A year living in a shack in Oakland.

Twenty-two years in, E-40 has extended his reign over the Bay Area rap landscape by returning to “making music the way he did back in the late ’80s: completely independently, selling his raps more or less directly to his fans.”

On the pair of entrepreneurs behind a Wal-Mart of weed in Oakland. The duo is talking IPO. “Everybody I was meeting was a little bit older, more a part of the hippie generation,” says one. “I was like, ‘I bet there’s so much room for innovation and new ideas.’”