Silicon Valley Tries to Alter the Perception of Cannabis
Very few people are going to get rich off of cannabis. There&#x27;s really nothing novel about any part of the industry except that it&#x27;s now legal. Indoor growing &#x2F; hydroponics are used for a wide variety of plants, so the tech on the production front is already mature (if not commoditized). Because it&#x27;s pretty cheap to produce and doesn&#x27;t take a ton of special knowledge, wide legalization will see a race to the bottom on price (along with razor-thin margins for growers). Prices are still very high right now because nobody can achieve sufficient scale (again, thanks to the weird legal environment) but once they do, prices and margins will fall and a lot of growers will get bought out or go out of business. It doesn&#x27;t really cost much to grow super-high quality marijuana on an industrial scale.<p>The rest of the value chain is really nothing novel either if you ignore the weird regulatory environment that currently exists. A retail store selling weed is not much different from any other retail store. A delivery service is still subject to the same fundamental issues as any other delivery service -- and when weed becomes really cheap, a $10 delivery fee may not make sense when you&#x27;re buying $20 worth of weed. There&#x27;s room in the market for differing tastes and consumption methods, but those too are more or less commoditized and can use general-purpose industrial processing equipment.<p>There&#x27;s a boom right now because the market is growing quickly, but there will be a corresponding crash once the consumer market starts to hit the point where scale matters.