True
"There's folks here that just don't appreciate the time it takes for deals to get done"
BUT what you are taking into account is that the deal making process probably has been going on already for a long time now. Very obviously there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than we know about. As evidence of that, SSM Industries certainly did not just dash off an MOU the first day they talked to Kim. They must have been in discussions for quite awhile beforehand yet the first we heard about SSM was the day of the PR on the MOU.
So just how, exactly, are you so confident that further and/or other discussions haven't already been going on long enough to be very close to a PR-able announcement? (and with that in mind, what do you suppose was the origin of the need to get authorization to create new share types so urgent that a special shareholder meeting was called on short notice?
It appears to me that you are overlooking some important details or you probably wouldn't be so confident that "The next announcement won't be groundbreaking"
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note to manshoon: some choice cherry picking there! You forgot to mention how I emphasized that the population ramp up was on "effective hold" and that indicated a delay of some sort, as indeed it was, and there was. I caught a huge amount of flack for that but it turned out I was right.*1
Admittedly when I first stated following KBLB (shortly after the SIAL agreement which is what brought it onto my radar screen*2) I was naive about the complexity of the task KBLB was trying to accomplish. So, yes, I did some premature predictions. Kim was very sparse with details and it took quite awhile to accumulate enough to get a better picture. However considerable water has gone under the bridge since then.
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*1 the reason might have been some problem that needed to be corrected in the worms to make them suitable for production or it might have been just that Kim's calculation of the cost/benefit of ramping up the population to higher levels (basically doing the Pilot Production Program much earlier and being a few months farther down the road when the time came VS the increase in dilution that would have caused (and almost certainly at lower SPs). We may never know the answer to that one.
*2 I had considered investing in Nexia many years ago but did not because of their failure to even attempt to address the issue of how to spin it (probably because they couldn't until they had the protein to work with). Doing the mechanical spinning appeared to me (and still does) to be a far greater problem than just producing the unspun protein.
Nexia COULD have been a MASSIVE success if they'd done one simple and easy addition to their development: instead of inserting the gene directly, inserting a restriction enzyme or equivalent so once they got THAT GM done they could have then done the SSP gene in the same place AND ANY OTHER GENE in a very easy fast and reliable procedure. They could have made a huge company by producing any number of other products in goats milk despite the failure to be able to spin the SSP effectively.
THIS is what makes the critical difference between a successful Biotech and a failure: the ability to be flexible and change course of direction WHEN APPROPRIATE. (WHich IMHO KBLB clearly has: it isn't just focusing on ONE spider silk product as are so many other companies but on a very wide range of diverse products. Another excellent example of such built in flexibility and room to expand and grown is SGMO, the company that created the zinc finger technology that's licensed to SIAL to sublicense to others including KBLB.
Kim's decision to switch to zinc fingers is what enabled KBLB to surge ahead on very fast forward (and what was motivated me to invest in the company.)
