Cannot wait to give you this one;
Michael Lebby
Why should you be excited? We have something that’s happening in the industry that doesn’t happen that often. The last time something like this happened is the bubble in 1999/2000 when everybody thought the internet was going to take off and we called it a bubble because two years later all the sales dried up and companies like Nortel and Lucent basically vanished. That was a bubble.
This is not a bubble. This is sustained growth. This is a driving demand that doesn’t look like it’s going to go away. Some people say it may mitigate a little bit but it’s not going to go away. Artificial intelligence, whether you look at it on the good side or you look at it on the bad side, this has been up at the policy level of national countries. It’s not just a tech thing that’s taking off. This is a technology that was, five years ago 2,000 engineers could do neural networks and machine learning. Now we’ve got a hundred million users using Chat GPT and Bard and whatever else. This is a big snowball that’s just growing, and it’s growing so fast the national governments are concerned about it. They’re concerned about people misusing it as opposed to using it for positive reasons.
What it’s doing in our space is it’s upgrading the technology a lot faster. I will agree with you, this technology has taken some time. But then when I think back to other technologies that I worked on where there is incumbent technology, there is a laser ray (phon) in this phone called [indiscernible]. I’ve worked on this in 1990/1991 with Motorola, never before face ID applications. We worked on it then, or optical interconnects for data centres or central office switches, as we called them at the time. But it took about a decade or more for that technology to take off. Now there’s a hundred billion of these lasers. If you look at OLEDs and the first OLEDs were being worked on in the early 90s. It took a long time. But it gets to a point where it just becomes ubiquitous.
I’ve worked on some technologies and I’ve seen the timelines. If you’re asking the question, would I like this to go faster? Yes, I would. Are we achieving an industry average with this brand new technology to displace incumbents? I think we are. We’re not behind. As investors you may look at this and go, well, it’s taking a long time to get to revenue. But are we really behind the curve? I don’t think we are. That’s why I’m excited. I don’t feel that we’re behind. I feel we’re on a threshold of something huge.
I can see it from your perspective and it’s a tough look because you’ve been in the Company, your father’s been in the Company a long time. But I think we’re doing pretty much the average for a new technology platform that’s going to have an incredible impact. That’s why I’m here and that’s why I’m really excited and that’s why I’m showing these types of slides. But I may not have answered your question to your satisfaction. But that’s probably the best answer I can give.
Tier ones have an incumbent technology. If you’re a lithium niobate modulator company and you’ve got your own little fab and you’re doing your own designs, you’re going to tell your team, guys, if you don’t make it any better, we’re going to have to go outside and get a new technology. What we’re seeing is we’re seeing these companies trying to exert the last little bit of that technology. I think you would the same. I would do the same. Why would you go to a new technology if you can get a little bit more out of your existing one? But it’s hitting a wall. Silicon won’t go any faster and they know this and it’s being talked about.
Tier ones are looking at our technology. I can’t answer the question about their decision process because they’re big companies, but we’re engaged from the engineers all the way up to the executive office. We’re engaged at the right levels. We’re working that issue as hard as we can.
