I took SMKY public through a self-registration that began back in April 2006 and took the next 17 months to complete; our sole purpose - as a development stage company w/o revenue - was to position the enterprise for public capitalization since private VC capital was being offered only at a huge cost to my seed investors from years earlier during the technology R&D stage. We financed the SEC filing process through sales of convertible notes and those converted shares were "registered" for free-trading. I had a stack of business cards an inch thick from investment banks I had done presentations for during the filing period whom had promised PIPE financing once we were public.
We were issued our permit for trading on August 31, 2007 and opened on the OTCBB September 7th, with the sponsoring MM bringing us out @ $.07. Clearly it was seen as the beginning of the dream for some 240 seed investors, convertible noteholders and their families as well as friends and it became a buying frenzy during the next 60 days as SMKY soared to 1.10, with news of the $10 million equity line I had secured with Dutchess Capital to finance our opening. I was too new in the game to understand or realize the toxic dynamics and potential for horrible consequences for shareholders that can result from this form of financing.
SMKY began to be shorted and huges sums of stock would have needed to be sold to raise cash for IR campaigning to surpress against the shorting and I was not willing to dilute SMKY to promote and keep it artificially pumped. Consequently, SMKY began to sink as it had virtually nowhere else to go as the economy had then entered its horrific downturn and PIPE financing as did most all financing ceased. Prior to SMKY's opening on the market, registered shareholders had begun to deposit their certs and many with their note conversions at $.10 cashed out in the up and down turns, which contributed to and built SMKY's float. Needless to say, for every seller there's a buyer and SMKY's float has several million shares purchased at high prices.
None of the seed investors' shares including mine were registered in the public filing and a few million registered shares were never moved into the float, so currently there's about 90 million shares held in cert form by some 300 shareholders. So while such a situation would probably have buried most companies and their shareholders, the dream remains strong and even more real now for the seeds and I believe most to be holding long. SMKY remains technically a development stage company, but so well seasoned now to perform and with potential financing considerably more friendly for seed equity.
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