“You want to do business? Real SF cats know how to hustle,” Ali Jamalian, founder of San Francisco equity brand Sunset Connect, tells me one afternoon.
Standing in Sunset Connect’s manufacturing space, nestled on an unassuming block in San Francisco, you believe him. For starters, it smells really dank. There’s a distinct color scheme in an industry where many cannabis prosecution spaces retain the white and gray warehouse aesthetics they are housed in — there are orange accents on the clocks, doors, and hallways, everywhere.
Jamalian himself even dons a fully-coordinated wardrobe of Sunset Connect garb, the branding of which is designed to look like Muni’s now-defunct paper transfers, and even applies to employee ID badges. Their break room has an espresso machine and ashtrays on the table. It’s a vibe city kids like myself, who are both Jamalian’s peers and primary consumers can get behind. And one poised to make history in a city already used to doing so.
‘I don’t think people will remember each and every grower for their strains.’
Having operated in the traditional market for years, Sunset Connect was officially established in 2014 and debuted on the recreational market only late last year after they completed the facility that now houses all their trimming, rolling, packaging, and extraction stations (pretty much a one-stop-shop aside from cultivation and edibles).
They’re the city’s first equity cannabis manufacturer, and most of their team have remained friends since their college days at the University of San Francisco, decades ago. Jamalian is also part of the city’s Cannabis Oversight Committee —a branch of the city’s Office of Cannabis founded in 2018 which grants local cannabis companies leverage in policy-making decisions, like taxes (they’re way too high), permits, and the city’s equity program. The committee also grants applicants mentorship and lower entry fees to an industry that can cost hundreds of thousands of non-refundable dollars to get into, without a guarantee of staying.
He’s been in the game a long time “since before we could tell,” and he’s ready to change the game as we know it, as the city did him.
Jamalian’s story spans decades and continents, punctuated by how cannabis changed his life and those around him. He was born in the spring of 1979 in Tehran, Iran, on the heels of the Iranian Revolution, but his mother emigrated to join Jamalian’s father in Dusseldorf, Germany when Jamalian was only a few months old. Jamalian grew up “lucky” in Germany, attending American schools and learning English alongside students from 60 nations. Dusseldorf is fairly close to Germany’s border with the Netherlands, so Jamalian and his friends would sneak off for a trip to the coffee shops of Amsterdam.
“This is awesome,” he recalls thinking while smoking his first joints. As someone who suffered from night terrors and insomnia, he’d toke and knock out.
Jamalian’s grandmother had moved out to the Bay Area before he was born, so the family visited every summer. At 18, it was time for Jamalian to make the move permanent, and he moved to San Francisco to attend USF for international business in the late 1990s. He started selling weed, “5 and 10 packs,” to afford tuition, and was soon “paying my bills with it, pretty deep into it.”
Then in 1999, while living in the Presidio, the worst-case scenario happened: he got raided.
It began a four-plus years-long legal battle, with countless drug tests, hearings, and bouts of anxiety.
“I was like the plague,” he says, remembering how no one wanted to room with him for fear of a random sweep. He was 20 and in over his head, “I was really scared. I had a medical card at this time. I would tell them ‘this is my medicine.’”
When Jamalian wanted to plead guilty to possession of one pound, the court brought up deportation; as a German citizen, it was a distinct possibility. When the case was settled in 2004, Jamalian returned to Germany. He put his four languages, university studies, and natural affinity for visual imagery into a marketing career with clients like Colgate and Pantene.
Unsurprisingly, the marketing world was “fake and corporate,” so when some friends of his, now partners, came to visit him around 2008, he returned to the city by the Bay to grow. While he’s not growing now, he still keeps the San Francisco smoker in mind: we smoke heavy — too much to shell out $85 every day, but too discerning to smoke boof.
“All we really care about in the city, we truly care about people here liking our stuff,” he says. And in a city as expensive as San Francisco, accessibility is crucial to connecting with people. “I wanna be like the every day, good bang for your buck, not Dom Pérignon. I’m a grower and I wouldn’t spend like that!”
As he said, hustlers. When it was clear that 2016’ Proposition 64 was going on the ballot, Jamalian mobilized to brand his and friends’ pounds as Sunset Connect and find partners who could offer him scientific expertise in exchange for his lived experience. It can be hard in an industry where the people with money have no patience, and the people with patience have no money.
“The business is patience, and don’t get greedy. In my 20 years of underground business, the two things I’ve seen are if you get impatient, you get sloppy. You make mistakes and either get busted or lose money. And if you get greedy, literally the industry just kind of flushes you out. I’ve seen that happen to people way bigger than me.”
After some disagreements and empty threats from his former partners, Jamalian flushed them and is Sunset Connect’s sole owner.
2021 has seen the start of Sunset Connect’s transition from equity mentee to mentor in their own right, through a micro-incubation of city “Legends,” partnering with home-grown community figures to support them entering the game holistically, without relying on vampiric investors. Their first run with rapper San Quinn went well, and they’re gearing up to release the second iteration with RBL Posse’s Black C.
“Our legend series is to give these guys a stepping stone into the industry. We’ll do a collaboration, always a local legend, and it’ll be three months long. Then if they want to take that brand and take our logo off of it and run with it and go with a distro and replicate it, they have a reference.”
The one he’s most proud of, however, is the United Playaz collaboration with Rudy Corpuz, who designed and named the packaging for the eighths and pre rolled cones, called “healers need healing too.”
“There’s just so much synergy with Rudy; we just have so much in common from ideology, friends, what we believe in, our entire view on community,” he adds. “But we’re also street people. So we know, like, it’s real man.”
The business of cannabis, as anyone who’s ever tried to grow a seed or move a pack will tell you, is a long game. For Jamalian, who already has 20 years under his belt, the next step is clear: becoming the city’s first equity-owned vertically integrated cannabis company. His cultivation facilities are underway, but he likely won’t see the first crop until 2023; their current facility took 27 months to build out. But who can be angry about that? Not Jamalian. He’s right at home, and won’t be going anywhere.
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“Culture, the weed culture, it means a lot more to me than anything else. I don’t think people will remember each and every grower for their strains,” he says. “I think they’ll remember us as a whole for our city and our culture. And if we can all be a little part of that story, that’s already more than most people can get.”
