Like many people in San Francisco, Sasha Robinson is working on a startup out of his home. His living room is a riot of wires, battery packs, pliers, and metal casings. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was a bomb maker. But these are just the raw materials for a new gadget he’s creating. It’s something revolutionary, he thinks, and he should know. In the 2000s, Robinson ran software development at industrial design firm Moto, where he oversaw new product development for the Flip HD camcorder. Before that he was at Juniper Systems and Silicon Graphics, two of the Valley’s foundational tech firms. His cofounder, Mark Williams, has also bounced around Valley software firms, but his main experience was at Apple, where he managed a Mac OS design team. These guys have tech cred.
They also met at a Burning Man party. “We would hang out socially and always ended up talking about ideas and inventions,” says Williams, explaining how they came up with their new product in his living room. “We were sitting on my couch in my apartment, smoking. I was over 40 then, we could really feel it in our bodies. We were social smokers, but we both felt it …”
“Wait. Are you talking about tobacco here,” I interjected.
“Yes … ,” Williams says, looking sideways and grinning. “I am?” Pregnant pause. Robinson chuckles. “That’s what the line has to be from any manufacturer importing into the US,” he says. Openly acknowledging that your product—in this case a high tech vaporizer called the Firefly–is intended for marijuana use exposes you to classification as a distributor of drug paraphernalia, opening you up to the risk of the federal government seizing your assets and bank accounts. And that makes it difficult to pay a lawyer.
So, officially, the Firefly is for pipe tobacco. But I didn’t try any pipe tobacco in it. You probably won’t either. I did, however, sample some marijuana, for which it’s really, really great. A personal disclosure: I’ve smoked a lot of pot. I’m no stoner, but I’ve been smoking it for more than 25 years, and in that time I’ve used all sorts of vaporizers. They’ve evolved a great deal over the years, from giant complex tabletop devices to today’s generation of e-cig-style vapes that deliver brain-hammering doses of butane-extracted cannabis oil. The Firefly does those devices one better, magically and almost instantly vaporizing actual plant material at the touch of a button. It is just wonderful.
It offers all the convenience of a pipe—it’s portable and downright stealthy; you can slip it in your pocket, carry it loaded up with marijuana—but it’s less harmful than a conventional pipe, because you are inhaling vapor, not smoke. The Firefly uses a lithium-ion battery to power a convection heating element that reaches 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The chamber is insulated by air, which means the Firefly’s housing doesn’t get hot enough to burn your fingers, or anything else, when you slide it back into your pocket.
What’s more, the Firefly looks nice. Clean lines. Metal body. Solid color (your choice of red, black, or silver). You could mistake it for some sort of consumer gadget—a flash drive, maybe, or a backup battery. It definitely doesn’t look like traditional drug paraphernalia—which is entirely the point, of course. This is a vaporizer you can be proud of. You don’t have to hide it in the back of a closet. You want to show it off; among the liberal-minded tech crowd, it’s already a status symbol. Gizmodo called it “portable perfection” and “hands down, the best portable vaporizer.” Business Insider dubbed it “the Tesla of toking up.”
But imagine if Tesla couldn’t advertise that its cars ran on electricity. While laws are changing at the state level, the federal government still classifies marijuana as a schedule 1 drug. So you can build all sorts of products and services around pot, but you often can’t talk openly about their intended functions—in your marketing materials or on your website—if you want to sell them in all 50 states or import them into the US (if, say, you had a factory in China cranking them out). You can’t trademark anything intended for marijuana consumption. You can’t effectively advertise your product in today’s most common manner: Google, Facebook, and Twitter have banned marijuana keyword advertising. And these problems all assume you operate a business that never comes in contact with the actual plant or its derivatives.
“We call that touching the sun,” says Justin Hartfield, an investor with the cannabis-focused Ghost Group, a Newport Beach, California, firm that is raising $25 million in investment capital. “If you’re manufacturing a schedule 1 narcotic—growing it, infusing it with other products—you’re touching the sun.” And you’re liable to get burned.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no money to be made, even on the strictly legal side of the operation. “There’s hundreds of millions of dollars in software and ancillary services,” says Hartfield. “Add in vaporizers and you’re talking many more.”
For the science and technology set, it’s a classic opportunity to disrupt an industry historically run by hippies and gangsters. And the entire tech-industrial complex is getting in on the action: investors, entrepreneurs, biotechnologists, scientists, industrial designers, electrical engineers, data analysts, software developers. Industry types with experience at Apple and Juniper and Silicon Valley Bank and Zynga and all manner of other companies are flocking to cannabis with the hopes of creating a breakout product for a burgeoning legitimate industry. Maybe it’s the Firefly. Maybe it’s something still being developed in someone’s living room. There’s a truism about the gold rush days of San Francisco: It wasn’t the miners who got rich; it was the people selling picks and shovels. As the legalization trend picks up steam, Silicon Valley thinks it can make a better shovel.
They also met at a Burning Man party. “We would hang out socially and always ended up talking about ideas and inventions,” says Williams, explaining how they came up with their new product in his living room. “We were sitting on my couch in my apartment, smoking. I was over 40 then, we could really feel it in our bodies. We were social smokers, but we both felt it …”“Wait. Are you talking about tobacco here,” I interjected.
“Yes … ,” Williams says, looking sideways and grinning. “I am?” Pregnant pause. Robinson chuckles. “That’s what the line has to be from any manufacturer importing into the US,” he says. Openly acknowledging that your product—in this case a high tech vaporizer called the Firefly–is intended for marijuana use exposes you to classification as a distributor of drug paraphernalia, opening you up to the risk of the federal government seizing your assets and bank accounts. And that makes it difficult to pay a lawyer.
So, officially, the Firefly is for pipe tobacco. But I didn’t try any pipe tobacco in it. You probably won’t either. I did, however, sample some marijuana, for which it’s really, really great. A personal disclosure: I’ve smoked a lot of pot. I’m no stoner, but I’ve been smoking it for more than 25 years, and in that time I’ve used all sorts of vaporizers. They’ve evolved a great deal over the years, from giant complex tabletop devices to today’s generation of e-cig-style vapes that deliver brain-hammering doses of butane-extracted cannabis oil. The Firefly does those devices one better, magically and almost instantly vaporizing actual plant material at the touch of a button. It is just wonderful.
It offers all the convenience of a pipe—it’s portable and downright stealthy; you can slip it in your pocket, carry it loaded up with marijuana—but it’s less harmful than a conventional pipe, because you are inhaling vapor, not smoke. The Firefly uses a lithium-ion battery to power a convection heating element that reaches 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The chamber is insulated by air, which means the Firefly’s housing doesn’t get hot enough to burn your fingers, or anything else, when you slide it back into your pocket.
What’s more, the Firefly looks nice. Clean lines. Metal body. Solid color (your choice of red, black, or silver). You could mistake it for some sort of consumer gadget—a flash drive, maybe, or a backup battery. It definitely doesn’t look like traditional drug paraphernalia—which is entirely the point, of course. This is a vaporizer you can be proud of. You don’t have to hide it in the back of a closet. You want to show it off; among the liberal-minded tech crowd, it’s already a status symbol. Gizmodo called it “portable perfection” and “hands down, the best portable vaporizer.” Business Insider dubbed it “the Tesla of toking up.”But imagine if Tesla couldn’t advertise that its cars ran on electricity. While laws are changing at the state level, the federal government still classifies marijuana as a schedule 1 drug. So you can build all sorts of products and services around pot, but you often can’t talk openly about their intended functions—in your marketing materials or on your website—if you want to sell them in all 50 states or import them into the US (if, say, you had a factory in China cranking them out). You can’t trademark anything intended for marijuana consumption. You can’t effectively advertise your product in today’s most common manner: Google, Facebook, and Twitter have banned marijuana keyword advertising. And these problems all assume you operate a business that never comes in contact with the actual plant or its derivatives.
“We call that touching the sun,” says Justin Hartfield, an investor with the cannabis-focused Ghost Group, a Newport Beach, California, firm that is raising $25 million in investment capital. “If you’re manufacturing a schedule 1 narcotic—growing it, infusing it with other products—you’re touching the sun.” And you’re liable to get burned.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no money to be made, even on the strictly legal side of the operation. “There’s hundreds of millions of dollars in software and ancillary services,” says Hartfield. “Add in vaporizers and you’re talking many more.”
For the science and technology set, it’s a classic opportunity to disrupt an industry historically run by hippies and gangsters. And the entire tech-industrial complex is getting in on the action: investors, entrepreneurs, biotechnologists, scientists, industrial designers, electrical engineers, data analysts, software developers. Industry types with experience at Apple and Juniper and Silicon Valley Bank and Zynga and all manner of other companies are flocking to cannabis with the hopes of creating a breakout product for a burgeoning legitimate industry. Maybe it’s the Firefly. Maybe it’s something still being developed in someone’s living room. There’s a truism about the gold rush days of San Francisco: It wasn’t the miners who got rich; it was the people selling picks and shovels. As the legalization trend picks up steam, Silicon Valley thinks it can make a better shovel.
by Matt Honan, Wired | Read more:
Image: Benjamin Rasmussen
