Another $0.02 worth...
Just so everyone knows, Charlotte Walker has been a member of the board of directors of Sanctuary Woods for the past two and a half years. Therefore, she was partly responsible for the horrible performance of the Company by not acting in the best interests of the shareholders and yanking the reigns on Scott Walchek sooner than was done. Also, Charlotte Walker teamed up with Brian Beninger and rustled up the investment capital in the first "BIG MONEY DEAL" in 1994 that drew in $18 million from investors such as the Wisconsin State Investment board.
So, Charlotte Walker has a long history (for the software biz) with Sanctuary Woods and has a long history of going back to the market time and time again to try and raise capital. The only reason that Charlotte Walker has so many problems with offshore investors (remember Paul's post a while back about the "Israelis?") is because she's ticked off all of the mainland investors to the point where no one in North America is willing to give her any money.
I find it very interesting that Charlotte Walker only got incentivized to get SW back on its feet when her OWN capital and OWN stock options were at stake. She didn't seem to really care at all for the two years + that she was representing the stockholders. If a lowly average guy like me knows this sort of thing, then you can bet that all the industry people know it too. They are going to be well aware that Charlotte Walker was just taking up space on the board of directors until she saw the opportunity to move in and make some quick bucks herself. How can any investor have confidence in the long term viability of the company when they know that Charlotte Walker's only goal is to drive the stock price up to make her money back (and then some, depending on what the price goes to.) Charlotte has been in the picture for six months now, and the only signficant thing that's happened is that she's trimmed back the staff, signed a distribution deal and sold off the company's biggest asset. The stock hasn't moved at all, except to the Nasdaq small caps board and then off Nasdaq altogether.
I, too, have inside sources at SW, and the stories that I hear aren't of these massive money deals and Franklin Goes To Hollywood and big profits. The stories that I hear are that there's only one or two programmers left, everyone's crammed in two to an office and the most frequently heard question is "should I come into work tomorrow?" Anyone who doesn't believe this should take a trip down to South Grant street in San Mateo and visit the Santuary Woods office.
I hate to come out with a full-on flame of SW like this, but when I saw in Paul's last post that he "tried hard to find some bad news" I thought that I should at least let people know what's on the other side of this coin.
Bart.
(ps. all of the info here, besides my heavy-handed opinions, is publicly available if you do a litte research into the company.) |
