We met our first Canna Chad in 2016. He came from Canada with a blazer, a buzzword-loaded deck, and an ego big enough to fill a hash hole joint tube. His company? CannaRoyalty — one of the earliest to drop serious capital into California’s cannabis industry. Half a million dollars landed in our dispensary without a solid business plan or product roadmap. We didn’t know it yet, but this was the first sign of what would become a full-scale Canna Chad invasion — one that would eventually stretch from investment rounds to pre roll machines, and from flashy dispensary rollups to overbuilt preroll manufacturing machines that couldn’t handle real-world flower and the evolution of heavily infused material in preroll production.

When people think about cannabis today, sleek dispensaries and flashy packaging often come to mind. However, the industry didn’t begin with polished branding or celebrity strains. Instead, it grew from protest, persistence, and patients who had nothing left to lose. At Hummingbird, we proudly carry that legacy forward. We don’t just build pre-roll machines — we continue the story of cannabis as medicine, advocacy, and community. That’s why we welcomed an artifact into our HQ that speaks louder than words: a real federal cannabis tin from the now-closed Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) program.

Oakland, California isn’t just a city — it fuels a movement. It radiates resistance, incubates Black power, and stages a daily act of community resilience. Reinvention defines Oakland, where residents rise with purpose and vision. Nowhere does that vision shine brighter than in Oakland’s cannabis equity movement — where Doja Academy leads the charge. To understand equity in cannabis, first recognise the historic inequities of policing. The War on Drugs devastated Oakland’s communities of color. Over-policing, mass incarceration, and systemic criminalisation broke families and choked economic opportunity. Now that cannabis is legal, impacted communities deserve a front-row seat in the legal industry.