There's a post that was posted today that broke the camel's back!
After one year and a half Reading this thing brlow makes me wanna shoot myself!
Enough is enough!
Vote No to proposals 3 & 4!
Some notes of my conversation with Steven Sprague (April 21 2012)
Let’s talk about the BOD. The BOD is not a rubber stamp for SKS. The BOD meets every six weeks and is very involved in the company’s decisions.
As to the salaries of members of the Sprague family, the BOD makes the decisions on salaries. Steven does not even vote with the BOD on salaries.
The way the salaries are structured for Michael and Peter is as follows. They are paid about $125,000 per annum. They receive a bonus of approximately $125,000. In essence they are both receiving about $250,000 per year. The reason it was set up this way was for the severance pay. If either one leave the company the severance pay is based on their salary of $125,000, not the $250,000 they receive annually.
What does Michael do for his salary? Steven places him in the top ten guys he has as engineers writing code. Michael is not the highest paid of the top guys, nor is he the lowest paid of the top guys. You all may think the time he is spending on Scrambls is a waste of money, but you are all wrong. Scrambls has the potential of completely over shadowing everything else Wave is involved in. I will talk more about this a little later.
What does Peter do for his salary? $250,000 per year for an industry veteran, and someone with a personal brand, is not over the top. He provides Wave consistently with access to his relationships. Peter was responsible for Wave’s relationship with ARM and BP. He is intimately involved. Those two relationships were, and are, worth the money he receives. He is still contributing with his access to relationships every day.
Noland Bushnell has been a very big deal with people in Hollywood. I think you will see the results of that with the introduction of Scrambls in a few weeks. (More later on Scrambls)
As to the BOD. It looks like two of the BOD members may retire on their own. If not, we will probably retire them when the slate comes out. SKS and I talked about this, and I assured him two of the current BOD members will not be approved. He understands this.
Listening to some of the posters on the board, I was lead to believe the BOD was some bad bad group of people that only did what Steven wanted them to do. To the contrary, they have made good decisions on the focus and future of Wave Systems. Do we want Steven to take his attention away from the real prize of opportunity and direction, or do we want him to stay on course? I want him to stay on course on not spend time worrying about the BOD. I am convinced the BOD is doing the job it is paid to do.
I for one, have changed my view of the BOD. There will be a couple of new members, and I think we should leave it at that. We don’t need Steven wasting his time looking for BODs. There will be a change, and that is good enough for me.
One more note regarding the BOD. There are a couple of Government IT guys that would be perfect on the board, according to Steven. That could not hurt one bit.
Momentum will swing our way. Look for the June-July time frame to see this happen.
We should see upwards of $50 million in venues this year. A couple of major deals will make that number much much higher.
There are those that say the fall in the current price is because there must be a leak in Q1’s numbers, that they will be bad. He said that the numbers will be in line with the past few quarters. To me that means we will see growth quarter over quarter.
Right now they are filling a gap. He expects to see revenues catching up with expenses, if not in Q2, Q3 for sure. If revenues are a little bit more than expenses in Q3, Wave will potential show a profit. He said we could have shown a profit in the past, but they took the road to invest it all back into the company. I agree with that 100%
On reason for higher expenses is because he feels he made a mistake regarding mobile. He invested in mobile and then looked for the traction. He now wishes he had seen the traction first and then invested. Look for big things to happen in mobile by year end, going into Q1 or 2013.
There will be 40 deals closed this quarter. Deals that are based on companies adding machines when they turn them over. Q2 is only two weeks old and it looks like it could be a very good quarter.
These deals are showing up on the bottom line, make no mistake about that, and the bottom line will grow, as new units are added by these companies.
Remember, in December of 2010 we got a 10 million dollar deal from GM. We never got a deal to replace that, yet our numbers grew through the December of 2011.
Steven feels that Computex Taiwan will be very important to Microsoft and Wave as Windows 8 receives more attention. This will happen sometime in June.
Samsung is providing revenues right now. It will grow substantial in Q2 and through the rest of the year. Samsung is a very important partner, who will see tons of revenues coming Wave’s way. Wave has been developing all the trusted software for the Samsung products. This will prove to be a very big revenue source for us.
Remember, the floods in Taiwan pushed everything back by 90-120 days. That problem is coming to an end. Product is flowing again.
When Intel bought McAfee, three very important people from McAfee joined Wave in Europe. Europe is going to be a big contributor to Wave’s bottom line. He expects 15-20 million of revenues coming out of Europe this year. (Revenues are coming out now) Can things happen that will reduce that number, yes. Can things happen that will make the number higher than 20 million, yes. Bottom line, Europe will and is a big big winner for the company.
He thinks the Army’s decision to make all moving hardware, such as vehicles and tanks having to be equipped with trusted computing, will be a real winner for Wave, and will get other agencies on track.
There are other things happening with the Government which we’ve talked about on the board with all the dots. Now we have to have those dots equal revenues. This will happen as some point in time.
SCRAMBLS
Scrambls will be introduced in the next few weeks. If successful, the revenues from Scrambls will dwarf all other income coming into Wave.
The secret of Scrambls are the KEYS. The company that holds the keys, owns the Kingdom. What would $1.00 per month, per individual bring in as revenues? Don’t even guess.
To have the keys for consumer media, consumer content, companies virtually having their own private conversations through Scrambls, the numbers are unreal.
Is it possible that Scrambls could be so successful, that it could be bought for 10 figures? Don’t laugh; we could be looking at a monster. And the best this is, Scrambls will only cost around a million dollars. Look for the introduction in the next few weeks.
One last thing. As to insider buys. The only insiders are Jerry Feeney, Steven Sprague and the BOD members. Those are the only officers. If Lark Allen or Brian Berger bought shares (which they maybe doing), it will not come up as insider sales because Steven structured it so no one would be liable except for him, Jerry and the BOD.
There is no risk of Wave Systems going away. They have no debt. No one can in and take a piece of the business because they gave us money.
Yes, dilution has not been fun, but that will be coming to an end also.
The risk of owing this stock at $1.33 is zero. Once again ZERO!!
The momentum will change. The price right now is a screaming buy. (I am not telling anyone to buy here) But the down side risk is ZERO.
As far as getting dropped from the Russell, he does not see that happening.
I am send this to you all first but I think I will put this all up on the board sometime tomorrow.
If I think of more conversation I will post it.
Steven is very positive. He works his butt off everyday of the week. He travels a lot (which is not easy, I did it for 30 years) I have put my bet (by owning this stock) on Steven. He will take us to great heights.
Disclaimer
I received no inside information. I am not compensated by Wave Systems for anything. This conversation took place by me promoting the hook up.
