Life at Jane

We each have a piece of this dream.

Everyone at Jane feels very passionately about the positive effects cannabis can have on a person’s overall well-being. Our co-founder and CEO, Socrates, is a U.S. Army Veteran and had never tried cannabis until he left the Army. Cannabis helped Socrates find balance in his life, connect with his loved ones, and connect with himself. As he explored the medical market in California, he was stunned by how little transparency there was regarding the medicine that may or may not be available to him. It was easier for him to order a burrito than it was to order medicine that was invaluable to his health. This led to the ideation and creation of Jane. The rest is history.

All of us at Jane, whether we consume cannabis or not, are bonded by the mission to transform the cannabis industry and help others. We’re creating a product that provides detailed analytics for retailers and manufacturers down to the SKU level, and has applications even beyond the cannabis industry. We can tell how products behave in each market, for example, how well an edible will sell in L.A. versus Santa Cruz versus Seattle, and dial it down even more to a specific timeframe, shop, and user demographic. Fun fact: when the vape news became big we noticed that baby boomers stopped buying vape products whereas millennials didn’t.

We’re currently the e-commerce provider for 1 out of every 2 stores across the U.S. and also active in Canada. There’s clear product-market fit and our e-commerce technology powers over $3B in cannabis transactions, representing over 30 million orders. We raised a $100M Series C in 2021 and just a year later launched an iOS app. We’re continuing to grow quickly and it’s an exciting time to join the team!

At the end of the day, business is all about people.

We make a product for people. We are a company of people. If you can anticipate the needs of a customer, client, or teammate – that is worth its weight in gold.

The cannabis industry in particular requires high EQ. Cannabis affects everyone differently and everyone has their own opinion on cannabis. It is our responsibility as a company within this space to understand, empathize, and continue to progress the cannabis space. Not everyone on our team consumes cannabis. We cover the spectrum: some team members consume cannabis daily, while others have never, which is more than okay! What’s important is that we all understand the market, the role our product plays in it, and are committed to Jane’s mission.

Our team is close-knit and we all share and celebrate our wins together. Having empathy on a team is really powerful. During our Friday Closeout meeting, we take time to share things we're grateful for, whether that’s work- or life-related. We believe any win from any person feels like a win for the entire group. It’s our strong emphasis on empathy that helps us lift each other up, and laud and applaud one another in an open and non-competitive way. Folks on the team come from a wide range of backgrounds (whether that’s experience in retail, coding bootcamp experience, or life coaching practice) and we’re proud to have several affinity groups that support diversity. Some of these Slack groups include #estrojane, #veterans, #cannaqueer, #momtourage, and #parents.

We’ve passed on candidates who had strong experience but would be difficult to work with. People who feel above the team and that there’s a ‘right’ way of doing things (aka their way) won’t succeed at Jane. There has to be wiggle room, which is why we know we need the full context surrounding decisions. It’s important to collaborate to fully understand all factors at play, whether it’s a certain timeline, timeframe, resource constraints, or potential iterations in the future.

At the end of the day, we’re working with humans and we feel that at a very deep level. As Abe, co-founder and CTO, says, “As a leader, I’ve learned to be a lot more vulnerable and focused on how I can best empower people to do their jobs. There has to be mutual respect, always.”

We love "impossible."

We embrace the “impossible” as a chance to grow and be challenged. The harder the problem, the more confident we become in our technology and solution. We look at every problem as an opportunity to innovate and lead. We’ve been referred to as the Amazon of online weed shopping, but really we’re so much more. It might be more accurate to say we’re an Amazon-like experience, because on the backend we source from and support local businesses. We are transforming local brick-and-mortar stores into an online localized marketplace by directly integrating into the stores’ Point-Of-Sale systems, something that isn’t currently being done. We also have five software utility patents for this technology that are not specific to cannabis.

While we have great product-market fit, given our unique positioning, our backend problems surrounding infrastructure and scalability are very interesting. We’re building an off-the-shelf e-commerce platform, a review system for products and discovery, and recently launched an advertising product that allows cannabis brands to target cannabis consumers. One great example of innovation at Jane: ownership tags. We made it easy for customers to be able to shop according to their values and find dispensaries owned by underrepresented groups whether that’s BIPOC-, LGBTQ-, Women- and Veteran-owned stores, to name a few.

Cannabis discovery is more similar to finding music you like than wine. Some people may listen to house music and feel super focused, while others get revved up. With cannabis, how you experience things is unique to the individual. We’re using data to figure out how someone with your specific tastes and preferences for certain strains and products can be matched with others who share similar profiles. That way, if we know these strains worked for others like you, we can help you find new products you might enjoy, too.

We want you to leave your mark on the product.

At Jane, we’re looking for a certain type of person – someone who feels ownership in what they do and takes the initiative to get things done. One great example of this is when Andy (a software engineer at the time and now VP of Product) got fed up with how often we had issues with our deployments. Andy wasn’t sure if our tests were actually failing or if there was an issue with Capybara. He decided to explore Cypress on his own time, built it out, and developed tests that were more accurate. It’s this kind of ability to raise your hand and commit to delivering something you’re proud of that we’re looking for in every hire.

Another great instance of taking ownership is our swag program. As an account manager, Ken saw that it was a time-consuming, manual process to get t-shirts, notebooks, and other fun items to clients. He created a Google form that streamlines the process of adding customers’ addresses, sizes, and any other necessary information. Several teams now use this form and we can also track that usage. Similarly, Ken also took the lead and created a more efficient priority placement process for brand partners who are advertisers.

Last but not least, when Cody (one of our senior software engineers) first joined the team, he wasn’t afraid to take ownership. When he was ramping up, we assigned him several bugs and small features, which he paired with other team members on to get a full understanding of the issues we were facing. He spoke up about certain use cases and acceptance criteria not being what he was used to. But instead of saying, “I wish there was more structure here” and asking the PM to handle all project scoping, he took it upon himself to build a process that worked for him. He met with the PM to collaboratively establish a workflow that met his needs and expectations. His proactivity led to systemic changes in how features are scoped and built.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t wait to be told, but rather takes initiative to solve problems and develop features you’re proud of, we’d love to meet you!

We’re obsessed with the process and love learning from our customers and our team members.

Our design and development process is centered around two-week sprints where we deploy rapidly, learn from our users, and continually iterate. Time is everything to us – and we like to work efficiently and optimally. That means team members need to feel comfortable stating their opinions and openly debating any decision we make that they might disagree with. Everyone has a voice in this company. (It’s just a matter of surfacing what you believe to be true in a constructive and positive manner!)

We gather feedback from our partners, end users, and analytics tools, and we’re focused on having researched business cases behind every decision we make. We want to hire people who have expertise in areas where our current team members do not. As our engineering team has grown, we’ve organically started to pair more. We’re not dogmatic about pairing in any way, and wouldn’t even say that we’ve cultivated a pairing culture, but our engineers naturally come together to review each other’s pull requests and work through problems together. As we continue to grow, we hope to move further and further away from silos.

When you grow, we grow.

You are a plank-holder in this company and we are invested in growing our own. Our ideal candidates are passionate about self-awareness and personal growth. Evan started as a Senior Engineer and was promoted to Lead Engineer within a year, thanks to his drive to tackle challenging problems and lead technical initiatives on the team. In Evan’s third month he launched Jane’s product review feature, and has continued to impact the product and cannabis industry!

We want to work with great people who are excited about self-improvement both in their personal and professional lives. If we know someone has a certain interest or passion, we’ll do our best to make sure to involve them on a relevant feature or project. For instance, Athena started as a Partner Success Manager. She took the initiative to help build out technical documentation for the team. She kept an open dialogue with her manager about her interest in the technical side of things, and when a QA Analyst role was created, Athena interviewed and moved to the product team.

Julia is another great example. Having previously worked in the cannabis retail space for several years, she understands firsthand the pain points users face on the floor. Being able to empathize with customers using point of sale systems day in and day out enables her to go above and beyond for partners and advocate for features that would best serve them. She now manages POS and payments on the partner success team. As she puts it, “One of the things I love most about Jane is how leadership is not only great at recognizing team members’ diverse experiences, but also finding ways to apply that experience and make folks feel appreciated.” Ultimately, we are 100% bought-in and will always invest in the people who are bought-in, too.

On time. On target. Our word is bond.

As a company, we thrive on solving interesting, complex problems with creative solutions that thrill our users. In this industry, so much is new and we rely on our partners to tell us what they need, what problems they’re facing, and how we can best help them grow. As Alexandra, our Senior VP of Partner Success says, “There’s always a curveball that comes our way – like new tax rules going live that we need to accommodate or an operator wanting to launch delivery for the first time. What unites us at Jane is meeting these challenges head on with optimism and excitement.”

On the engineering team, we work on sprints primarily around planning, but we push to production every day. We strive to efficiently prioritize the features in our development pipeline and deploy as quickly as possible. The quicker we have a feature out, the quicker we can start iterating to provide our users with the functionality they really want. That’s not to say we’re not pragmatic! We take test coverage seriously. Millions of end users depend on our app, so if a bug happens during checkout, we’re losing people real business.

Still, we’re not fearful about deploying (and deploying quickly) because we trust our deployment process. Abe and Andy are always on-call and everyone else on the engineering team is on a weekly rotation. If you’re on-call, you’ll cycle in to help with our error alert feed. This helps expose everyone to different parts of the codebase, yet everyone has support should they need help figuring out an issue.

Good humans are core to our company.

What distinguishes us at Jane is that we’re truly a cohesive team comprised of good humans. While our HQ is in Santa Cruz, we also fully embrace remote work and are hiring across the U.S. and Canada. Bonus: compensation isn’t dependent on location! We try to align with Pacific Time as much as possible, but we’re flexible and respect each other’s working hours. Some like to begin their day at 8:30am while others sign on at 10:14am for 10:15am meetings. We trust our team members to get their work done however suits them best. Once a quarter, we have Jane Green Days, where we cancel all meetings and can have heads-down time.

Some of us in Santa Cruz get together to surf (Pleasure Point is just half a mile down the road), play music, and the list goes on. At the beginning of the pandemic, we started a bi-weekly trivia happy hour over Zoom, which has been a great bonding experience and continues today! Our friendships extend beyond work, and we think that speaks to how bonded we feel as a team. It’s akin to being on a sports team really.

Our interviews are purposefully designed to be as human-centered as possible and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback: “That was unlike any onsite I’ve ever experienced!” is a common refrain. We have candidates meet with as many team members as possible, from engineering and design, to C-suite execs, to get a feel for what it’s really like to work here. The more exposure you have to the people at Jane, the better. After all, you’re not just interviewing for a job, you’re joining a team.

Everyone pitches in to get things done and we feel collective ownership for what we’re building. All accomplishments are co-accomplishments. 🙌