Mike Straumietis is an businessman and marijuana entrepreneur based in Los Angeles, California. ^[1]

Mike grew up in Portland, Oregon to a lower-middle class family. His father died when he was a teenager and his mother became a drug-addict. When he was 19, he started a lawn fertilizing company and by the time he was 23, he started growing marijuana. He has overseen the cultivation of over a million pot plants, been the target of a federal manhunt by the DEA and U.S. Marshals, and lived on the run for almost a decade under seven different identities.

In 1996, Big Mike took $25,000 he’d made from a small illegal grow in Temecula, California, snuck into Canada with a fake passport and built a growing and trafficking organization 200 people strong. He then used his growing and business expertise to start his company, Advanced Nutrients. Today, Advanced Nutrients is the maker of the #1 selling cannabis-specific nutrient line in the world, with $90 million a year in sales from 93 countries.

As of May 2018, Mike had over 1.7 million followers on Instagram.