Chris Walsh had just spent two weeks on the road talking to medical marijuana dispensary owners across Colorado, and the message he kept hearing was the same: They didn’t want a newsletter. They wanted to know what their peers were doing. They wanted to be in the same room.
When Walsh, founding editor of MJBiz, relayed that insight back to company co-founders Anne Holland and Cassandra Farrington, he planted the seed for what would become the world’s largest B2B cannabis trade show – MJBizCon.
The first MJBizCon drew 402 people to a former Masonic Lodge in Denver. Nobody walked in thinking they’d just attended something historic. But they had.
The timing wasn’t an accident. Colorado and Washington state had just legalized recreational marijuana sales, and people across the industry were hungry for real, actionable information. Not rumors. Not guesswork. Actual business intelligence.
“MJBizCon and the regulated cannabis community really grew in tandem alongside each other,” said Kate Lavin, who was editor of Marijuana Business Magazine from 2018 to 2023 and later editorial director for MJBizDaily.
“People were hungry for information about the cannabis business, since the recreational industry promised to be a lot different from what we had seen in medical.”
How did the co-founders decide on the cannabis industry?
It all started with a newsletter.
Holland and Farrington had spent years building media companies and events for niche industries, and they were looking for their next market.
They wanted something with steady growth, at least 50 companies to advertise and buy booths and thousands of executives who needed information to do their jobs better, Holland said in an interview.
A news story about Denver having more dispensaries than Starbucks caught her eye. She called Farrington. They hired Walsh, a former Rocky Mountain News business reporter, and sent him out to talk to operators across the country.
What he came back with surprised them.
“They don’t want a newsletter,” Holland recalled him saying.
“They wanted to know what was going on with their peers. They’d been so used to being quiet and private, really hiding at that point.”
So, the team built a conference.
It wasn’t easy – working in cannabis could hurt your career back then.
Banks turned them away, with the founders literally flying cash from Denver to a Citizens Bank branch in New England that had agreed to work with them.
“Starting a cannabis show was really hard,” Holland said.
“We always had at least two bank accounts because we were constantly losing bank accounts. Getting cash from Denver, flying with it and going to the bank was scary.”
What was the turning point for MJBizCon?
Things started to shift in October 2013 when the federal government issued the Cole Memo, easing banking concerns and signaling a more tolerant approach to state-legal cannabis businesses.
Almost overnight, interest in the show exploded. The Seattle-area event sold out within 24 hours of the announcement.
“It became the hottest ticket in cannabis,” Farrington said.
From there, the founders set their sights on Las Vegas. In late 2013, after Nevada had authorized medical marijuana dispensaries, Farrington and her top salesperson flew out to shop for venues and eventually secured a space at the Rio Hotel & Casino.
“Moving into real conference space at the Rio gave the industry a vision that it could look like every other industry,” Farrington said.
The show kept growing and, by 2017, it outgrew the Rio and moved to the Las Vegas Convention Center.
That was a defining moment. A major convention center saying yes to a cannabis event wasn’t just a logistics upgrade.
“It legitimized the industry as a place where real money was being exchanged,” Lavin said. “And our owners took that trust that had been shown in them very seriously.”
Attendance hit 31,563 in 2019. Then COVID hit, pushing the 2020 show online. When everyone returned to Vegas the following year, it felt like more than just a conference.
“Everyone was so happy to be out of their house and seeing friends again,” Lavin said. “For us as a staff, it was a huge relief to see everyone come back.”
How was the format for MJBizCon determined?
One thing that set MJBizCon apart from the start was how it was built. The show’s programming didn’t come from a sales team. It came from reporters. The same journalists talking to cultivators, retailers and operators every day were the ones tapping those people to speak on stage.
“It’s all about listening to your community and what they need,” Farrington said. “They know what they need. It’s figuring out how best to deliver that to them.”
The team also drew some firm lines around what kind of event they wanted to run. A “no booth-babe” policy became one of their most talked-about rules. They banned sexist advertising and made diversity on stage a priority, not an afterthought.
“We gave the programming crew demographic guidelines – do anything you can to avoid having four white guys on a panel together,” Holland said. “It was hard work to make sure we had people of color and women on stage.”
That commitment reflected the values of the industry they were serving and made its way into the editorial coverage as well.
What is the founders’ legacy?
Ask the founders what they’re most proud of, and they don’t talk about attendance records. They talk about people. Attendees who showed up just to explore, came back the next year with a business plan and the year after that with a partner, then a booth.
“People used what we created to create paths for their own lives and dreams and futures that otherwise would have looked very different,” Farrington said.
Lavin sees the legacy a little differently. For her, the real value lies in the unexpected connections that form when unlikely groups come together.
“The suits and the stoners. The operators and the regulators. There is something that happens when you get these people in the same room that you can’t replicate anywhere else.”
Conversations shaping the cannabis economy will be front and center at MJBizCon. Keep up with the latest conference news here.