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FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
Imagine Fyllo as an early DoubleClick or
PayPal of weed, assuming the role of a nascent
tech’s proving ground (and reaping the ben-
efits), hoping soon to be its standard-bearing
bedrock foundation.
At a recent count, Fyllo reports 15 cli-
ents—everything from a multistate supplier
of medical marijuana to an edibles boutique
in Washington State. Although Fyllo declines
to elaborate on its revenue, citing its fundrais-
ing push for $30 million by March, Chock
says the company expects profitability in the
second quarter of 2020.
Fyllo hopes to capitalize on the preference
of Silicon Valley blue chips like Google and
Facebook to buy success rather than build it.
The startup also hopes to take advantage of
the largely local cannabis industry’s bent to-
ward word of mouth, physical billboards, and
primitive email lists.
“Fyllo isn’t Google. Thank God. There’s a
tendency of the smaller players to figure out
the modeling, the infrastructure—to do the
fucking heavy lifting—and deliver premium
at scale,” says Ford. “Fyllo is offering the Good
Housekeeping seal and mitigating risk once all
the low-hanging fruit has been taken. They’re
ready for 50 versions of the California Con-
sumer Privacy Act. Who else can say that?”
In the throes of cultural and legal upheaval,
the marijuana business is frenzied at best,
chaotic at worst—trapped in a boom that
banks won’t touch because it would risk their
standing with the federal government, which
considers cannabis a Schedule I drug on par
with Ecstasy, heroin, LSD, and peyote. (The
Drug Enforcement Agency considers cocaine,
meth, and OxyContin, Schedule II drugs, to
be safer.) Prestige employees now regularly in-
dulge in marijuana—the FBI has struggled to
find hackers and programmers who meet the
government’s requisite three-year abstention
from the drug (thanks, Burning Man). But it
has also contributed to epic missteps by Elon
Musk, who was fined $40 million by the SEC
for making a 420 joke about Tesla stock prices
on Twitter, and by former WeWork CEO Adam
Neumann, whose reported use of marijuana
on a private jet became part of the narrative of
an unchecked leader.
Bringing order to the chaos is Fyllo. “Take
out the CEO of Bank of America, and the
machine goes on,” says Andrew Parks, CEO
of Canadian banking services
firm Fountain Asset Corp., who,
as an investor himself, is also
at the rooftop party. “Whatever
happens in cannabis, these Fyllo
guys are their own machine.”
Chad Bronstein, Fyllo’s
CEO, is its de facto C-suite
first among equals, given his
penchant for having the others
call him “daddy.” Chairman
Brent Skoda—of accounting
firm Skoda Minotti, which was
founded by his father—brings
business acumen he has refined
since making day trades in
fifth grade (by age 15, he was
executing acquisitions at Merrill
Lynch’s private client group).
Chief of staff Aristotle Loumis’s
Greek version of Warby Parker
was acquired by businessman
Marcus Lemonis. Chief market-
ing officer Conrad Lisco rallies
them around the mantra “All
in, all out, altogether.” And then
there’s Chock, the steadiest of
the bunch, who calls himself
Vulcan as he texts meal pics to
his personal trainer.
Thankfully the bro-y bluster
is tempered by the cool grace
of chief data and compliance
officer Nicole Cosby, formerly
SVP of media tech standards and
partnerships at communications
powerhouse Publicis, who holds
court at the end of the banquet
VENTURE
table at The Chase. “ ‘Crawl, walk, run’ is smart
anytime,” she says. “But it’s perfect in an indus-
try that’s just figuring itself out. We can set the
day one standard.”
Marijuana-business dealers and their well-
earned reputation for homespun crunchiness
have never seen anything like it.
Clad in the only Gucci loafers in atten-
dance at the conference, Chock is a whirlwind
of handshakes. Told that Kim Campbell,
Canada’s first female Prime Minister, is also
at the conference, an attendee nods absent-
mindedly. “Yeah, yeah, yeah ... Hey,” he adds,
nodding toward Chock, “what’s the story with
this guy?”
F YLLO FACTS
BUDDING GENIUS
CannaBrain indexes
17,625 U.S. and
Canadian dispen-
saries’ inventory,
local laws, hours of
operation, licensure,
pricing, and more—
integrated with 20
data sets including
foot traffic from
cell-phone location
services, customer
purchase history, and
online behavior from
Oracle Data Cloud.
JOINT EFFORT
In May, Fyllo opened
an office in Haifa,
Israel, with four
engineers (for-
merly of Intel and
Microsoft) to develop
image recognition,
natural-language
processing, machine
learning, A.I., and full
stack development.
HERB ’N’ SPRAWL
Fyllo says its part-
nerships—includ-
ing with three top
cannabis-specific
point-of-sale provid-
ers—cover 80% of
the legal U.S. market,
allowing a client an
average 4X return on
ad spending.
