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In this episode of the Legacies Podcast, host Tom Ritchie welcomes Chris Violas, CEO and Founder of Blaze. They explore Chris’s entry into the cannabis industry in 2010 during California’s Proposition 215 medical era, managing a delivery-first dispensary (Cannib Delivery) while studying at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Chris explains how the difficulties of dispatching drivers, scanning patient recommendation cards, and handling cash led him to build a custom tech system, which served as his senior information systems thesis and laid the groundwork for Blaze.
Violas details the early capitalization of Blaze, leaving a cloud engineering role at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2019 after securing seed funding, and growing the company from a team of five to eighty people. He outlines the development of Blaze’s core point-of-sale (POS) and delivery dispatch features, discussing the infrastructure scaling and load testing required to maintain high server uptime (five nines) during peak industry events like 4/20.
In the second half, the discussion focuses on regulatory and e-commerce developments. Chris compares state-by-state compliance pipelines in the US (such as Metrc integrations and prescription portals in Ohio) with Canada’s provincial models. He breaks down the acquisition of Canadian retail integrator Green Line in 2022 and details the rollout of Blaze Sites, an e-commerce platform designed to give retailers direct SEO control and complete ownership of customer transaction data. Chris also highlights the Blaze Cares initiative, detailing a point-of-sale donation integration supporting the SickKids Foundation in Toronto.
Tom Ritchie Says: Welcome to Legacies, everyone! Don’t forget, Legacies is powered by AVEO, leaders in sustainable vape hardware. I’m joined this week by Chris Violas, CEO and founder of BLAZE. Chris, welcome to Legacies, man!
Chris Violas Says: Awesome! What’s up, Tom? Thanks for having me. I’m a huge fan of what you’re doing up there. I know a lot of the Canadian community follows Legacies, so I’m super excited to chat about cannabis, tech, and all the fun stuff happening across the space.
Tom Ritchie Says: I always get jealous when I have guests joining me from California because you’ve always got sunshine and warmth! You’ve had quite the ride across technology and cannabis, going back to your early dispensary days in 2010 with Cannabest, right?
Chris Violas Says: Exactly! Not many people know that story. I started as an ambitious operator during California’s early green rush. My father has been a cannabis attorney and asset protection specialist since the late 2000s. Watching him represent operators made me want to test my own entrepreneurial chops. We opened a dispensary during my junior year of college under Proposition 215, which was California’s original medical cannabis framework.
Chris Violas Says: It was the absolute wild west. We had about 5,000 square feet of indoor cultivation. Back then, consistent branded products and beautiful edibles like Wyld didn’t exist. My degree from Cal Poly was in Business Information Systems, so I focused on operationalizing technology. We ran an active medical delivery service alongside the storefront. Delivery logistics were challenging and barely profitable, but running that operation taught me how the plant, the patient, and technology intersect.
Tom Ritchie Says: Doing medical cannabis delivery back in 2010 must have been dangerous. What were those early days really like?
Chris Violas Says: Let’s just say I’ve been robbed, and I’ve had employees take off with product and cash. At that time, you were directly intersecting with the illicit market and large organizations supplying California and the East Coast. We did everything strictly by the book, operated cleanly, and had a successful exit in 2014. That exit gave me the seed capital to eventually fund BLAZE.
Tom Ritchie Says: How did you handle product sourcing and point of sale during that period? Was it all cash and cobbled-together software?
Chris Violas Says: My father represented roughly 20% of California operators, giving us access to top-tier indoor hydro growers in Long Beach and greenhouse producers in Monterey County. We brought dense, high-grade indoor flower to California’s Central Coast, which had traditionally only seen sun-grown outdoor. Because we were in a college town, I assumed college students would be our core customer base. It was the complete opposite—students had little money and were difficult to deal with. Our primary clientele ended up being retired folks and local winemakers who genuinely relied on cannabis for therapeutic relief.
Chris Violas Says: Weedmaps served as our yellow pages. For point of sale, we cycled through two early cannabis-specific platforms that are no longer around. They could ring up a retail transaction, but delivery dispatch, compliance logging, and e-commerce integrations simply didn’t exist. I ended up coding a custom WordPress WooCommerce site and linking it to our dispatch phone systems. Having to hire staff just to transcribe orders across disconnected software showed me firsthand that cannabis retailers faced massive technology bottlenecks.
Tom Ritchie Says: Was that the lightbulb moment that sparked BLAZE?
Chris Violas Says: Exactly. My senior thesis at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2013 was literally the architectural blueprint for BLAZE: an integrated information system built specifically for retail point of sale, delivery dispatch, compliance tracking, and e-commerce. By the time we sold the dispensary in 2014, I had a complete business plan ready.
Chris Violas Says: Early pioneers like MJ Freeway in Colorado, Green Bits in the Pacific Northwest, Meadow through Y Combinator, and Flowhub were laying the groundwork. But to build my own chops, I spent the next several years in enterprise technology—working at an adtech agency running the samsclub.com North American account with an $80 million annual scope, and then nearly four years at Amazon Web Services (AWS). About a year into AWS, I began writing the initial code for BLAZE on nights and weekends.
Chris Violas Says: In 2018, California’s adult-use Proposition 64 took effect. A client of my father’s in Long Beach needed a modern compliance-focused retail system, and they became our first customer. Prop 64 created an urgent need for compliance automation. In April 2019, we closed our seed funding round, and I left Amazon full-time. We started with five people around a table—today, BLAZE employs nearly 80 team members.
Tom Ritchie Says: Who were those first key hires when you launched?
Chris Violas Says: First was my co-founder and CTO, Armando “Mondo” Roggio—a brilliant technical architect we couldn’t exist without. Then Grant Carlson, who started in customer support and now leads product development, followed by early sales reps like Matt Anderson and Raj. I spent those early years personally selling door-to-door, closing our first 100 dispensary clients myself. Rous at Tropicana in Orange County told me, “You won the deal because you showed up in person.” Over half of our company today is comprised of former cannabis operators. Having that authentic DNA makes all the difference.
Tom Ritchie Says: What was BLAZE’s primary unique selling proposition when entering a market with established players?
Chris Violas Says: Built-in delivery dispatch. While competitors treated delivery as an afterthought or third-party bolt-on, BLAZE offered native driver routing and dispatch out of the box. In dense California markets, delivery allows a storefront to expand its revenue radius far beyond foot traffic. That feature put us on the map, and we remain industry leaders in cannabis logistics today.
Tom Ritchie Says: Every 4/20, cannabis retail experiences massive transaction volume spikes, and competitor point-of-sale outages frequently make headlines. How does BLAZE maintain stability during peak traffic?
Chris Violas Says: Point-of-sale software is mission-critical. If a system crashes on 4/20 while lines stretch out the door, you ruin a dispensary’s most profitable day of the year. My background at AWS instilled an obsession with enterprise infrastructure: “five nines” (99.999% uptime) is the standard.
Chris Violas Says: We begin preparing for 4/20 in late February: running rigorous database load testing, implementing strict code freezes, and scaling server clusters. On 4/20, our DevOps team monitors real-time database IOPS and transaction latency across every market. Because of that preparation, our recent 4/20 holidays have been smooth and calm.
Chris Violas Says: When we launched our integrated payment solution, BlazePay, we also introduced BlazeCare—a round-up charitable giving feature at the register. We partnered with the SickKids Foundation (The Hospital for Sick Children) in Toronto. One in five Ontarians has a connection to SickKids, and empowering dispensary shoppers to support children’s health creates meaningful community impact.
Tom Ritchie Says: In June 2022, BLAZE acquired Greenline POS in Canada, led by Albert Kim. How does managing software across US states compare to Canadian provinces?
Chris Violas Says: Shoutout to Albert Kim—he built an extraordinary business, and we’re honored to continue that journey. The regulatory differences are fascinating. In the US, compliance operates like a pharmacy management system. In markets like Ohio, our system must interface directly with state medical portals to verify patient allocations, doctor recommendations, and prescription limits before dispensing.
Chris Violas Says: Canada operates a streamlined horizontal retail model without ID queues or medical allotments, but requires real-time automated transaction reporting directly to provincial bodies like the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS). In both markets, our mission is identical: absolute inventory traceability, compliance automation, and eliminating product leakage.
Tom Ritchie Says: In Canada and the US, regulated retailers compete against illicit mail-order marijuana (MOM) websites that dominate search engine results. How crucial is automated SEO for legal dispensaries?
Chris Violas Says: Regulated cannabis operators are locked out of mainstream advertising on Google and Meta. As a result, organic search visibility and digital shelf presence are your most critical top-of-funnel assets. If an operator’s online menu doesn’t match their in-store brand vibe, they surrender customer acquisition to illicit sites.
Chris Violas Says: Early online menu providers forced dispensaries into generic iframe widgets where the third party owned customer records. Retailers need automated, clean SEO pages that index every cultivar, brand, and category while preserving retailer data ownership.
Tom Ritchie Says: You recently launched BLAZE Sites. What operator pain points did you design this product to solve?
Chris Violas Says: Through our e-commerce platform, Timber, we repeatedly encountered operators who were held hostage by third-party web agencies or had their webmaster quit, leaving them without login credentials to update basic store information. Dispensary operators shouldn’t have to hire an expensive digital agency just to update a promotional banner.
Chris Violas Says: BLAZE Sites acts as the Shopify of cannabis. With the click of a button, an operator in Canada or the US can deploy a fully themed, SEO-optimized, compliant e-commerce website in 30 minutes. It provides a single unified login connecting their website, online menu, mobile app, in-store point of sale, and payments. Our Canadian sales manager, Tristan, calls juggling twenty disconnected SaaS tools “the vendor bender.” BLAZE Sites eliminates that fragmentation so operators can focus on retail excellence.
Tom Ritchie Says: What enterprise features are you rolling out for multi-store operators?
Chris Violas Says: We are building a centralized management hierarchy structured around Location, Company, and Organization. This allows enterprise operators managing 100 storefronts across multiple brand banners to deploy unified product pricing and promotional campaigns across all doors in under five minutes.
Chris Violas Says: We’ve also undertaken a massive data normalization project in the US. While Canada has provincial catalogs, the US market is fragmented with localized brand naming conventions. Normalizing that data allows us to deploy machine-learning recommendation engines and predictive inventory analytics across our network.
Tom Ritchie Says: Leading an enterprise tech platform in cannabis is relentlessly intense. How do you maintain balance and stamina?
Chris Violas Says: I played collegiate soccer, so athletic discipline drives my lifestyle. I’m up between 3:00 and 4:00 AM every morning for a run, an intensive workout, and a 40-degree cold plunge. That quiet morning focus sets the tone before the day begins. Outside of work, my world centers around my wife Allison and our two toddlers, Cali and Ford. Balancing intense entrepreneurship with family grounding is essential.
Tom Ritchie Says: What advice would you give to entrepreneurs navigating today’s cannabis market?
Chris Violas Says: You need relentless endurance and unwavering self-belief. This industry is a commercial washing machine, and volatility will continue for years. The operators who win are those who stay laser-focused on operational fundamentals and embrace the grind.
Chris Violas Says: Seeing New York’s market expand to 350 dispensaries with over 400 brands proves how rapidly this space matures. Experienced, sophisticated operators are driving the next wave of growth, and BLAZE is thrilled to provide the technology infrastructure powering that expansion.
Tom Ritchie Says: Chris, your vision, technical rigor, and passion for operators are inspiring. Thank you for joining us on Legacies!
Chris Violas Says: Thanks so much, Tom! Great conversation, and let’s definitely catch up in California soon!
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CEO & Founder
Chris Violas is the CEO and founder of Blaze, a leading cannabis retail software platform. He previously operated Cannib Delivery dispensary.
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Cannabis Retail Technology & POS Platform
Blaze is a leading cannabis retail and delivery software platform in North America. Founded by Chris Violas and Mondo, the...
Learn More About Partner ↗BLAZE leverages an AWS-backed infrastructure and starts load testing and code freezes in February to prep for peak traffic days like 4/20, ensuring 'five nines' (99.999%) database reliability and real-time monitoring.
BLAZE acquired Green Line in 2022 to enter the Canadian market, allowing them to study and deploy Green Line's lightweight POS model alongside their medical-focused pharmacy-style systems in the US.
BLAZE Cares is a community giving program integrated into the POS terminal that allows dispensary customers to round up transaction totals, with early campaigns supporting the SickKids Foundation in Toronto.
