If you've ever thought to yourself, "I wish there were a way to smoke weed in strangers' homes without consequences," you're in luck.
A new startup, Bud and Breakfast, bills itself as the Airbnb for "cannabis friendly lodging." The site, which launched last month, allows home-dwellers to list their properties for short-term rental to anyone looking for a private place to smoke. The site's founder, Sean Roby, told the Guardian this week that the idea was to give pot-smoking tourists a way to enjoy their herb safely, especially in states like Colorado, where purchase and possession of marijuana is legal, but smoking in public is not.
"A lot of people would come to Colorado, go to a dispensary, buy some herb and then go out on the street and smoke,” Roby told the outlet. “That is not legal. We want to provide safe and legal accommodations for people to have an alternative.”
There is a glut of pot-themed start-up activity lately, as states relax their laws and entrepreneurs rush in to serve the newly open markets. Eaze, the "Uber of weed," raised $10 million in venture capital last month from investors including Snoop Dogg. And Privateer Holdings, a Seattle-based venture capital firm, recently raised $75 million to invest in marijuana-related start-ups. Bud and Breakfast isn't even the first start-up to try to apply the Airbnb model to cannabis-friendly rentals — that would be AirTHC, which launched last year — but it does seem to have found a hot market. (Roby told the Guardian that his phone "has been ringing off the hook.")
The listings on Bud and Breakfast are still far from comprehensive — I couldn't find any available listings in San Francisco for this weekend, for example — but there is a "Bob Marley studio apt" available in Kingston, Jamaica for just $52 a night. Presumably, snacks aren't included.