Trying to name the most influential people in cannabis is inevitably subjective. You will no doubt see names in the GCT100 that you think don’t belong. You’ll wonder why certain names are missing from the list. We get that.

But we also set out to make the process of determining our inaugural list of cannabis influencers as rigorous as possible. We created 10 different categories of influence so the list wouldn’t be dominated by a group like corporate CEOs or big-name celebrities, but would also include chefs and scientists and activists. We scoured the Internet and consulted our own and other cannabis and business publications to discover who is making headlines across the cannabisphere. We used our own editorial judgement to select nominees but we also gave credit to people named on third-party influencer lists. We laboriously tallied the social media follower counts of our nominees. And we invited a select group of cannabis experts and insiders to participate in a two-week closed vote on more than 500 nominees for the GCT100.

What did we learn? We reconfirmed something we already knew—that cannabis is a vibrant, dynamic industry and culture that is home to people from all walks of life and from all around the world. It’s home to leaders who are incorporating the plant into the myriad ways they utilize their skills and express their talents. They are journalists and artists and investors and brand-builders and geneticists and podcasters and politicians.

That’s influence.

You can see our methodology and scoring formula to learn how we selected nominees. We’re revealing the GCT100 over two weeks. In the first week, we’ll be naming all of the nominees in the 10 categories of the GCT100. In the second week, we’ll announce the winners.

One final note: We decided to exclude certain categories from our final list because of the structure of GCT’s ownership and founding partnership. Just as we didn’t allow our select voting panelists to vote for themselves, we didn’t want to vote for ourselves in the GCT100. Thus, we did not include a Legal category or Staffing & Recruitment and Business Consulting sub-categories. We do have a Media category but we did not nominate ourselves in it.