The owner had been arrested and there was nobody else left. So he drove the boss's car around with half a kilo in it, in his early twenties, and opened up in the morning.
He was twenty and he was the only person in the building who knew anything about the product.
"There was nobody in the house who had any little experience of cannabis except me. So there was opportunities."
He went up quickly — one shop, then two, then buying for both.
Then the owner was arrested.
"They had nobody. So they were really relying on me. And I didn't even have the driver's licence then. Then I was driving around with half a kilo of weed in the car of the boss. Because there was nobody willing to do it, and we had to have something to sell."
He anticipates the obvious question and answers it himself.
"How can you call me — a bartender then, or whatever? I'm not a young criminal. It's just the love, and the feeling I already had at a young age with the product."
The coffeeshop was a family business before it was his job. His uncles owned one in Amsterdam, and he was allowed in as a child.
"When I was 12, 13 years young, I was allowed to be inside. Back then in the days it was normal for a kid to come also in a bar. So you were also allowed to come in a coffeeshop."
He is specific about what he was allowed to do there, and it is not what you would assume.
"There was table football. They were making milkshakes — but really milkshakes, like milkshakes. Nothing infused or something like what we do today. Really milkshakes with ice and milk."
His uncle had brought back a portable games console from the United States, which almost nobody in the Netherlands had. That is what the boy was there for. But he was also, without meaning to be, watching a business.
"I was playing at his house on this games machine. He was counting money, and I saw stacks of money, and I saw people going out to a table, not knowing what they were doing."
The conclusion he drew was immediate and, in hindsight, load-bearing.
"So now I really want a coffeeshop. I'm like 14, 15 years young."
The story he tells about that shop's opening is the family legend.
"They dumped a bunch of flyers out of an airplane above Amsterdam saying free joints at the opening. So what happened is, the whole street was full of people. And they made the Dutch news with it."
"There was police standing on one side and police standing on the other side. And they wanted to arrest both of my uncles — basically in the middle of the coffeeshop, handing out free joints to every person in front of the door."
He does not moralise about it.
"So they got both arrested. Just these kind of things."
His own beginning was under a bridge, with older boys and spray paint.
"We were young guys. They were doing graffiti under a bridge, and some of the guys they had some hashish. I didn't know what it was, but I was curious. Of course — you're young. And I tried some."
What he remembers is not the effect but the conclusion he jumped to.
"Every world leader should smoke this, and then maybe world peace will happen."
The reasoning underneath it was, he says, about what the drug makes you unable to do.
"This is so relaxing. If you are doing this then you're not capable of going to war, because you are too slow. You are not capable of doing it."
He does not leave it there, and the correction is his own.
"Of course, later on I also found out that it's not the most ideal drug for everyone. Some people really get into situations where it's not so good."
The comparison he keeps returning to is alcohol, and it is not abstract.
"I also saw my own grandfather die on an overdose of alcohol."
That is why he describes the coffeeshop he worked in with a certain distance, because it was in the drinks business as much as the cannabis one.
"We were also selling beer on Friday nights. It was party time. The whole coffeeshop turned into some kind of discotheque with lights flickering and girls dancing on the stage, because the girls attract guys. And the guys were drinking more beer. At twelve, one at night they had to be kicked out by the bouncer, because they didn't want to leave."
He thinks the modern version is an improvement, and he says why in one clause.
"Today you see all those coffeeshops changed into some clean desk with a bartender behind. It's also a nice change — because alcohol can really bring a lot of damage and harm to people."
Then the thing he cannot make square.
"Why do you allow alcohol, and they make such a fuss about cannabis?"
What he says he was actually good at was the product, and specifically the willingness to reject it.
"The strength to say no. This is bullshit, that is not a nice product, or this is much too expensive. Or: this product from the other boys, it should be the best one — I dare to say no."
He is realistic about how rare that was.
"Not everybody dares to say no. Especially not when it would be someone higher up in the hierarchy."
He describes an era before cannabis became a shelf item.
"Back in the days some coffeeshops didn't even have cannabis. It was only hashish. It was only pollen. You were unique if you had something from Lebanon, yellow or red."
Asked what changed, he finds the word for it midway through the sentence.
"Today it more and more becomes like a top shelf product. It's an advertisement world. It's marketing — exactly, that's the word I'm looking for."
He spent years at a large cannabis seed company, and the part he describes is not the work.
"I came from a time where you were having burner phones, changing your phone every month. And then all of a sudden I was in a situation where I was chill. There was no more stress. No more looking around your shoulder. No more maybe the police are going to raid my little grow."
Then the sentence that reframes everything before it.
"So my time there, it was like — fuck. What have I done wrong all my life?"
The company he runs now started with a man he called a liar.
He had been introduced to a scientist with an unusually simple plant nutrient, and he did not believe a word of it.
"I told him: you're crazy. It's not possible what you're telling me. Because your crop will die, or your roots will burn. By all what I know about plant growing, it's impossible."
So he drove out to check, and then he checked again.
"I went straight to the greenhouse. And everything is alive. Then I said, he's tricking me with this equipment. I ran back to my car, took my case, checked the tank. Wow. Back to the plant. Wow. Checked the roots. Wow."
He pitched it to his employer, who spent six months deciding against it.
"You could have said six months ago not to waste a lot of time with me."
Then the pandemic arrived and made the decision for him.
"He said: there's two opportunities. It's the door, or it's packing seeds and sending it out, because I will not fire you. And then I said, okay — I'll take the door."
He is blunt about what he did not know, and it is not agronomy.
"I didn't realise how much money is going around with my competitors, and also not how much it all costs. These trade shows, they cost tremendous money. And if you want to become somebody, you become number 101 at 22A in the corner somewhere."
He goes anyway, and he says exactly why.
"You want to meet all your contacts. You want to shake the hands. You want to say that you're still here and are active."
The other thing he did not expect was being copied by someone he taught.
"I showed him everything. I showed him: hey, this is the path I want to go, this is what I want to do. And he said, yeah, I'm going to invest in you, I've got faith in you."
"You know what he did? He took another guy and he did the same."
His response is less bitter than the story warrants.
"I thought this only happens in the industry where whoever's doing illegal stuff. But no, it happens in the legal world as well. Okay — same shit, different colour."
Underneath the market there is a much older thing he keeps describing in the same words.
"When I started growing my own plants, I found rest and peace. Because these are not communicating to me. And I could read and learn very easily from a plant, by looking at it."
The moment he returns to twice is a night he spent next to one.
"The first time ever, I slept under a cannabis plant. I saw the growth in the plant. I saw it really popping up and getting big. And I was like — wow, this is magic."
He extends it to a comparison he clearly finds funnier than it is.
"It's like a baby getting born out of nothing, to a beautiful piece of human being."
And he is honest that the wonder was never separable from the arithmetic.
"And when I saw that the first time in plants — and then also realising the same plant can make me money. It's a money tree. So this is something I want to keep doing."
He quit tobacco, and he says the addiction was never the thing everybody assumed.
"When I was young they said to me, you're not addicted to cannabis, you're addicted to tobacco. And I was like six, seven joints a day. Then even 20 joints a day. But it was indeed the tobacco."
The proof he offers is a holiday that used to be unbearable.
"I've been once in my life to Indonesia when I was still smoking tobacco and cannabis, and I felt sick all the 14, 15 days I was there. I felt like the poorest guy on the earth, because I couldn't smoke my weed."
"Nowadays you can take me easily to any country where I would not be allowed to smoke for 30 days."
He adds the qualifier without being asked.
"But as soon as I'm around cannabis, I would be the first to roll up a pure, nice joint."
Three days a week he trains. He coaches sixteen young footballers, plays himself, and trains alongside police officers doing martial arts. He has a wife, two daughters and a son, a pool in the garden and a small sauna. He says the time with his children is the time he does not smoke at all.
Asked, at the end, how it has gone, he does not qualify it.
"I have no complaints. I'm a happy person."