Pubdate: Wed, 13 Nov 2013
Source: Seattle Weekly (WA)
Copyright: 2013 Village Voice Media
Website: http://www.seattleweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/410
Author: Nina Shapiro

GOING TO POT

A grandmother, a Ph.D., and a multimillionaire are among the people
scrambling to get business in order as the I-502 starting gate finally
opens.

For people who want to start a legal marijuana business, if it's not
now or never, it's something close to it.

On Monday, Nov. 18, the state Liquor Control Board will open a 30-day
window for applicants seeking a license to produce, process, or sell
marijuana. Some time later-the board hasn't announced exactly when-it
will begin to accredit marijuana testing laboratories.

The beginning has finally come for the nuts-and-bolts implementation
of Initiative 502, passed by voters last November and making
Washington one of only two states, with Colorado, to legalize
recreational marijuana. It's a historic occasion that many have
likened to the end of Prohibition.

But the dawn of what Fortune has called "Marijuana Inc." has some
unique twists and turns. For one thing, Washington's would-be
entrepreneurs get this one shot at a license-perhaps their only shot
ever. While there is a chance the LCB might open another window at
some point, spokesperson Brian Smith allows, "There are no
guarantees."

"This is not like any other business market," he explains. He
elaborates that LCB members deemed the 30-day period a way to limit
the number of pot businesses in the state, which they thought
necessary to protect public safety and avoid the wrath of the feds.
"We're walking a fine line here," he says.

Hence the current frenzy of entrepreneurial activity. Aspiring
business owners have pored over the 40 pages of regulations approved
by the LCB last month, looking for angles and sometimes cursing
restrictions. The cap on retail licenses-334 across the state, 21 in
Seattle-looms large. So does the three-license limit for any one
individual or business, which the LCB has said is meant to prevent
big-money companies from swooping in and dominating the market.

In the days leading to the application window, the prospective
business owners are preoccupied with financing, branding, and,
especially, real estate. Applicants must submit an address where their
business will be located. Already a difficult task for any business,
it is made harder by a myriad of marijuana-specific obstacles.

To avoid a backlash from the federal government, which still considers
marijuana an illicit substance, the state has adopted restrictions
important to the feds. Applicants cannot declare an intention to set
up shop within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, libraries, or other
facilities frequented by children. And then there are local zoning
codes and the wariness of landlords to consider.

Still, some prospective sellers have grand plans. Others are aiming
for a niche market. A good number have moved here from across the
country-or in one case, the world-to get in on the industry's ground
floor. Many are homegrown. They are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.
One is a Ph.D., another a grandmother, yet another a self-proclaimed
"multimillionaire."

Here are the stories of four businesses trying to overcome those
obstacles, legitimize marijuana, and maybe at the same time make a
fortune.

Shy Sadis and Derek Anderson: The Joint

It's a little more than three weeks before the licensing window opens
when Shy Sadis and Derek Anderson drive up to a dowdy two-story
building on a dead-end commercial road in Kirkland.

"I can tell you right now, it's not my favorite spot," says Anderson,
a 33-year-old with a salesman's fast-talking patter and casual
business attire: gray slacks, a button-down shirt, and leather shoes.

"It's got no curb appeal," adds the blunter Sadis, 40, dressed in
jeans adorned with a belt buckle bearing the logo of the
medical-marijuana dispensary that he and Anderson founded four years
ago, and now hope to convert into a chain of 502 retail stores. "The
Joint," the buckle says, with a pot leaf filling in the "o."

On the other hand, the building is near I-405, and it's one of the few
spots in Kirkland that meets the 1,000-foot rule.

Sadis stays behind to talk on his cell phone about other prospects
while Anderson enters the building through the computer business that
occupies the bottom floor. "I'm looking for the owner," he tells the
blonde, middle-aged woman behind the counter. "That's me," she says.
He says he's looking for a location to house his business.

"What kind of business are you in?" she asks.

"We're gearing up to start a 502 business," he says
brightly.

"OK," she says noncommittally.

But as Anderson keeps talking-working in that he was "born and raised"
in Kirkland and that he and Sadis "run their business like a
business"-the owner and her husband, who wanders over, seem supportive.

"I just read this morning that 54 percent of Americans support
legalizing marijuana," she says. Her husband adds that he heard
there's a "former Microsoft executive trying to get into the
business"-a reference to Jamen Shively, the self-proclaimed "dot-bong"
entrepreneur whose grandiose plans, albeit clouded by
behind-the-scenes shakeups, have garnered national press. (See "Jamen
Shively's Green Rush," SW, Oct. 9.)

Sadis, who has since entered, scoffs. The publicity reaped by Shively,
whom he considers an opportunistic newbie, is a sore point with him.
"We're the pioneers," he says. But he doesn't argue with the couple's
general drift.

Sadis and Anderson are primarily interested in leasing, though the
owners reveal that they've been trying to sell the building for years.
They are well aware of its sudden desirability to 502 entrepreneurs, a
flurry of whom have already come by. "They were very interested," the
husband says of one group.

"Here's our main concern," says the woman, whose next words explain
why she and her husband ask not to be identified in this story. "If
for some reason the feds come against this, the building could be
confiscated."

Anderson jumps in to relate that the Department of Justice released a
statement in August indicating that it would not move against
Washington and Colorado as long as they abide by certain guidelines.

The couple nods. They've heard about that. The husband
enthusiastically takes the entrepreneurs on a tour of the place,
pointing out attributes like cinder-block walls that he says even a
sledgehammer couldn't pierce.

After the tour, the wife reiterates: "Look, we're getting close to
retirement age. We don't want to have our assets seized." But she and
her husband agree to consider an offer. The entrepreneurs say they'll
be in touch.

Whether or not this building works out, Anderson and Sadis are
prepared to move ahead. They have already secured three locations
where they can operate 502 businesses, in Tacoma, Snohomish, and
Bellingham. They also have two medical-marijuana dispensaries in
Seattle, in the U District and Capitol Hill, but those won't meet
state regulations for 502 shops.

In fact, those dispensaries will likely have to close. In late
October, a state working group proposed regulations for the
medical-marijuana industry that would funnel all legal pot sales
through 502 stores. Yet Sadis and Anderson don't want to give up the
Seattle market. So they continue to look for sites in the city and
nearby.

The Bellingham location is the one that excites Sadis, and it has
nothing to do with market potential. Last year, Bellingham authorities
charged him with marijuana distribution after a raid on a Joint
dispensary in that city. (Anderson was not charged because his name
was not on the paperwork; Sadis says his own ownership stake in the
business is much larger.)

Court records say that the raid followed undercover buys at The Joint
in which detectives were asked to show proof of authorization by a
health-care provider, making the charges somewhat puzzling. However,
the documents also note that Sadis acquiesced when one detective
offered to sell him pot, which may or may not be illegal depending on
your interpretation of the law.

In any case, the cops later came looking for him, first at his home in
Mill Creek, then at his son's baseball game. Tipped off by his
girlfriend, Sadis says, he left the game and drove to Bellingham to
surrender in court. Sadis never did any jail time and worked out a
"stipulated order of continuance" whereby the case will be dismissed
in three years if he refrains from future felony marijuana crimes in
Whatcom County. The deal does not bar him from opening a 502 store,
since that is legal.

"It's going to be super-sweet the day I open a 502 location [in
Bellingham] and shove it in their ass," Sadis says.

Sadis' ambitions stretch beyond Bellingham, and even beyond the state.
"The Joint," he says. "It's super-catchy. I can take that brand
anywhere." He says he's already registered businesses under that name
in Nevada and Illinois, in preparation for what he hopes will be
legalization efforts in those states, and has bought the rights to the
urls "thejointllc.com" and "thejointcoop.com." (Thejoint.com has
already been snapped up, he explains, by a chiropractor.)

He and Anderson are also discussing ways to get around this state's
three-license limit. They're mulling a franchise-type operation,
whereby friends, family members, and acquaintances would apply for
licenses.

LCB spokesperson Smith says "it would be very difficult" to establish
such an operation because of rules that require license applicants to
declare "true parties of interest," who are then held to the
three-license limit. One suspects, though, that if there's a loophole,
Sadis and Anderson will find it.

The two-both of whom consume marijuana for medical purposes, Anderson
for knee injuries related to sporting accidents, Sadis for
migraines-met while working in the real-estate industry. Anderson
flipped houses before getting "punched in the head by the economy," he
relates. Sadis, luckier, says he became a multimillionaire by buying
foreclosed properties and apartment buildings.

In their new line of work, they practice charity. They have made
donations to the unions of King County police and Seattle
firefighters. (Regarding people who want to give money, "We don't
discriminate," says the police union's Bob Casey.) They also
participate in the annual Toys for Kids drive hosted by Mariners'
broadcaster Rick Rizzs. (Donate a toy, get a free gram of pot.) Yet
they also have a keen sense of the bottom line.

"I'm an entrepreneur," Sadis stresses. "I'll sell shit if it makes me
money."

Alex Cooley: Solstice

"This is the little thing that makes us so special," says Alex Cooley.
He's referring to a document he's just placed on a wooden conference
table in his spare but chic office space on the first floor of a
renovated 1927 SoDo warehouse. The prized possession is a certificate
of occupancy from Seattle's Department of Planning and Development,
which gives Cooley the right to grow marijuana on the premises.

DPD issued the certificate in March-well in advance of the state's
issuance of 502 licenses and the city's establishment of zoning
regulations specific to the cannabis industry, which it did in
October. Cooley-a self-assured 28-year-old with a clean-cut look
alloyed by lobe-stretching disc earrings and finger tattoos that on
one hand spell LOVE and on the other LIFE-wanted to set up shop sooner
than that. And he wanted to do so with the city's blessing.

So, he says, "We went through the front door of the city of Seattle."
His pitch to DPD, he relates, was "Let us be the example."

"It was clear he wanted to do everything right," recalls Brennon
Staley, the DPD's project manager for marijuana zoning regulations.
Although the city didn't have such regulations on the books yet, it
did have them for something called "vertical farming." No one was
quite sure what that was since nobody had ever applied for such a
permit, but it was intended to promote urban farming that maximized
building space. Cooley, Staley says, "made a compelling argument" that
his plan for a marijuana production facility fit the bill.

And so Cooley's company, Solstice, began growing pot in the SoDo space
and selling his yield to medical-marijuana dispensaries. He is now
avidly pursuing the recreational market. In fact, he intends to grow
his business exponentially.

Solstice is the company that Mark Kleiman, the UCLA professor who has
served as the state's top pot consultant, referred to at an August
Seattle City Council briefing. Warning of a production shortage in the
first year of 502 implementation-given the time it takes to get a
marijuana business approved through state and local authorities and
then actually grow the plant-Kleiman noted that there was only one
already-permitted producer that Seattle could count on.

Solstice's position has come at considerable cost. As Cooley observes,
"It's expensive being legitimate." He says he and his two partners
planned to spend $80,000 to bring his 9,000-square-foot space up to
code: putting in insulation, upgrading the sprinkler system. Instead,
the work ate up a third of a million dollars.

"We almost went bankrupt," Cooley says. They averted that fate, he
says, by taking small salaries, reaching into their personal savings,
and putting all the money they earned back into the company.

Solstice is now a busy and sprawling operation, with 12 employees
occupying three floors, including a mezzanine break room boasting a
ping-pong table. The hub of the company, though, is its subterranean
level, which devolves into a warren of rooms accessible only by key.

As Cooley heads downstairs to give a tour, the sweetly cloying odor of
pot becomes detectable, albeit not overpoweringly so due to the carbon
filters the company has installed. Stop one is a garage-sized room
where five workers-all men in their 20s or early 30s, who found their
way to Solstice through word-of-mouth or ads the company has placed on
Craigslist and Monster.com are breaking down plants into bud-heavy
branches and hanging them on racks where they will dry for five to
seven days.

"See how few leaves there are, how swollen the bud is?" Cooley asks,
holding up one such branch. Those qualities, aesthetically pleasing to
buyers and thought to increase potency, are part of what allows the
entrepreneur to sell his product as "premium" cannabis. Temperature,
humidity, and carbon dioxide exposure are all factors Solstice plays
with to achieve them, and to prevent mold and other hazards.

We next go to what Cooley calls a "clean room pass-through," a
changing area where we don white lab coats before heading into the
"donor room." There, cuttings from other plants grow on racks until
they're big enough to make it into the "vegetative room." They'll
eventually get transferred to yet another room reserved for plants
that are flowering. It takes between four and a half months and a year
for a cutting to reach this stage.

Cooley points out plants of the "tangelo" and "blueberry cheesecake"
strains, which are supposed to smell like their namesakes. (The
tangelo really does, the blueberry cheesecake not so much.)

Then it's back upstairs to the "safe room," where processed buds and
joints are kept under lock and key. "As you can see, there's very
little in here," Cooley says, opening the safe to reveal only a few
vials. That's because Solstice sells out almost immediately to the 15
dispensaries he supplies, including the Northwest Patient Resource
Center, which is aligned with ex-Microsoftie Jamen Shively.

Dozens more want to buy his marijuana, but, he says, "We can't keep
up."

Cooley, who went into the marijuana business after a hiring freeze
prevented him from finding a teaching job in Seattle, and who
cultivates a progressive corporate image as carefully as he does his
crops, says he's also choosy about whom he sells to. "Our ideologies
have to align," he maintains. Solstice's ideology, according to
Cooley, is environmentally conscious, pro Fair Trade, and
LGBT-friendly, although he admits a dispensary's policy on, say, gay
rights doesn't always come up.

Solstice is now planning a major expansion as the recreational market
comes online. He is applying for three producer and three processor
licenses. If the company gets all of those, it could have six separate
facilities in addition to the SoDo operation. Despite its unique
status as a city-approved, 502-ready facility, Cooley says he might
reserve it for the medical market, a possibility he is entertaining
due to the intricate details of state regulations. Most notably, the
LCB is stipulating that producers and processors cannot work with
marijuana plants they already have. Rather, to preserve the integrity
of a "traceability" software system that will keep track of pot
products from "start to sale," entrepreneurs must bring new seeds and
starter plants onsite within 15 days of starting operations under a
state license.

"We'd have to close down for a time," Cooley says. "It would cost us a
half-million to a million dollars to transition. We might as well take
that money and build another facility."

On the downside, if the legislature decides to do away with
dispensaries, the SoDo facility would be left without a clientele. The
company is weighing its options and studying what Cooley says is a
1,000-page spreadsheet of data analyzing marijuana growing conditions
around the state.

Meanwhile, it is wrapping up a private offering to raise funds for a
build-out. He won't say how much money Solstice is seeking, but
discloses that a planned second offering, after the company gets
licensees and has more value, will go after a larger amount.

Cooley keeps his cards close to his vest. For many months, he avoided
interviews with the press, and when we first met, in late summer, he
didn't let on that he was likely to septuple the size of his
operation. More, obviously, will become evident in time.

"We've got a one-year, three-year, and five-year plan," he
says.

Molly Poiset

Molly Poiset was learning how to make pastries at a Cordon Bleu school
in Paris when I-502 passed. The school was a career turn for Poiset,
who had spent many years as an interior designer for wealthy clients
in the Colorado ski resort town of Telluride.

Among the many reasons it was an interesting move was that Poiset has
celiac disease, which prevents her from eating gluten. She says she
wanted to learn to cook pastries the French way so she could adjust
the recipes to exclude flour.

When Washington and Colorado legalized recreational marijuana, she
realized she could tinker with the recipes in yet another way. Her
idea: to create high-end, French-inspired, beautifully decorated and
packaged pastries infused with marijuana.

"A lot of people who know me would say, 'What the . . . UKP' They
would not see it coming," says Poiset, a petite 58-year-old
grandmother who prefers wine to pot. But she had a clientele in mind
that she cared very much about: well-educated, professional,
conservative people. People, that is, like her daughter.

Three years ago, her daughter became severely ill with leukemia.
Poiset learned, though a family support group she joined, that
marijuana might help. But, she says, "the subject couldn't be
broached." She felt sure that her daughter would never consider pot.

Following a stem-cell transplant, her daughter is doing much better,
but Poiset is continuing her mission to create cannabis fare so
enticing that her daughter and others like her would try it. That,
Poiset believes, makes her stand out in the industry.

"Right now, anybody else who's in the business of what we call
'medibles' are doing Rice Krispie treats, suckers, gummy bears," she
says. "They'll take fortune cookies and dip it in chocolate that's got
some cannabis and call it dessert."

The question she faced while in Paris was where she should relocate
to. Despite hailing from Colorado, she quickly realized that
Washington was the place to be. Colorado is giving its first
recreational marijuana licenses to existing medical operations, while
Washington's process is open to all comers.

Poiset found a condo in an old Queen Anne high school-turned-condominium
complex that reminds her of Paris, with its stately architecture,
urban feel, and courtyard fountain decorated by sculpted lions. She
turned the living-room space into an expanded kitchen, lining shelves
against one wall with French-style pots and pans. "They're very
different. They have no bottoms!" she says, holding up one circular
metal pan in which you can allegedly bake a cake.

She filled another wall with two clocks, one set to Seattle time and
one to Paris time, and giant blackboards, on which she writes recipes
that she tries out on the wooden table in the center of the room. To
use in her creations, she grows marijuana in a pot, as she does
lavender and rosemary.

"I'm on this huge learning curve," she says one late August day at the
table in her kitchen. She is dressed in an elegant long blouse cinched
with a belt over white pants. Opera music is playing in the background.

She says she's still experimenting with recipes-although she tastes
her creations only before she infuses them with marijuana, not after.
"It's not my thing," she says of pot, and anyway she doesn't want to
get "baked" while she's working. For that pleasure, she employs
experienced pot users as taste-testers.

Meanwhile, she is trying to get up to speed on LCB rules, the contacts
she should know in the industry, and the Seattle neighborhoods where
she might locate her business. The state does not give her the option
of operating out of her home.

By early November, she still hasn't found a place. Agents and
landlords, desperate to prove their liberal credentials, will say
things like "We voted for Obama," Poiset says. And then they'll hang
up on her. But she's confident that some leads will come through.

In the meantime, her plans are firming up. She knows she's applying
for a producer as well as a processor license. "I need to be in
control of the supply chain," she says, explaining that she wants to
cultivate marijuana strains that are known for medical rather than
psychoactive properties.

She won't be able to market her goods with medicinal claims; that's
forbidden by state rules. But she notes that the LCB will allow
entrepreneurs to run a website about the medical side of pot as long
as it is unconnected to their businesses.

Producers and processors cannot get retail licenses, so Poiset will
have to sell her pastries to the public through other outlets-all 21
of them, she notes with a wry laugh, referring to the maximum number
of stores allowed in Seattle. She says she won't be able to go much
further afield to reach more stores because of yet more rules that
prohibit using delivery people outside of one's business.

In September, Poiset earned an accolade that should help her market
herself. Every year, the magazine High Times hosts a "Cannabis Cup"
awards ceremony in Seattle, with categories like "Best Sativa"
(referring to one type of marijuana plant), "Best Concentrate," and
"Best Edible." In this last category, Poiset entered a
cannabis-infused white-chocolate truffle laced with frankincense and
edible gold. She says she wasn't expecting a win, in part because of
her outsider status in the industry, which was reinforced at the
event, held in a Fremont banquet hall. "Everyone looked very young and
had many tattoos," she recalls. She says her contrasting presence made
her think of the Sesame Street song "One of These Things (Is Not Like
the Others)."

When the winners were announced, she recalls, "I was way, way in the
back." So when she heard she won second place for her truffle, she had
to elbow her way to the front, repeating "Excuse me, excuse me." She
was thrilled.

Ed Stremlow, Lara Taubner, Randall Oliver, Brenton Dawber, John
Brown: Analytical 360

Sir/ Madam,

I am a French student in biological engineering at the University of
Technology of Compiegne. As part of my studies I am looking for a
six-month internship as an engineering assistant. I have attached my
CV.

So begins an e-mail from a French native to Analytical 360, which
occupies a marijuana-industry niche that has emerged in the past
couple of years. The company is a laboratory that tests marijuana,
both for potency and for pathogens like mold.

Showing me the French student's e-mail on his computer in Analytical's
Wallingford office, COO Ed Stremlow chuckles. He's grown used to such
inquiries. He gets so many that he routinely turns people away. And of
those he hires, he says, "I haven't had an intern yet that didn't want
a job here."

Take Virginia Webber, a Bastyr University graduate who planned to go
into quality-control testing on herbs until she went into a dispensary
and saw "budtenders" picking up marijuana with their hands-"without
even using something like chopsticks," she says. "I realized how much
the movement needs education." She started as an intern and is now
Analytical's quality-control manager.

Or Caitlin Reece, who last year got a B.S. in environmental science
from Evergreen State University. Believing that marijuana is a safer
medical treatment than many pharmaceutical drugs, she applied for an
internship; was told by Stremlow that there was a long waiting list;
sent an application anyway; and scored a position. Her attention to
detail in repetitive tests singled her out as a "rock star," Stremlow
says, and she is now the company's lab manager.

A marijuana testing lab might seem an unusual career path for young
scientists, but they are likely reassured by the presence of veterans.
Most notable is Lara Taubner, a biochemistry Ph.D. who this fall quit
her job as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Montana,
where she studied mad cow disease in a federally funded lab, to devote
herself full time to being Analytical's chief scientist.

She says she was persuaded to leap from academia into the decidedly
more turbulent world of marijuana after looking at the research on the
drug's medicinal effects. Frequently discussed is the drug's
usefulness as a cancer treatment. What's more, she says, "there are
definitely ideas out there that cannabis can help prevent diseases
like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, even diabetes."

She would like Analytical to someday move into medical research. Yet
she also saw a more immediate need in the marijuana industry: making
the drug safe and reliable. "That's basically a scientific endeavor,"
she says. Her husband, Randall Oliver, who with a B.S. is less
academically credentialed than his wife but has worked for many years
testing compounds and designing processes for pharmaceutical
companies, was also enthusiastic about the idea-as were three
Seattle-based friends of theirs, including Stremlow, who were itching
to try something new with their careers.

"You hear horror stories of patients who have eaten something [infused
with cannabis] and gotten sick or slept for the whole day," says
Stremlow, a former real-estate appraiser.

So with the backing of their friends, Oliver and Taubner in 2011
started a marijuana testing lab in their Montana basement, devoting
their spare time to the endeavor. They and their three co-founders
eventually moved the business to Seattle to cater to the thriving
medical-marijuana market here. Other than Northwest Botanical
Analysis, founded around the same time, there were no other marijuana
testing labs here at the time.

The Stone Way space Analytical moved into is compact. A small lobby,
decorated with Kandinsky prints, leads to a couple of back rooms.
There, marijuana samples are photographed with a microscope that scans
images into a computer, and then tested. Reece explains how a machine
called a vortexer spins the samples really fast to facilitate the
extracting of cannabinoids, marijuana's active compounds. Then they
can be analyzed with hulking equipment, which resemble several fax
machines piled atop each other and utilize a method of quantifying
compounds known as high-performance chromatography.

The results do not always please customers. On this August day, a
representative of a California-based company that makes a
marijuana-infused soda comes in to discuss the disturbingly low
potency Analytical's tests have revealed. "He's getting 18 milligrams
of THC," Stremlow explains, referring to pot's psychoactive compound.
"He was expecting 72."

The representative, wearing argyle socks and sunglasses perched on his
head, huddles by a computer with Analytical CEO Brenton Dawber to go
over the test results. Dawber speculates that the THC is getting stuck
around the bottle tops because of insufficient use of an emulsifier.
The soda rep takes it in.

Stremlow, who joins them, tells the rep that he knows that the
California company's salespeople have been bad-mouthing the lab. If it
doesn't stop, Stremlow warns, he's going to bring in all the lab's
clients-some of them dispensaries that buy the soda-and set the record
straight. "I don't think you'll have many accounts left," he says.

The rep, seemingly convinced by Dawber's presentation, diffuses the
tension. "I'll let my sales guys know to correct their verbiage," he
says.

Afterward, Stremlow says that he'll have to take an even harder line
when the recreational market comes online. "I'm not going to tell them
how to fix their product. They're going to have to pay for that."

Analytical plans to seek state accreditation so it can operate under
502, which obliges the lab to make certain investments. For instance,
it has had to buy expensive new equipment that can perform additional
tests required of marijuana entrepreneurs, such as those looking for
pesticides. The question now is where to put the equipment.

Needing more space, the lab found a building in Georgetown with
receptive owners. The owners' bank, however, threatened to call in its
loan if they rented to Analytical. For months, the owners have been
trying to find a bank that will refinance the loan. Meanwhile, the
equipment is sitting in storage.

While banks have been squeamish, others have expressed interest in
investing in Analytical. Over lunch at the Tutta Bella down the street
from their Wallingford offices, Stremlow and Dawber recall how a
couple of retired guys with money to spare took them to dinner at
nearby Blue Star Cafe & Pub.

"They had been in gray markets before," Dawber says.

"Strip joints, porn shops," is Stremlow's recollection. At the end of
the evening, Analytical's founders concluded the retirees were more
interested in reminiscing about old times than about putting down hard
cash.

No matter. Stremlow says he and his co-founders are wary of giving up
an ownership stake to investors, even though the lab's biggest
challenges may lay ahead. As the 502 era gets underway, Analytical
founders are expecting a surge of new labs.

"Only the strongest will survive," Stremlow says. "We hope we'll be
one of them."
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MAP posted-by: Matt