WeedHire Goes Up in Smoke

It had an app, it rang up more than 48,000 Facebook “likes,”  and it had a vision: WeedHire was to be the “Monster.com of Marijuana,” the virtual employment agency for the legal cannabis industry.

Got a job to fill in a pot dispensary? Turn to WeedHire. Got deep skills in cultivation, sales? Turn to WeedHire.

Doctors, land use professionals and even lawyers would be needed, as the movement to legalize weed spread, WeedHire said. “Looking for a lawyer to work for kinda cheap on a meaningful Marijuana/Family case,” one online ad reads.

On New Year’s Eve, however, WeedHire revealed it had turned to a Florida firm for help paying the bills. Turnaround Strategies now controls WeedHire’s assets, and is tasked with making the most of them to take care of creditors the company can’t pay, according to papers filed in Delaware’s Court of Chancery

An assignment for the benefit of creditors is a form of state court-supervised bankruptcy, and WeedHire is a Delaware corporation.

It is also publicly traded, although not much. In its most recent report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, for the quarter ended March 2015, the company lamented the lack of an active trading market for its stock.

WeedHire also reported doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern, with debts hovering around the $2 million mark, and sales slipping.

Before it hitched its hopes of success to the spreading movement to legalize marijuana, in May 2014, WeedHire had a day job, in the business of disposing of discarded electronics. Court and SEC documents indicate WeedHire held on to its day job while attempting to get the weed-job-web thing off the ground, and that still wasn’t enough to pay the bills.

Write to Peg Brickley at [email protected]