Pioneering investor and USC Dornsife alumna wants to disrupt your life

If you’re seeking predictions about your love life, you might visit the psychic down the block with that neon sign. If you’re looking for predictions about the future of business, you’d be right to talk to alumna Sally Nichols, who seems to have near psychic abilities when it comes to entrepreneurship.

While a student at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in the 1990s, Nichols started a nonprofit that later became the impetus for Disney online. In the early 2000s, when health care was undergoing a tech revolution, she co-founded practice management and clinical trial software, which she later licensed to a pharmaceutical company.

Then she turned her focus to marijuana. Since 2015, she’s been an advisor and investor with several cannabis companies. In 2016, she invested in Bloom Farms, a California-based cannabis and hemp wellness company, and later she became the company’s president.

Her instincts to invest in such a controversial industry have paid off. Nearly 30 states have now made cannabis legal in some form, and it’s grown into a multibillion-dollar industry.

Defying expectations

Nichols’ background didn’t immediately suggest an unconventional streak. Her mother’s side of the family came over on the Mayflower, she says, settling first in Boston before moving to New York City and helping to start the first telecommunications company and build Gramercy Park. Growing up in Westchester County, New York, she attended the prestigious Hackley Preparatory School, where her fellow classmates had their eyes set on East Coast Ivy Leagues like Harvard and Yale.

But Nichols longed for a change of scenery. “I wanted to see a different part of the world. I wanted to surround myself with a different ethos than just the East Coast, explore myself intellectually and have a different level of social interaction,” she said.

A high school friend told her about USC. Intrigued, Nichols sent for a brochure, but her parents refused to allow her to attend.

“My parents said, ‘You can’t go to school in California,’” says Nichols. “So, I went to school for a year at the University of Illinois, where my brother was, but once I was there, I bought a car, applied to USC, got in and said, ‘I’m going.’

The first time I ever saw the campus was the day I showed up to move into my dorm.”

She regards it as the single best decision she’s made in her life to date. “So much of who I am and who I’ve become and the opportunities that I’ve had in my life came out of that single, deep-rooted instinctual decision that I belong at USC. And I never looked back.”

Trojan paths cross

Nichols says her career was significantly shaped by her undergraduate years, particularly an international relations class taught by Steve Lamy, professor of international relations, spatial sciences and environmental studies.

“It actually became the foundation for how I view international business and, in many ways, how I’ve shaped my cannabis business,” says Nichols. “Cannabis is a social, political and economic movement alongside being a business. I really believe that if I hadn’t taken that class, I wouldn’t have immediately understood the complexities of this space.”

There was another important campus encounter. She met her husband, David Nichols, at a sorority and fraternity mixer. They were just friends at first, bonding over Grateful Dead concerts, Trojan football and environmental causes. They formed USC’s first environmental campus organization, dubbed Earth Spirit, distributing a newsletter and organizing trash clean-ups.

Sally Nichols also continued her rebellious streak. She’d been an avid high school athlete, but her favorite sport, lacrosse, wasn’t popular on the West Coast at the time and USC didn’t offer a women’s team. So, she played with the men’s club.

Entrepreneurial spirit blooms

After she graduated with a degree in international relations, Nichols and her husband converted Earth Spirit into one of the first online environmental education platforms in the country. Eventually, they partnered with Disney, which turned it into Disney online. “And then, we just kind of were serial entrepreneurs,” says Nichols.

Although the two hadn’t dated while at USC, by 1999, romance had blossomed and the two were married.

David and his father purchased the K-Swiss brand of athletic shoes, which Nichols helped build into a billion-dollar business.

In the early 2000s, she started GirlVentures with Alison Foto Agley, a graduate of the USC School of Architecture whom Nichols met while on campus. Their company provides consulting and seed capital to start-ups.

Through GirlVentures, Nichols and Foto Agley created clinical software just as hospitals across the world were beginning to digitize, and then licensed it to a large pharmaceutical company. In 2014, the pair took the plunge into cannabis. Foto Agley had already had her eye on the cannabis market in California, but with Colorado’s rapid legalization, it was time to move.

GirlVentures invested in several cannabis companies, and Nichols also invested in several others on her own. In 2015, GirlVentures made its first of several investments into Bloom Farms. Soon after, Nichols was asked to join Bloom Farms’ executive team to lead distribution and compliance. She went on to hold several positions within the company before taking the helm as president.

“I really had to earn my spot at the table; it wasn’t given to me as an investor and it certainly wasn’t given to me as a female. I really had to earn it. I’ve never worked harder in my life and felt more reward than I have in this industry,” says Nichols.

Growing change

For Nichols, working in cannabis has gone beyond just running a business. It’s also become an avenue for social change.

Bloom Farms buys almost exclusively from women growers. The cannabis industry has traditionally been male-dominated, says Nichols, with men owning the land and women harvesting. After noticing that some of their best relationships were with women-owned and operated businesses, they decided to buy exclusively from woman-run farms.

“As soon as we announced that, some of the retailers wondered if we were buying inferior product since it was coming from female farms,” says an exasperated Nichols, adding that much of the best flower in the California market actually comes from women-owned-and-operated businesses.

Bloom Farms has also donated over 2.6 million meals to California food banks. For each product sold, the company donates one meal.

“There’s a strong connection between the business and doing the right thing, making the world a better place,” says Nichols.

What’s next on the business horizon for Nichols? Well, nothing conventional. One area of interest has been block chain and cryptocurrency, along with other psychoactives such as psilocybin mushrooms, which has been increasingly investigated as a means to treat depression.

“We’re just really interested in innovative and disruptive ways to evolve how we all live,” she says.