I make no claims to being a particularly smart guy on this thread, but I did spend a couple of hours with the principals at SilkRoad. I have to tell you, it was a bizarre experience.
For example, while I'm used to startup enthusiasm that verges on Hari Krishna-ish wild-eyed conviction, this was something else altogether. People trotted out John Palmer's collected papers like they were a long-lost Gutenberg bible.
At the same time, none of the principals I spoke with impressed me. For example, they had strange backgrounds -- eclectic is too mild for it. Uniformly older than the usual datacomm startup crowd, they also lacked any for-profit datacomm background, including J Palmer. That's not necessarily a big deal, but on top of everything else it makes them impossible to read.
What else ... given the company's avowed stage in development it bothered me that they had no true beta testers. That may have changed since, but the SDSU project was some bizarre distance-learning thing with unsophisticated users; the one other beta tester I spoke with was as in the dark as the rest of us.
On an earlier point ... while I agree with a prior poster that referees regularly dismiss articles that contain substantive stuff, the disconcerting thing about the comments I heard back from my "expert" was that the paper contained silly errors that weren't simply typos. Given how unusual the company's background is, they need something to argue their case, and these papers didn't do it -- and neither does Kagan or the Dataquest report on their site.
Don't get me wrong. I'm kinda rooting for these guys -- knocking off a couple of WDM/SDH etc. players would be great to see. I'm confident it's not a scam: the office is real, the people are real, the confidence is real. But I'm not confident that they haven't re-discovered something we already knew, something they accidentally re-labelled, but that had been tested and discarded elsewhere for cost-effectiveness or robustness reasons.
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