tedpeele- I’ve come to believe Lebby is involved in a Herculean effort.
Much of what he has done, independent of the critics and cheerleaders, has been near genius.
His starting point was 0.
0 prior art.
0 revenue
0 data sheet
0 customers
0 products
0 revenue
Many companies would have burnt through untold cap-ex to pull off the task of a novel, exotic product to market. Big staff, frivolous marketing, large office building, ect. They would have huge dilution by now and maybe some reverse splits.
Lebby has slowly, steadily, step by step built out his infrastructure without committing the sins listed above.
His involvement in the industry conferences, expos and events is brilliant. Low cost, gorilla-type marketing that put the company in front of the target audience.
He has been brilliant at keeping his core investor group from losing heart and slowly atrophying into a handful of groupies holding on to hope forever.
He has done this with a finely tuned mixture of specificity and vague forward looking statements. He has told the story he needed to tell to keep everyone expectantly right here. This is where people like you and me take issue. We want reality and we want reliable, truthful transparency.
I believe Lebby is close to accomplishing a moon shot. To do this he needed to get many difficult and unknown challenges solved.
1. He needed to demonstrate to design engineers that he has a reliable, stable material that performs according to claims.
2. He needed to design and produce samples of devices using the material and demonstrate the viability of the process.
3. He needed to build out the backend process including 1. Applying EOP precisely and reliably. 2. Poling at wafer level. 3. Stabilizing and protecting the EOP with ALD. 4. Packaging. 5, ect . Each of these is a complicated and difficult challenge with no prior art.
4. Convince foundries to accept #3 into a formalized backend PDK. Recall there is currently no customer or demand for this material, product or process. This has to be a significantly time intensive and complex process for the foundry to include and test the result for reliability. Again, no prior art.
I believe he is currently still convincing foundries to ‘accept’ (write, test, refine) the backend process into formal PDKs. This is a mountain on its own.
There are many highly technical and complex challenges surrounding all of this that have been, or are currently being addressed. We don’t have full transparency here.
All the while Lebby has had to protect the technology from being duplicated or stolen by enormously capitalized competitors, some of which are potential giant customers. He’s done this with a mixture of secrecy and patents.
While I believe Lebby is uniquely brilliant and has done Herculean work, we investors must peer through the glass darkly. We don’t have the transparency we would like. Everything has been far more complex, challenging and time consuming than we perceived or perhaps, believed.
All the pieces appear to be falling into place to pull it off. In whole or in part. A small event can trigger an avalanche.
The process of market acceptance will start with some small production runs in niche markets. But this represents that everything that needed to be accomplished for commercial viability has been completed. A huge accomplishment.
We need to see a commercial product as a confirmation that all of this is indeed complete and functional.
We may know more in the next 90 days. Pure , unbridled speculation based on some of Lebby’s ever tantalizing indications.
Cheers
