"Here they are," says James Monsees, extracting two smallish white boxes that scream upscale gadget and laying them on the table with a proud grin. It's a grin that goes nicely with his business-casual attire, his guileless enthusiasm, and his upbeat, low-key demeanor. you'd never suspect these devices were designed to deliver a drug.
The boxes open with classy fabric pulls, revealing their densely packed contents. These are soon splayed across the table: two gleaming, handheld gadgets--one tube-shaped, the other closer in form to a phone--and a cluster of accessories that includes stands, chargers, cables, and small bullet-shaped cartridges. Monsees deftly works the minimalist controls on the two devices, and soon multicolored LEDs are pulsing meaningfully beneath their surfaces. They're sleek things, really, and Monsees can't help bragging that earlier in the day he was notified that one of the devices won a prestigious Red Dot award for design.
It's just what you would expect from a high-tech startup founder who graduated from Stanford and has been backed by some of Silicon Valley's brightest luminaries. On the other hand, it's not exactly what you would expect from a tobacco company, which is what Monsees is running. The glowing gadgets d'art on the table are essentially the future of the cigarette, or will be if Monsees's company, Ploom, continues to gain traction.
There are two big factors that favor Monsees and his co-founder Adam Bowen in their quest to make tobacco cool again. One is that their devices let users pull from tobacco most of the nicotine and flavor of cigarettes in the form of vapor, without taking in the cigarette smoke--thus removing many of the health risks, according to some experts. And, as a major bonus, one of their devices has become the darling of the pot-smoking world, which is steadily converting to vapor even as that world swells with growing legitimacy.
But two big factors are also working against Ploom. One is predictable: fierce competition that's likely to stiffen as both startups and tobacco giants invade the "e-cigarette" market--already worth nearly $2 billion a year and growing fast. The other is a bit less typical in the business world: Ploom can't market on its strengths. That's because making health claims and wooing drug users cause all sorts of problems for a company that's trying to remain squeaky clean in the face of widespread disdain for, and the threat of regulation of, anything linked to tobacco.