I like your analogy. However, you state that the one mistake Wave made was to go public too early. Mistake from who's point of view would be my question.
I think its highly unlikely that many venture capital firms would have cut SKS the slack that Wavoids have. Whether this is good or bad we'll see. What we have here is, as you state, is a publically held venture company. Wavoids have born venture capital risks without having the controls that venture capitalists ordinarily require. I am not complaining about this, it just my observation.