If you insist. My expertise in finance derives from years of managing small enterprises, including the post of President. My "corporate career" included M&A, which cannot be carried out with out in depth understanding of the financial side of "great technologies".
For the last 15 years most of my activities are in the field of creating intellectual property for other clients, sometimes these result in the formation of new enterprises. I have been asked a number of times on these threads how can one get in on the ground floor prior to the IPO of a company, and that is quite difficult because in most cases, this part of the financial world is reserved to Venture Capital firms and accredited investors (people having net assets in excess of a million bucks), which I presume most on this thread are not. In that connection, last year I have sent via personal selective e-mail, only to people that were engaged with me on the threads (thus qualified as "cyber-acquaintances", if you will), a note to determine their respective interest in getting on the ground floor of such an opportunity. This like many other start up did not get off since no sufficient funds were raised (this space is too short to explain all the details), suffice to say that those that did invest in this venture received all their money back, since I imposed a discipline of not spending a penny of their money until a minimal sum sufficient to get the venture to a critical state was raised. You should believe me that if their money was not returned in full, they would have been all over SI mentioning this fact loud and clear. Mind you, in that venture I took for my efforts and risk of personal funds (about $100,000, now gone) a mere 16% of the expected start up capitalization of about $2.5 MM, and allocated a mere 10% in options to the future management team. Compare these to Gordon's 150% of outstanding capitalization's option and post facto grant of 5 MM shares on 30 MM outstanding.
Because my work includes helping start ups, on rare occasions, I find unique ground floor opportunities in which I invest myself. I am right now involved with such an enterprise, which I believe has indeed a very unique position and IMHO, a potential 100 times greater than the "possibilities" that TSIG currently has. I have thus informed some of my cyber acquaintances on SI (and I have about 1000 of these according to the last count) of that opportunity. Few of those that invested in the venture discussed above, took the money they received back from me and invested it in that new enterprise. They are accredited investors and fully know that their chance at another MSFT is only 10% and that their chance of losing all their investment is probably between 25% to 50%.
I hope you are not offended that I did not contact you relative to that new venture, but I did not think you were an accredited investor. You can contact me via PM if you are accredited, have the fortitude to invest in "development stage" companies, understand the risks associated with such companies and, of course, are genuinely interested.
Oh, yes I have a great personal interest in that venture's success, not only because I own shares (not even .5% of the capitalization) in the company, but also because I am in the process of negotiating with them a license agreement on some of my own patents in the field they are involved in and on new products I have conceived based on their unique technology that they can launch at once rather that the three years delay that they were contemplating.
I trust that sets the record straight.
Zeev |
