Just two years after two friends cooked up the idea while they shared a joint, MassRoots, a social network for cannabis users, is now being publicly traded as a penny stock. The company’s public offering follows 22-year-old co-founders Isaac Dietrich and Tyler Knight’s successful battle with Apple’s App Store to get their free app on smartphones in the 23 states where marijuana is legal.
MassRoots, headquartered in Denver, bills itself as the Instagram for cannabis users, by cannabis users. Its app allows its 275,000 semi-anonymous users to post pictures of themselves smoking marijuana without the potential repercussions of doing so on conventional social sites.
“The whole point is that we don’t want our grandmothers to see us taking bong rips on Facebook,” says Dietrich, who is also the CEO.
Dietrich skipped college to go into politics, working on getting Republican candidates elected to Congress in his home state of Virginia. But that night in April 2013, when he and Knight were smoking in Knight’s apartment, he decided to go in a much different direction. The two realized all of their friends who used cannabis didn’t post pictures of themselves partaking, but would if they had a safe environment to do so. “We need to start a social network,” they agreed.
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