(long)
Sure Greg, and point well taken.
My post was mostly sarcasm, but it definitely has underlying truth. Hickey's only been around for a few years (3?). Moskowitz (who also started ATIS) started CHAI and ran the company before that. He just relinquished control of the board a few months back.
Moskowitz hyped the hair growth product (Piliel) relentlessly to Wall Street, and they bought the story...for a while. Hence, this board's title. When Hickey took over, he did everything he could to distance CHAI from the product, including soon abandoning it. That's when CHAI took the big dive in December 1997. Hickey's been straightforward with his investors, and has (now) focused the company on adhesion barriers, which is what they're expert in, anyway. Not that Hickey hasn't made mistakes. He inherited a PR nightmare (with the obligatory axing of Piliel), and not much cash to continue the POA barrier development. Enter Clinicel, their quick fix solution to the cash crunch problem which worked miserably. It always looked clear that they company only saw Clinicel as a necessary distraction to their primary business plan.
For over a year, Hickey has walked a very fine line between creating shareholder value and getting the Repel products, especially CV, to the market via excessive dilution through VC/external financing sources. He had big VC and other financing offers (one was rumored to be from a VC group affiliated with Oz). They were all highly dilutive to the rest of us. Surely, they could have made the deal sweet for CHAI management and screwed the rest us, had they really wanted to. But they didn't.
Don't think that Moskowitz is completely gone from the picture, though. He owns (by far) the largest stake in CHAI, and I'm sure his voice still echoes through the board room. I happen to believe that some sort of gentleman's agreement was made between Musky and Hickey last year when Musky resigned, just before funding the private placement. Perhaps that Hickey would agree to take a look at the offers for the company, which had previously been ignored? Perhaps a 'drop dead' date to get the stock moving before agreeing to the prior? Who knows....
Marc |
