Chris Violas Breaks Down Blaze’s Software Infrastructure

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Bryan Fields: What's up guys, welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellen Finney. This week we've got a very special guest, Chris Violas, CEO at Blaze. Chris, thanks for taking the time, how are you doing today? Chris Violas: I am doing great. It is Green Wednesday, it's exciting, and thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I've been listening to this for quite some time, so really excited we got the invite to join today. Stoked to be here. Kellen, how are you doing? Kellen Finney: Doing really well, really excited to talk to Chris, really excited about the West Coast expertise that he's going to bring to the conversation today. I know we're going to dive into a lot of POS stuff and a lot of the fun technology that Blaze is pioneering in the space, but more importantly, Bryan, how are you doing over there on the East Coast? Bryan Fields: Yeah, I'm stoked, and of course Chris may live on the West Coast, but he's bringing a lot of that education to the East Coast and spending a ton of time out there. I think, for the record, we've got an East Coast/West Coast battle here, so let's just take it the old traditional way — I think it comes down to where your parents laid their roots. So Chris, your dad in particular, East Coast or West Coast, where would he be from? Chris Violas: Yeah, there you go — and by the way, my father is general counsel at our company and a co-founder, so he's very much involved, very much part of it. But born in Upstate New York, in Rochester, lived there for quite some time. My mom was born in New Jersey, so all East Coast folks who found themselves on the West Coast. To your point, Bryan, I spend a lot of time in New York, couldn't be more excited about the rollout out there and all the different things happening on the East Coast right now. Lots of good things. Bryan Fields: I love it, I love it, we wrangled them all the way to the East Coast. So Chris, for our listeners unfamiliar with you, can you give a little background on yourself and how you found your way to the cannabis space? Chris Violas: Yeah, absolutely. I'll take it back to college, because that's really where it started for me. I was a D1 athlete, soccer player at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, loved it, I was a goalkeeper. I thought I was going to go pro. I didn't touch cannabis once going into college. Junior year comes, I break my right wrist twice, and as a goalkeeper I just stood on the sideline all year. I came home during winter break and said, "Hey Dad, I want to go with you to work." My dad was a cannabis attorney, been around since 2005, very fascinating. I said I want to see what you're doing — this is circa 2010, 2011. He took me to Long Beach, we went through all the cultivation facilities and dispensaries, and I was like, I need to get into this, this is crazy. So I wrote a business plan for my father, and we launched a dispensary going into my senior year of college — a delivery service out of San Luis Obispo. Scaled that up and realized pretty quickly within a year that I didn't want to run it, but I really wanted to build software to solve this problem. I was lucky, I got an exit out of that a year later and started my journey on the technology side, which is what I went to school for. I worked for a really cool ad-tech agency — my biggest project there was rolling out the Samsung HQ in New York City, across from the High Line, at the Standard Hotel, a fully digital experience. After that I went to Amazon Web Services, sold cloud services for about four years, worked with some great clients, learned how to scale streaming applications and workloads in the cloud. During my time at AWS I started building Blaze, put some funds into it from the dispensary sale I mentioned, and finally got it off the ground in 2018, getting some beta customers on. In April 2019 I finally left Amazon and went to Blaze full time. So the background is cannabis operator and technologist coming together. Bryan Fields: I love it, and I can see the origin of the path here, which makes it really clear. So let's talk about those first days — you have the idea for Blaze, you want to get started. What's the first thing you do to take the idea and start building the physical product? Chris Violas: You've got to find developers. I was very fortunate — I was very close with my boss at the ad-tech company, who ran the engineering team of about 40 people. His name is Amin, he's actually a co-founder at Blaze today. I convinced him to come work with us, so that was day zero — finding the talent for the team. He started building out the engineering side, and I went into designing the business flows and logic flows. It was very much us going back and forth on how this was going to look, then getting hands on keyboard to get it deployed. Definitely a challenge, and I can't tell you how many times we've changed the system since then, but it was the traditional startup path — get to an MVP, make sure the critical functions work. At that point we were solving for California and the recreational market, and we happened to have great knowledge of what that looked like. My father actually wrote the regulations for the City of Long Beach and was a principal author of the state's rec regulations back in 2018, and a lot of municipalities adopted that framework, so we were very familiar with the intimate pieces of compliance and how operations needed to function. We built against that, used my father's existing client base to get our feet wet with Blaze, and then started to build and grow. We raised a round, hired a team, and started scaling the system. Bryan Fields: At what point did you leave AWS and take Blaze full time? Was it conceptual and then you decided to take the risk — when in this journey did you make that decision? Chris Violas: We launched our first beta customer in March 2018, so we knew the stuff was working. At that point we saw some big raises happening — Meadow was coming up, a little earlier, and Green Bits was starting to get funding momentum, so we felt like we had to play with the big boys. We went out to the market in Q4 and found our venture capital partner, Act One Ventures — phenomenal partner, not a cannabis VC but a technology VC — got that check, and finally got to leave and build out the team. When I left in April 2018 (2019) we were about five people; we're about 85 now. Kellen Finney: It's such a different experience building a product internally and then putting it in the hands of a beta customer for the first time, seeing the failure points and feedback — that's a dynamic only someone who's experienced it can really see. So that first interaction with the beta customer — was it as you intended, or were there surprises? Chris Violas: I was really familiar with the operations side, having run a delivery service, so I understood that piece well. A storefront is actually a bit less complex than delivery mechanics. What surprised me early on was the shoot-from-the-hip mentality — there wasn't a lot of planning going on, people were trying to solve for regulations they didn't fully understand, different tax schemes all over the place, and then Metrc started rolling out and no one knew what that was. I think part of our success has been the domain knowledge on our team — myself, my father, and a lot of teammates are former operators in various capacities, whether through brands or other technology providers. You can't buy in totally to the customer feedback loop — you have to understand it, interpret it, and rely on your own judgment. Taking that feedback and distilling it down to core functions and understanding how it scales has been a recipe for our success, and we've proven it through acquisitions like Green Line in Canada and Timber in the US — using the same methodologies and frameworks. Kellen Finney: I want to highlight your infrastructure background too — that's such a critical component in building the house from a stability standpoint. Chris Violas: When you talk about mission-critical infrastructure, our system — it's not okay to have a lag when someone's standing at the point of sale pushing buttons trying to check out. There's no room for issues, and if there are, you need to know how to fail over and move through them. We've spent a lot of time on this, and while a lot of my background factors in, our engineering team is world class — Amin leads that organization extremely well. It's the basic things people don't think about: our production database has transactions flying in and out constantly — we process a couple hundred million dollars a month — and you don't want reporting to read from that database, it's too much pressure. So from day one we put an ETL together into a data warehouse, and reporting sits on the warehouse instead, so two-year reports don't affect production processing. Some people learn these things the hard way; we knew them from day one. It's a different beast when you need 100% uptime. Kellen Finney: Because any failure point creates such an uncomfortable experience for the consumer and the employee. Chris Violas: Exactly, and when something does happen, our response needs to be as fast as calling the fire department. Support isn't just someone answering a line — are they connected to the engineering team, really dissecting what's happening? I take a lot of pride in this — I view every customer's shop as my shop, I feel the impact if we cause a problem for their business. It's our responsibility to step in and help run that business smoothly. That's why they're paying us, and it's a trust you need to earn. Kellen Finney: The POS system is supposed to alleviate the nuances of running the business — if it causes more issues, that's a big problem, and managing that trust is a huge challenge. If there's downtime, support has to be a fire line to get them back up taking sales instantly. Chris Violas: Right, and I'd say it's one thing to have stability, but that stability is what allows us to spend our time innovating instead — that's where the exciting stuff happens. We're outpacing our competitors on innovation pretty easily, and I'm excited because that value comes back to the retailer, helping their business grow. We're here to help grow it, not get in the way. Kellen Finney: How do you balance deploying new innovations with ensuring stability, since new features inevitably bring some breakage that local testing can't fully catch? Chris Violas: It comes down to our world-class engineering team. When we acquired Green Line, around June 2022, we brought in some great teammates — shout out to Peter, our VP of Engineering at Blaze — and standards from day one: building so we can scale, making sure unit tests are done right, QA has a clear understanding, product managers have a vision. We're also SOC 1 and SOC 2 certified, type one and type two, meaning we have policies in place so the person who writes the code isn't the one deploying or testing it. We've learned the hard way — we've released stuff that was technically ready but the workflow wasn't dialed in, so our account managers got upset because they had no input. Now they're highly involved before anything even gets into beta, because they understand the day-to-day of these customers — the purchasing team, inventory team, sales floor lead, all different personas. I also run transactions on our POS all day myself — if you don't use your own product, especially as an executive, you lose connection to the reality on the ground quickly. Kellen Finney: That's why I wanted to highlight your background — if you don't build the core infrastructure right from the start, everything crumbles as you try to scale and bring in acquisitions. Chris Violas: One hundred percent. And now we get to focus on the fun stuff — building new innovations in tech, especially at the retail level. When we tie together e-commerce and the point of sale tightly, we really start to fly past some competitors. We've seen great case studies — take a look at Happy Monkey, shout out to Vlad and Ramone, we just launched their second location in New York, and they're fully bought into using every piece of our technology rather than piecing together different systems. We're starting to see great results from them. Kellen Finney: Can you give listeners a high-level overview of the Blaze ecosystem? Chris Violas: For those not familiar, think of us as covering all things commerce — we're a dispensary tool set providing point-of-sale infrastructure: the registers, back of house, business intelligence and reporting, dispatch functionality for delivery. On the e-commerce side, we provide the online shopping experience, a white-labeled mobile app, and in-store kiosk support. We also handle payments — in the US that's cash, ATM, and A2A for online orders — and this year in Canada we launched our own payment facilitation business, Blaze Pay Canada, with full credit and debit card support. A lot of providers have one or two pieces of that ecosystem; it's hard to do it all at once. That's why we went into acquisition mode looking for best-in-class technology in each category and stitching it together with strong connective tissue. Bryan Fields: Take us through the process of connecting those platforms — negotiating the acquisition and then the technical integration. Chris Violas: I'd say this is one of our specialties — there aren't a lot of successful acquisitions in cannabis tech; often a year later the product's out the door. For us, the merger process is critical, specifically around infrastructure. There are certain domains critical to our world — think of inventory as a critical pillar, with products and inventory actions. Any product we add needs to know about products, so we build microservices around these critical pillars until they reach what we call the global service. Once an acquisition's product integrates at that level, everyone's speaking the same language and we can move — like launching deal pages so a promotion built in Blaze POS shows up on e-commerce, or sales channels where you can set different discounts for offline versus online. It's about making sure the infrastructure is solid and malleable so every acquired provider can tap into it, rather than managing different databases. Bryan Fields: Do those adjustments happen one step at a time, or does a change on one side, like e-commerce, immediately require connecting to inventory? Chris Violas: It depends on the product and what we're trying to do. Rewards is an interesting example — the POS has a different reward system in Canada than the US, so we have to decide whether to build it once or let each region do it individually. Often we find ourselves saying, okay, we're going to build a microservice for this new critical pillar. It comes down to evaluating each piece individually, and the classic build-versus-buy question. Bryan Fields: Do you have a specific team dedicated to post-merger integration, almost like a matchmaker between teams? Chris Violas: Doing acquisitions is like having another kid — a lot of work, teaching them to walk and talk while also saying, "run your business, you've got a day job." You need dedicated people to make it smooth. I got great advice from Chris Beals, former CEO of Weedmaps, and other advisors — critical information systems need to be migrated within the first month. If we use HubSpot for CRM, the acquired company needs to be on our HubSpot by the end of month one; Slack needs to be open day two. Culture and communication have to come first, or the incoming company can override your culture and create culture wars. We acquired Green Line, the Canadian POS with about 33% market share up there, at 500 doors — we're well over a thousand now, doubling that company, which is unheard of in these kinds of acquisitions. Same with Timber — we bought them at about 200 doors, now over 500. Bryan Fields: The best part of the ecosystem model is that a customer using your flagship product naturally expands into other products that already work well together — but if the software doesn't connect those things as described, customers get frustrated. Chris Violas: We're not perfect, but we've done a good job, and it's rewarding when customers say they didn't expect something to "just work" together — we spent a lot of time thinking about that. It's also fun watching competitors try similar moves and quickly seeing it doesn't work the same way. Bryan Fields: What about unique cannabis challenges — state-by-state variation, anything like that affecting your business? Chris Violas: The US is by far the most challenging when it comes to cannabis, for reasons spanning payments and compliance. Canada is relatively straightforward. Payments remain top of mind — really difficult in banking, Visa and Mastercard don't want anything to do with our space, yet their logos are on every piece of plastic including debit cards. On compliance, you're tracking things like the New York BioTrack rollout, which has been a very interesting process. States like Washington are doing their own thing, Utah isn't aligning to Metrc or BioTrack, meaning custom integrations. It's a big part of our team's work keeping up with compliance, but it's manageable. We just launched support for Metrc's Retail ID this week — if it saves a dispensary from needing a person to manually label products on intake, that's a $60,000–$70,000 win. My biggest frustration is states not learning from each other's rollout mistakes — we should have learned from California's mistakes and done it right elsewhere, and the communication around new compliance requirements is often chaotic. Bryan Fields: Every state seems to think they'll avoid California's mistakes but ends up creating its own chaos. Chris Violas: Right, and part of the strategy behind the Green Line acquisition in Canada was to get into a quieter regulatory space and ask, in a perfect world, how would we build this system? We can do full payments and serve enterprise customers reaching 100 stores up there — really tough to do in the US unless you're GTI or similar. We're learning a lot in Canada, and the hope is that once US regulations loosen, those learnings can come down immediately. Bryan Fields: What benefits would an enterprise-level solution provide operators in the US if they reached that scale? Chris Violas: When you're that big, things change. Many MSOs, after acquisitions, leave the brand with the retail, so you might have four or five different retail brands across 50–60 stores, and one system can't handle that — you end up needing separate systems for each, with different pricing and loyalty structures. In Canada we're building things like pricing by banner or by logo, managing multiple brands within one system rather than forcing everyone into one setup. These management challenges scale further as more brands come in per state. Kellen Finney: It's funny — the way you describe scaling one system at a time reminds me of how early cultivation facilities scaled, just building more rooms to double capacity. Chris Violas: Really similar. These MSO operators are making it work through sheer power, but it's not the best use of their capital, resources, or time — they could move much faster with everything in one system managed at a more global scale. Bryan Fields: Do conversations with bigger MSO players involve asking you to help prep for that kind of consolidation? Chris Violas: A lot of MSOs are scared to touch anything right now — balance sheet issues, carrying too much inventory, not buying properly. When we talk to them, there's often a "we can't touch anything, zero disruption" mentality and a fear of migration — similar to when people were hesitant to move from data centers to AWS. It's hard to get them to discuss their problems out loud, especially if you're not their core provider, but we're trying to build that trust. Bryan Fields: How do you manage situations where an MSO wants functionality closer to a full ERP than what Blaze offers? Chris Violas: There's a point where we're excellent and where we intentionally stop — we've got a ton of APIs that we use internally ourselves and expose externally, so a procurement team with their own purchasing algorithm can trigger purchase orders per store via our API today. At the same time, we're launching a partnership with Sage, a big ERP, next week, so retail data can consolidate there quickly rather than requiring manual data entry and bookkeeping. Bryan Fields: Let's switch gears — when things go wrong and support gets called, can you talk about the procedures you've put in place? Chris Violas: We over-invest in support relative to competitors — nothing is outsourced, it's all handled stateside or by our Canadian team for Canadian customers. We break it into three areas: onboarding, account management, and tier-one ticket support. Average tenure on that team is about three and a half years, many are former operators who understand Metrc or Weedmaps and who to contact there. Our CSAT score this year averages 99.1%, with about six months at 100%. Shout out to David Hines, our Customer Success Director for the US and Canada. As you scale, you shouldn't just hire more support people — you should find the recurring issues and solve them with technology. Bryan Fields: Can you give an example of that? Chris Violas: When rolling out some Metrc functionality, we'd get failed submissions and tickets requiring our team to dig through backend logs. We solved that with an interface called the Compliance Issue page, launched in early 2023, which surfaces all the issues and logs directly to the customer, giving them the tools to solve the problem themselves. Tickets have actually gone down over time even as our customer count has gone up. Bryan Fields: Do you have any interesting data trends or habits you've found surprising? Chris Violas: I just did a webinar with Andrew from Happy Cabbage on this — one to two percent of customers drive 15 to 20 percent of revenue for the average dispensary, which is very consistent across the US and Canada. Part of that webinar was about moving that from one-to-two percent to three-to-four percent to meaningfully drive revenue. Another interesting data point was around average inventory carry days, around 45 days, longer than people expect, pointing to inventory problems operators are getting into on the balance sheet. Bryan Fields: Is that similar to a metric in industries like Coca-Cola or alcohol, where a small percentage of consumers drive a majority of revenue? Chris Violas: It's pretty consistent in retail generally, though it shifts with price points. I'd imagine alcohol is similar since average order value is roughly comparable, in the $70–$100 range rather than $30–$40 — once people find what they like, they keep coming back. Bryan Fields: Can you share how the Metrc Retail ID alignment works for people unfamiliar with it? Chris Violas: It runs on serialization — every unit is individually tagged, so if a manufacturer makes 10,000 pre-rolls or vape carts in a lot, each has its own unique ID, allowing manufacturing to do the labeling that carries through the supply chain to retail, using the same label. As a retailer on our system working with a distributor or manufacturer on Retail ID, you scan products as you receive them rather than manually labeling, and that QR code works throughout the system for transfers, audits, and point of sale. The QR code is effectively a URL that can point to brand assets like test results or marketing materials for consumers who scan it. I was speaking with a large California retailer with about 15 doors and strong vertical integration, selling 50–60% of their own products — this will save them hundreds of thousands of dollars, since they currently have three or four people labeling products full time. Bryan Fields: Is that similar to how produce has standard barcodes at a grocery store, rather than each store having its own? Chris Violas: That's more of a GS1 SKU barcode maintained at scale; this is more about tracking down to the manufacturing lot level than a general SKU barcode. Bryan Fields: The key takeaway is the massive time and cost savings — potentially reducing headcount needed just for labeling. Chris Violas: Right, we saw that firsthand at the Hall of Flowers show in Ventura this past March, where our team spent about 12 hours labeling products for the show with our customer Wheelhouse, a great dispensary down in Ventura. Other providers may have pieces of this integration, but it works fully across our system without missing a step. Bryan Fields: I'm impressed with some of the work your team does with a children's hospital — can you share a bit about that? Chris Violas: As part of launching Blaze Pay, our full credit card payment solution in Canada back in June, we're announcing a partnership with SickKids, a children's research hospital in the Toronto/Ontario area. During the holiday season and into next year, retailers who opt in can let customers round up their purchase by a couple dollars at the terminal, with proceeds routed directly to SickKids and all the paperwork handled behind the scenes. I was grateful they were open to partnering with a technology provider in the cannabis space. We're calling this Blaze Cares, and we plan to bring similar programs to the US next year. Bryan Fields: Let's do a hard pivot — dream smoking session, three people, dead or alive. Chris Violas: I'd say Snoop Dogg, that would be so rad. I've had a chance to smoke with Berner, that was cool. I'd also say Elon Musk, just to pick his brain and see him in a goofier setting — we saw a glimpse of that on the Rogan podcast. If I swapped someone out for Berner again, I'd say Joe Rogan too, I love how diverse his topics are. Bryan Fields: What's the most expensive lesson you've ever learned? Chris Violas: Probably sinking a couple million dollars into something I shouldn't have — trying to go the cheap route that ended up being three times more expensive and hindered us long term. It reinforced what we do today: hire domain experts in your space, which is critical when building vertical SaaS. Bryan Fields: What question do you wish more people asked you? Chris Violas: I wish I got more questions around how we can target customers and grow the business, rather than damage control after someone's already off the path. I'd like to hear more questions about how operations meet the technology and leadership alignment around those decisions — a lot of people making tech decisions aren't the ones actually using it day to day. Bryan Fields: Prediction time — what's the next unlock for Blaze? Chris Violas: We're doing interesting work normalizing our dataset — knowing that a specific gummy product is recognized consistently as the same product across all our retailers. That opens up brand insights and a lot of other things, and we're pretty bullish on that front. Kellen Finney: I'd add the Shop to Scan feature we saw at a San Jose partner store, walking through the store with your phone — I think that's an important transitional feature for POS and dispensary organizations as e-commerce becomes more available, helping retain the customer relationship even as more shopping moves online. Chris Violas: I spoke to this with Andrew last week too — I don't know where this obsession with building elaborate storefronts came from. It's about 80% more efficient to fulfill an online order than to walk a customer around the store; a budtender can fulfill 30–40 orders an hour online versus a transaction every five to ten minutes on the floor. Smart retailers are moving toward what companies like Starbucks do — using the store as a distribution and pickup center rather than wanting customers to linger. You have to incentivize the channel shift, like dedicating half the parking lot to 30-minutes-or-less online pickup. We see AOV about $20 higher for e-commerce, and another $10 higher if you support prepayment, so it's more efficient to fulfill and better for the top line. Bryan Fields: One more quick question — is Blaze looking at Bitcoin and crypto payments? Chris Violas: I'd love to see something like that, and stablecoins could play a role, but I'm not sure what adoption would be needed. Part of the issue is loading the wallet — do you use a credit card through a partner like Coinbase? Our goal is to reduce friction at checkout, not add steps like moving from Solana to XRP to a Canadian conversion before a purchase completes. Our payments team looks at a lot of things, but we haven't revisited crypto specifically in about a year — blockchain as a ledger concept is cool, but it feels like overkill for what we're doing in this space right now. Bryan Fields: Chris, for listeners who want to get in touch, learn more, or try Blaze, where can they find you? Chris Violas: I'm on LinkedIn, just look up Chris Violas, or check out Blaze at blaze.me. We've got a flat organization, so I personally see a lot of the contact form submissions and take those calls — I like speaking with folks. I'll also be at MJBizCon next week for a couple of days. Otherwise, follow me on LinkedIn for speaking engagements and webinars. Bryan Fields: Thanks for taking the time. Chris Violas: Thank you, Bryan, thanks Kellen, you guys are awesome, fun discussion today.