To say that MedMen Enterprises Inc. Chief Technology Officer Ryan Lissack is a busy man is an understatement.

Just over a year into his tenure at the cannabis retailer, Lissack has become a linchpin at the company, overseeing areas such as information technology and security, digital products, factory operations, and the wholesale business.

“I kind of joke that the ‘T’ in ‘CTO’ stands for ‘things,’” Lissack said. “At this point, my role is a little bit of a hodgepodge.”

In part, Lissack is filling in for executives who departed after a recent corporate restructuring. But his extensive experience in areas that include startups, tech, product and ecommerce has made Lissack a key piece of MedMen’s revamped corporate team.

From where he sits, Lissack has a unique window onto the prospects for the cannabis market — not just in L.A. but nationwide

He says he has an optimistic view of the category and confidence in MedMen’s future as a continued major player in the evolving industry.

Market leader

MedMen has spent much of the past year reeling from financial and corporate turmoil. But it remains the dominant player in the fledgling cannabis market.

The company has built the largest footprint of any cannabis dispensary operator in the United States, with a presence in five states.

It was one of the first dispensary companies to capitalize on newly recreational pot markets in Colorado and California.

Today, MedMen has 12 dispensaries in California and 33 nationwide. In many of those markets, MedMen operates both factories and dispensaries.

Though it has sold three licenses for facilities in recent months, MedMen still holds more than 70 dispensary licenses nationwide. Lissack says the company is holding onto the remaining licenses in preparation for other states legalizing medicinal or recreational pot.

And in August, the company started a delivery service in California and Nevada.

“When we decided to launch a delivery business,” Lissack said, “that was something we were able to move on very quickly because we already had a commerce platform that had all the regulatory pieces, and it was completely mobile.”

Financial challenges

For MedMen, Lissack said, the most lucrative markets are the ones that allow recreational consumption. That’s because cannabis sales are the company’s primary source of revenue.

“The main focus is on retail,” he said.

The reliance on recreational users has posed challenges, though. While medical and recreational pot delivery became legal in California in 2017, regulations in various cities across L.A. County are still developing.

That’s one reason MedMen’s financial situation has seen so many ups and downs.

The company also invested early and heavily in an array of dispensary licenses, and some costly dispensary locations didn’t turn out to be big sellers.

In October, the company was forced to terminate an agreement to purchase an Illinois-based cannabis cultivator called PharmaCann, citing “shifting capital markets” in the pot industry.

A month later, MedMen published a plan to achieve profitability for the first time: It included cutting executive positions and salaries, selling off unprofitable dispensary licenses, and raising more debt funding.

As of December, MedMen’s efforts to revamp its balance sheet netted roughly $37 million in total.

Strategic hire

Lissack came to MedMen with a strong operational track record. He’s started and sold technology companies, and his resume features a laundry list of big-name tech brands.

In 2006, Lissack founded content management platform developer Koral Technologies, which was quickly acquired by ecommerce

giant Salesforce.com Inc. in 2007. He spent five years as senior director of software engineering at Salesforce before joining Maker Studios, which was acquired by Burbank-based Walt Disney Co. for $657 million in March 2014.

After the acquisition, Lissack went on to work for two years at Maker as its chief technology officer.

Prior to MedMen, Lissack was also co-founder and chief technology officer at

Rival Inc., a Playa Vista-based event ticketing startup backed by Santa Monica-based Upfront Ventures and Menlo Park-headquartered

Andreessen Horowitz.

“These experiences at companies of various sizes, maturity levels and industries have given me a deep understanding of large-scale enterprise, consumer, commerce and data platforms,” Lissack said.

“I’m grateful to have had these opportunities to learn and grow as they’ve set me up to come into MedMen and operate effectively with the speed and agility necessary for us to capitalize on the incredible opportunity in front of us,” he added.

At MedMen, Lissack is in charge of technical operations and oversees the company’s factory, cultivation, wholesale and manufacturing businesses. He is also in charge of human resources.

Focus on technology

Part of Lissack’s mandate is to continue developing MedMen’s proprietary technology, which helps the company manage its extensive operations.

Besides building its own online ordering system from scratch, MedMen also owns its back-end management software.

“We believe that by having proprietary tech that is highly customized to our business that we get material strategic business advantages,” Lissack said. “For example … our data warehousing technology, which is a big focus for us. We have a tremendous amount of data that we use for email marketing and the like.”

MedMen is also working with a facial recognition company to match the faces of customers on RealID licenses to their in-store personas. Lissack wouldn’t disclose the name of the company it’s partnering with for the service.

“We have a partnership with a company that will use computer vision to detect face IDs,” he said. “It’s a back-end technology we integrated with.”

Lissack said MedMen aims to cultivate the same experience for customers in each location, despite their vast geographic differences.

He said MedMen has been called “the Apple Store of weed,” and that’s a comparison the company has embraced “in (the) look and feel of the place.”

When customers enter the stores, they’re greeted by staff with tablets that take their orders and process payments digitally using MedMen’s own software.

Having a custom-built ordering engine helps MedMen keep up with customer demand.

“The platform we use to transact with our customers, whether that’s in our stores or online for pickup or delivery, we originally built that completely custom because there was nothing off the shelf that existed that supported the demand of this industry,” Lissack said.

Delivery Men

MedMen recently designed a delivery platform. The only aspect of the operation it didn’t handle, Lissack said, was logistics.

The company’s default is to not build tools internally unless it’s necessary.

“Everything you’ve got to build, you’ve got to maintain,” Lissack said, “and it generally costs more money.”

MedMen contracted OnFleet Inc. to handle the shipping and tracking of its goods in L.A. and Nevada. OnFleet’s software integrates with MedMen’s existing program and helps drivers track and deliver goods across the county.

On the regulatory front, Lissack said the company employs software it designed to handle the complex legal requirements of each municipality where it operates.

“The regulatory requirements are incredibly complicated,” he said. “They vary state by state, and in many cases city by city.”

The platform can track everything from corporate tax withholding to customer purchase limitations and other regulations, Lissack said.

“Here in L.A., different counties and different cities have widely different rules,” he said. “That causes all kinds of complexity, and that’s why the technology is so important,” he said.