All,
After having finally read through 650 posts since Feb 25th, I can report that Bruce, Lee, and Sethy were very accurate and complete in their reporting. Thank you guys for the concise accuracy.
Since they covered the facts, I'd like to take the time to convey my feelings from an intuitive prospective and hopefully a few others that were in attendance can chime in to add their gut instincts.
In my years of investing in many startup companies, especially young fledgling hi-tech companies, you have to rely heavily on your instincts, which of course also lends even more risk to an already speculative situation.
They all share one thing in common, a story.
Unfortunately sometimes the story is just that, a fabrication and exploitation of minute tidbits of truthful kernels that lend credence, and suck the unwary into a riptide of bullshit. The more you hear the more believe until you've dropped your guard and swallowed the bait, hook, line, and sinker.
In the past decade of investing in these PeeWee's, I've been fortunate to have only run into but a handful of scams. Yep, you guessed it, they were the ones with the best stories, and easy to understand technologies (no rockets scientists needed). The old soft sale, get their foot in your door, and let your imagination be your own worst enemy type of investments.
After three years of dealing closely with Franklin, nothing has come easy. Understanding the technology, the alliances, the marketing, hell even Frank himself. This has been one of the most convoluted and difficult investments I have ever tried to get a grasp on.
Probably the scariest circumstances regarding my three year trek into the unknown with Franklin rests in the fact that I actually understand what their doing, where their going, and why they have chosen the twisted path to get to their end destination.
To be perfectly honest, it wasn't until just a month or so ago, that I finally glued all the missing pieces together, well almost all the missing pieces. Now all that is missing is just the names associated with partnering for infrastructure access, marketing, and of course the finalization of the FNET IPO'ng or buyout, or both.
It would take a book to spell it all out, so I'm just going to highlight a few key points that should put your thought patterns on the right track and may give you a greater sense of confidence in the masterful tact that Frank has engineered.
Why the development and need for FNET ISP services?
Under present day PUCO (Public Utility Commission) guidelines, Telcos are subject to tariffs and restrictions that Internet Service Providers are not. If the PUCO is convinced that a ISP is in fact an ISP and not a Telco, they would enjoy a hands off policy regarding tariffs and restrictions that a TELCO wouldn't.
With that in mind, now think back regarding the stepping stones that were established in the past few years that have brought us to this point.
a) the purchase of Internet One
b) the purchase of Malibu ISP
c) the purchase of Internet Passport
All rolled into FNET ISP.
Do you think that was an accident or planned?
In the interim, Franklin gets GTE to lay in an OC24 fiber optical cable, and is able to benefit from that installation as a test bed for all their gee-whiz telephony R&D, and still be able to off set some of the burn rate by generating revenues and establishing themselves as an ISP in the eyes of the PUCO.
Shrewd huh? Or a blunder as a few numb-nuts on this thread would have you believe?
Once the R&D has resulted in a viable product to generate revenues, the ISP facilities are converted into it's true intended purpose, an NETWORK OPERATING CENTER (NOC). Still operating under the pretence of an ISP known as FNET.
Now here is where things get interesting.
The TELCO's haven't yet, nor do I suspect they will in the near future, commit to IT platforms.
After all why should they?
If the ISP's are running under a blanket of "hands off" yet have to use the Telco's backbone infrastructure, why not lay back, receive the revenues from colocation fees and monitor the traffic over their own systems. That way when the time is right, they can come in and buy-up those IT companies that are truly doing the big business.
Make sense?
Now take this one step further, the telcos can take token equity stakes in those companies that have viable business plans, especially those that are using their own backbones. After all, they would in fact be able to monitor their investments, up close, as in real up close. And receive revenues for the use of the bandwidth in the interim. Kind of win-win for the telcos, even though the Internet Telephony industry could be perceived as a threat to their core business. Not really! Capeche?
OKAY, OKAY!
Now let's talk Franklin.
Even a blind man could have seen the transition taking place in Westlake. Companies that are floundering, are not in the state of expansion that is going on out there. Walls being knocked out, departments being built, desks being delivered, new workstations being created, new hires being trained.
Didn't I just read that Frank was interviewing yesterday?
I, and I'm sure others can testify that no one at WLV was standing around twidling their thumbs, quite the contrary, everyone was crankin, hustling, walking fast, in conferences, on the phone, etc.
And I'm not talking about during the scheduled tours, but rather when I just dropped in unannounced.
In closing there is also much to be said about reading attitudes.
And at the top of this list is Frank. There is a man with a real attitude. Since today is his birthday that makes him a Pisces. And as a Pisces he must be a Salmon. Why? Because here is one guy that swims against the current.
He could give a **** about what some numb-nut thinks, he is a man with a vision, and the foresight to have seen the writing on the wall three years ago. When others were "oh gee-whizzing" the coming of the Internet, he saw new conduits for communication, he saw a product that no-one understood (the Hurricane) as the catalyst to solving the VOIP that was on the frontier. Others saw failure, while Frank saw opportunity.
I trusted in his vision three years ago, and today I feel the electricity that comes from staying the course and not letting a bunch of ignorant skeptics sway my convictions.
Am I right? I sure hope so. But I do know one thing, no matter what the outcome, I know I have a backbone and I'll have enjoyed the knowledge of my experience.
Staying the course,
rb |
