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Today on Forbes, how Nabus became the Amazon Prime of the cannabis industry.

In a windowless room in a rented warehouse in Oakland in 2019, NABIS co-founders Vince

C. Ning and Jun Supp Lee, a few of their employees, and a friend they met at the startup

accelerator Y Combinator, Luana Lopez-Lara, who would go on to co-found prediction market

Kalshi and become one of the world's youngest

self-made billionaires, were all counting $2 million in cash by hand.

The money was earmarked for marijuana excise taxes in California.

San Francisco-based Nabus had recently launched as a cannabis distributor during the medical

marijuana heyday of the

country's biggest weed market, and it was Ning and Lee's job to collect and pay taxes on the

product they delivered to retailers. The duo had hired an armed guard to watch the door.

Once the cash was counted, banded, and bagged, Ning put the money in two suitcases, $1 million in each.

Threw on a Hawaiian shirt, he thought he was less likely to get mugged if he looked like a

tourist, but in the end he looked more like a scrawny narco wannabe, and he headed to

...