Barnie, I like Berlin and think he is a real CEO. A few promising differentiating characteristics out of gate compared to O'Connor (no need to even compare him to Lombardo since Lombardo was a joke, should have been in retirement in the first place instead of leading ADXS for ten months because the Board failed to have a seamless sucession plan).
1) Berlin is clearly more qualified from an experience standpoint to run Advaxis than O'Connor having actually been a biotech CEO prior to now and not just a biotech general counsel.
2) Berlin is more intelligent (he went to Princeton), which is already manifesting itself in a more thoughtful, financially analytical approach to running ADXS as he conducted a net present value analysis of each of our assets to prioritize scare shareholder resources (O'Connor's version of that analysis was called the spaggetti approach: throw as much money at everything under the sun and see what sticks.)
3) Berlin is aligned with our interests and sees himself as a financial steward of shareholder assets, as evidenced by the hard choice he made to layoff 24% of the workforce, whereas O'Connor ramped up the workforce and spending like ADXS already had a drug on the market neglecting shareholder interests but instead using "other people's money" to pay employees lavish compensation and non-merit bonuses so the place would be recognized as the best place to work in NJ and help O'Connor network politically.
4) Berlin comes across as honest, versus O'Connor during his first six months at the helm lied to investors and pushed through a huge increase in non-merit based comp for himself through deceptive tactics in the proxy process before he had proven himself in any way, shape or form.
All of the above finally caught up with the company in the spring of 2017, when Dan failed to deliver any AXAL deal during the annual meeting, coupled with talking about starting more trials and further expanding our unsustainable spend and pushing through another excessive bonus comp proposal that would increase every year engineered such that it would circumvent shareholder approval. That was the nail in the coffin that led to the exodus of institutional investors selling and pressure to remove Dan. Unfortunately, things apparently unravelled faster than our Board had planned for...as they in fact had no plan, hence letting an true amatuer beyond his prime run ADXS (further into the ground) for 10 months before hiring a real CEO, Berlin.
I do think we're now in good hands with someone who will create the most shareholder value out of the platform.
