Dockside Cannabis in Ballard

Dockside Cannabis, like many companies, has humble origins and deep roots in the local community. Dockside has worked hard to maintain both our humility and our roots while building greater trust and expanding our horizons. This is our story.

Aaron Varney, Maria Moses, & Oscar Velasco-Schmitz are the heart and soul of Dockside Cannabis, and the reason our company exists. All of them stem from backgrounds in either business, technology, or both- and their unique stories are what brought Dockside to life!

Aaron and Maria first met at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (now Presidio Graduate School) which was the first school in the nation to offer a degree in sustainable business. In Maria’s words, the program was “full of dreamers; people who had been in the business world and were dissatisfied with the pursuit of profit driving everything”.

Maria and Oscar met while working for Microsoft in the early 2000’s. At the time, a large portion of the people who worked in tech were cannabis smokers, but the culture surrounding it was quiet and many people kept their use to themselves. After having seen that cannabis was a valuable tool to building/strengthening community ties, Oscar began his career as a “cannabis evangelist” and began tirelessly working to normalize use and end negative stigmas surrounding the plant.

In 2009, Oscar had been advocating for cannabis rights for years and was able to establish lasting relationships with people and policymakers like city attorney Pete Holmes, which helped to shape bits of the conversation around what cannabis policy for Washington could look like. He later connected Maria with someone who ran a medical collective (but was looking to get out of the industry) in 2010, and the two of them agreed to move forward with their own cannabis shop – but a crucial component was missing. Maria introduced Aaron, who had been connecting people to the plant since the early 2000’s, to Oscar, and the rest went down in Dockside history.