Entourage Effect: Jeeter cofounders Sebastian Solano and Lukasz Tracz don't look to Warren Buffett for business wisdom—they admire the fire of 'Entourage' superagent Ari Gold.
Ethan Pines for forbesFounded by two sets of identical twins, Jeeter lit up the cannabis industry last year with $220 million in revenue, leaving the competition searching for a “Jeeter beater.”
By Will Yakowicz Forbes Staff
On a beautiful sunny day in May, the CEO of the largest pre-rolled joint manufacturer in the world is sitting in the rooftop bar of New York’s Royalton hotel at 420 Park Avenue South. The address was just another happy accident in a career that has been filled with many of them.
“It’s funny—yesterday I realized the address is 420,” says Sebastian Solano, the 40-year-old cofounder and co-CEO of California-based Jeeter. “By a sign of God.”
Or perhaps the sign of Gemini. Jeeter, which Solano founded in 2018 with his identical twin, David, and their two friends, Lukasz and Patryk Tracz, who are also identical twins, and a group of college buddies, has become the best-selling pre-roll company in the world.
“When we started Jeeter, it was supposed to be a quick brand to launch while we learned the industry,” says Solano, who wears a gold chain with a diamond-encrusted joint pendant around his neck and an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak on his wrist. “Little did we know, that would become our whole company, our Coca-Cola.”
While Jeeter is far from being the $46 billion (annual revenue) soft drink giant—for one thing, it is only in four states (Arizona, California, Massachusetts, and Michigan)—the company still generated an impressive $220 million in revenue in 2023 and expects to reach $300 million this year. Its closest competitor sells about half as much as Jeeter, according to cannabis sales data firm Headset.
The company is known for its flagship pre-roll product: the Baby Jeeter, a five-pack of small half-gram joints infused with THC oil and dusted with kief (which retail between $35 and $45). The industry’s most popular joint has plenty of fans—the company sells 3.5 million of them a month in California alone—but it has just as many enemies. When it comes to pre-rolls, Jeeter is the giant to beat.
At California-based cannabis retailer Sweet Flower, Jeeter is the chain’s best-selling pre-roll with 12% of the category. In a highly competitive segment, pre-rolls are the third-most popular cannabis product category after flower and vapes, companies are constantly trying to come up with a “Jeeter beater,” says Jolena Sterner, the director of buying at Sweet Flower. “Brands are trying to come after their market share, but Jeeter is firing on all cylinders.”
The company, which just launched its products in Massachusetts earlier this month, is slated to hit $300 million in revenue by the end of 2024 and launch in New York’s nascent cannabis market. And with the Drug Enforcement Administration expected to reschedule marijuana as a less dangerous drug, the country’s $28 billion cannabis industry (annual sales) spread across 38 states with some form of legalization, will finally be treated like other mainstream markets. And Jeeter is ready to smoke the competition.
“We still have to earn our spot every single day in this industry,” says Solano, who has a Bogotá-inflected accent after immigrating from Colombia at 14. “Our number one competition is ourselves and we'll never take anything for granted, especially after the journey that we went through. We're still the same guys.”
The Traczes and Solanos are not legacy weed guys, nor are they Ivy-league educated suits seeking a fortune in the cannabis green rush. Rather, they are former South Florida club promoters who turned a 700-person, neon-paint-throwing, electronic dance music concert into a global festival touring 40 countries before selling to radio and media entrepreneur Robert Sillerman for nearly $13 million in 2012. They are party guys. They are the type of entrepreneurs who don’t look for pearls of wisdom from Warren Buffett, but instead studied the gospel according to the HBO comedy series Entourage.
“In college, every Sunday, we would get together and watch last week’s episode and the new one right after,” says 39-year-old Lukasz Tracz from his home in Los Angeles, a backward baseball cap on his head and a gold chain with the same joint pendant Solano has around his neck. “It was like church for us.”
For Solano, who says he identifies with Entourage’s Ari Gold, the aggressive, vulgar and so-douchey-you-love-him Hollywood talent agent played by Jeremey Piven (and based on Endeavour’s Ari Emanuel), the show became a lighthouse—how friends can achieve their dreams together while not letting life’s complexities get in the way.
“They came from humble beginnings in Queens, and so did we from Colombia and Poland,” says Solano. “We are chasing success together and changing our lives and our family’s lives—and having a hell of a good time while we’re doing it.”
High Holiday: Jeeter celebrated 420 this year with a blow-out party attended by Busta Rhymes, Dywane Wade (who is an investor) and Gabrielle Union.
Courtesy of JeeterThe Solano brothers were born in Bogotá and moved to Pembroke Pines, Florida when they were 14. Their father worked as a landscaper and eventually a car salesman. In 2004, the brothers went to St. Thomas University in Miami to play soccer, but after each got injured and lost their scholarships, they headed for Tallahassee, where they became waiters while attending community college. David got a job at a local Olive Garden and Sebastian worked at a nearby Roadhouse Grill.
Patryk and Lukasz Tracz, meanwhile, were born in the small 8,000-person village of Ziębice, and immigrated to the U.S. when they were 9 years old, joining their parents who had come years earlier to work at K-Mart. By the seventh grade in Boca Raton, the twins were expelled from middle school for selling weed. In 2005, they enrolled at Florida State in Tallahassee, where Lukasz got a job at the Olive Garden and met David.
“There were six of us at orientation and we’re all introducing ourselves, but when it came to David, he could barely speak English,” says Lukasz. “I thought, this guy must be a good salesman to get a server job without speaking English well. And that’s when I decided to be friends with him.”
In 2005, the two sets of twins and a few other friends started calling their crew “The Committee” and threw their first party: a $200-per-person event at a rented house with the tired, sexist cliché theme of “CEOs and sexy secretaries.” The Committee rented eight buses and bought 75 bottles at a local night club. It was a hit. They handed in their aprons, quit school, and focused on making money. Soon the Committee was producing events at more nightclubs until they started throwing paint parties—an EDM-fueled event where participants wear white and splatter DayGlo paint on each other. They founded Day Glow Tours, which would eventually become Life In Color, and after selling to Sillerman, they were rich. They bought Hublot watches and expensive cars to celebrate.
In 2016, Solano, who had joined Sillerman’s SFX Entertainment, quit to live with his brother in West Hollywood, who became an EDM DJ signed with Universal Music. He started looking for his next move and decided it had to be in California’s multibillion-dollar cannabis industry. “I realized it was going to become legal and called Lukasz: ‘Check this out,’ I said, ‘this might be the next move for the crew.’”
Sebastian and Lukasz put up $1 million each, and their friends and family put in more, and they bought a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Desert Hot Springs for $3.5 million. They started a holding company, DreamFields Inc., and began distributing a handful of cannabis brands and selling wholesale marijuana.
Their supply chain wasn’t terribly sophisticated in those days—Sebastian would go to a cultivator and fill his Maserati GT with 200 pounds of weed and sell it to dispensaries for a 2% margin. In 2018, they decided it was time to build their own brand. The twins had an ambitious dream of a starting the Louis Vuitton of cannabis with a brand they were calling Culture Club, but their perfectionism was getting in the way and DreamFields needed to start making money. They decided to start a pre-roll joint brand to buy themselves time to build their real company.
Rockin' Pre-rolls: Baby Jeeters are infused with THC oil and some are sprinkled with kief for an added high.
courtesy of JeeterBack in college, the Committee used to call joints “jeeters”—and the name had a nice ring to it. That September, they launched Jeeter, but sales were slow. They booked about 40 stores as customers, but orders were very modest, around $1,000 each. As money was tight, they moved to a smaller house in Palm Springs and started eating a lot of McDonald’s—and not because they were high.
“I was crying on my way to work every morning, driving in the desert with no money about to tell my family and friends that we lost all their money, too,” says Solano.
On a Monday morning in 2019, Scot Garrambone, a college friend who had joined Jeeter as CFO and cofounder, told Sebastian and Lukasz some bad news: The company only had $35,000 in its accounts, but payroll and mortgage were due that Friday with a grand total of $260,000.
“It was time to accept it was over, but it was too tough to do it,” says Sebastian Solano, realizing that the only assets they had were the two Hublot Big Bang watches, a Maserati and a Bentley GT. “Lukasz, it’s all we have left,” Solano recalls saying. “We have two watches and two cars.”
They found a loan shark and gave him the titles to both cars and handed over their watches. In exchange, they got $250,000 and made payroll. David joined the company as a sales rep and Patryk joined as vice president of marketing. David spent his afternoons staking out managers in the parking lots of dispensaries and to give them free samples of Jeeter pre-rolls. Another college friend, Petar Dimitrov, the true pothead in the crew, decided the brand needed to infuse its joints with THC oil and sprinkle kief (the THC crystals found on cannabis plants responsible for getting people high) on the outside to stand out in a crowded market. After a month, David landed a $100,000 month order and within three months he was selling $1 million worth of Jeeter products. By 2020, Jeeter hit $3 million a month in sales. “At this point, there’s life,” says Solano.
Later that year, Jeeter became the best-selling pre-roll brand in California. The company soon began developing special limited-edition releases like the streetwear brand Supreme. They also launched their own holiday called Jeeterday.
At the first Jeeterday celebration in 2021, the brothers went back to their Committee days and threw a party at a rented Beverly Hills mansion designed to look like the castle in Super Mario Brothers. (Nintendo eventually filed a lawsuit as the company was clearly stepping on the videogame giant’s trademarks, and Jeeter settled it by paying up.) Hip-hop artist Ludacris and EDM DJs the Martinez Brothers played for 800 guests and a flock of drones hovered in the air in the shape of a joint—an idea the group got while at Burning Man that summer. Jeeter did another special release with NBA Hall of Famer Dwyane Wade—a package of joints wrapped in 24-karat gold rolling paper inside a box made with basketball leather. Later this month, Jeeter is releasing a special edition 4.2-gram spliff inside a small guitar case in collaboration with Bob Marley’s estate.
As a brand, Jeeter’s biggest influence is that other favorite party fuel—Red Bull, the energy drink company that made both of its founders, Chaleo Yoovidhya and Dietrich Mateschitz billionaires before they died.
“What Red Bull has done with the company means so much more than what’s in the can,” says Solano. “They have invented sports, they do music events, they own a Formula One team. We're huge into all that stuff. So, the question is, how can we put it all into one thing? That’s what Jeeter is.”
While Jeeter doesn’t own a sports team yet, Wade owns a piece of them. The three-time NBA champion is on the board and hosted the company’s 420 party this past April, which featured a performance by Marley’s grandson, Skip Marley.
Jeeter is also ripe for being acquired by a Big Tobacco company, especially with federal reform on the horizon, but Solano and Tracz say the team is not looking to sell. Together, the founders still own around 80% of the company, thanks to their strategy of taking out high-interest loans in the early days. The company only recently raised $35 million from venture firm Silver Spike.
“Our goal is not to sell this company—our goal is to keep this company forever,” says Tracz. Adds Solano: “If we take this all the way to its potential, we can realize our wildest and most amazing dreams through Jeeter.”