paying my workers comp claims and that can be millions of dollars in liabilities. So they’re in this really tough place in this dilemma. And a lot of them now are continuing to do testing, but they are taking judgment on those results based on their needs at the moment, which puts them in a really difficult place from a liability standpoint.

Yolanda

Right. Yeah. So it sounds like the enormous opportunity is also the enormous challenge, which is that is that 

Jeff

It is get to market fast because it’s desperately needed. It’s a great position to be in. 

Yolanda

Right.

Jeff

But we’ve got to go execute. 

 

Yolanda

Got it. 

George

And I think the biggest unknown opportunity is when are the feds going to legalize cannabis?

Because we know what’s going to happen. We strongly believe it’s going that direction. There’s multiple states that have legal cannabis.  That’s over  50% of Americans have some form of access to legal cannabis and when that switch flips, it will dramatically change everything. It’ll change our competitive landscape, it will change the market. But we just don’t know when that’s going to happen.

Yolanda

Right.  So you guys have the advantage of being really thought leaders in this area and seeing the opportunity and you’re actually just poised to take on the challenge of getting to market as quickly as possible so you can capture, for example, the state laws, but also when the federal legislation flips the switch on cannabis legalization.

Jeff

Yeah, and even leading up to that, states are passing, you know, legislation all the time. I think Minnesota did earlier this month and Washington just passed a law that prohibits discrimination and so the tidal wave is already here.  It’s flowing in.   Federal legalization will just put a final stamp on that and make it more broadly accessible.

But I think even in the interim, that tidal wave is really washing ashore on all kinds of shores right now. And so we’re getting more and more calls. We’re getting more and more interest both from the investor side as well as from, you know, the potential client side. So we have had a number of discussions with very large players in the risk mitigation insurance business because they are trying to figure out how to help their clients who are dealing with these quandaries.

Yolanda

Right.

Jeff

And they sometimes in some cases have connected this directly to their clients. George mentioned we’ve had large players in the oil and gas industry come to us because they have a lot of safety sensitive roles, very difficult jobs, and they have to figure out how do I manage that? And so it’s fun to be in a place where your product or service is so desperately needed, but it also creates an environment where, okay, we were a small team, we’ve got to get this thing buttoned down and get on the market as fast as possible. And we are.

 

George

A huge sense of urgency for the product and it’s really interesting too, because this is, as I mentioned earlier, that flipped from illegal to legal market in California. In the past five years, the market has changed dramatically. It wasn’t that we didn’t understand the market. The market keeps changing. Five years ago people were going, yeah, I would be often I would hear comments from investors, yeah, this is probably going to go away

 

Jeff

Meaning  legalization.

 

George

Yes. Especially, you know older investors are typically what you get because they have the money and they just grew up with the war on drugs and this is just never going to stick around. This will stop and almost get zero of that now. Right. So that’s completely changed. Everyone’s like, no, this is no way this is going away.

My golf buddy smokes pot. You hear that all the time from people you would not expect it from or talk to someone. Interestingly enough, in the construction industry not that long ago, it’s like, I want to get my guys off opioids. When you’re 60 years old, you hurt. And if you’ve gotten you’ve gotten an injury at work. Cannabis is a much better solution. But I need to have a test so that people can come to work safely but still be able to sleep and take something for their pain management when they’re at home. So it’s really, really a dramatic change,

 

Yolanda 

 

A huge shift in how people are thinking about cannabis now. So anything I didn’t ask that you wanted to comment on or a thought I should have asked?

 

Jeff

Well, I think there’s a lot of nuances in this market that are developing, too. And part of it is that as cannabis gets legalized, it goes from a weed that  somebody grows in their yard and, you know, distributed  somehow illegally to friends or others, to a really robust commercial business. And with that, the product portfolio in the cannabis world is expanding dramatically.

And so one of the issues that people are facing right now is, you know, I’m old enough to call it the Cheech and Chong days. You know, they get out of hand and it’s clear that somebody has been consuming because they smell like it. And you’re right. And then there are other signs. But now, I mean, if you walk into a dispensary, they’re amazingly Apple-like retail stores and there are a wide array of products. I saw a Lagunitas beer that has THC instead of alcohol. There are mints and candy bars and all kinds of things that are consumable. So for employers now, it’s not as easy as saying, oh, wow, I suspect something. It can be, you know, a pack of what appear to be Tic Tacs in your pocket, that you’re popping at work that actually have a fairly high concentration of THC.

Yolanda

Wow.

Jeff

And the other thing that’s happened is the products are getting more and more refined. And so the THC content is rapidly increasing where it used to be in single digits. Now it’s up, it could be 90% concentration. So I think what employers are also realizing is they have to look at this a little bit differently. And that’s where the technology that we’ve developed using oral fluid, using a chromatography based detection system really can tease out, out even out of edibles.

And that’s where a lot of the tests on the market fall short is they can’t pick up edibles. Picking up smoking’s pretty easy for breath and for oral fluid, but edibles are the really tricky part. Absolutely. Of course, I don’t have to tell George that – he’s doing the work. It is. It is very challenging to do edibles.

George

And edibles are a huge part of the market. So that’s the hardest part to do. Yeah, but the other thing you haven’t asked as a startup founder, I’m basically required if anyone out there thinks they have a unique skill, an ability to help us, please reach out. We are always looking for great people on the team or anyone who thinks they can contribute to Buzzkill’s success.

Yolanda

That’s fantastic. So I don’t know if you want to end on that, George, or if either of you have any last words,  words for the founders, words for the community ,  just anything you want to leave our listeners

Jeff

George,  I’ll let you comment on stepping out as a founder, but I’ll say as a compliment to your request for skills,  I would also say if there are investors out there listening that have an interest in coming into this business and taking advantage of the opportunity we have in front of us, we always are welcome to talk to them. 

Yolanda

Great. Thank you both. George, and Jeff,  for being on the pod. 

George and Jeff: Thanks so much. Great. Thanks for hosting, Yolanda.