In September of 2016, Our Chief Operating Officer and head cultivator Evan Marder was featured in Vegas Seven. As the interview highlights, Evan has a long history and passion for growing cannabis; that passion lives within all of our Matrix products.
Without Evan’s contributions, the Matrix we are so immersed in would not exist. Before leading our operation, Evan helped create the operation by laboring over our entire application process.
There’s no perfect educational background or résumé qualifications for entering the marijuana industry. But Evan Marder’s experience in nightclubs and entertainment gave him a pretty good start. “I was operations manager for Kahunaville in Delaware, which was a 100,000-square-foot complex, the largest on the East Coast,” he says. “That’s what actually gave me the confidence to know I could do something like this on this scale.” That job brought him to Nevada 15 years ago, but growing cannabis has also been a longtime avocation. At Matrix NV, he oversees the plants—from seed to clones to cutting to flowering to production—and handles myriad variables that arise along the way.
For Evan, as the article highlights in the Q&A section, entering the cannabis industry was no minor career change–it was a major leap of faith:
When this opportunity came up in Nevada, I just learned everything I could about government and regulations and what it would take to make something like this happen. I basically gambled my whole livelihood and my life savings … and here we are.
I’m basically the blue collar guy that everyone said couldn’t get into this industry because it’s so expensive. I was very fortunate, but it took a lot of work. I paid lawyers hundreds of dollars to tell me I was out of my mind. There are a lot of teams that tried to do this—“Yadda yadda marijuana, we’re going to make millions, it’s going to be great.” Then they actually start digging into it, doing the whole licensing process and building one of these places that they realize nobody knows how to build. Just knowing how difficult the process was, I figured that 30 percent of the licenses granted would get to the finish line. And that’s pretty close to where we’re at right now.
But I did the entire application plan — the state and the city. It was probably about three months of three hours’ sleep each night. I was literally delirious. Every little step has been extremely difficult. When you go to the building department—none of them have ever seen what you’re doing, so a lot of the stuff that you want to use, it’s like, “You want to do what? Holy shit!”
Proof that some pipe dreams do indeed come fruition and that hard work pays off, we’re proud to have Evan leading our charge!