Nanoflight, I believe that you are correct that it has not been directly stated that Mr. Pfeiffer left a job at 3M to come to Nanopierce. (And I admit to being one of those who assumed that he had done so.) OTOH, I've read a lot of these kind of announcements and I have never, ever read one that said explicitly, "Mr. X resigned from his job at MegaCorp to come and work with us." It would be considered tacky. The standard way of wording these announcements is to say that "Before joining OurCompany, Mr. X was employed as XXX at YYY."
So, in theory, the possibilities include: 1) that he was fired, 2) that he was given the opportunity to leave with the understanding that if he didn't he would be fired, 3) he retired from 3M before he had even heard of NPCT, or 4) he retired from 3M with the intention of joining NPCT.
I assume that #1 and #2 are so unlikely as not to merit serious consideration. If it was #4, it still means that he saw NPCT as the best opportunity for a new phase of his career. If it was #3, he was apparently happily retired and NPCT tempted him out of retirement. Either #3 or #4 works fine for me.
For that matter, it's also possible that he might have left 3M with the blessing of top management (maybe they even made him eligible for retirement earlier than he normally would have been) because they wanted to have a really, really good friend at Nanopierce.
IMHO all of the plausible explanations are extremely favorable, so it doesn't seem to be a big deal one way or another.
Best regards,
Geoff
PS Maybe when you fly the corporate jet to St. Paul to pick him up and bring him to Denver, you can pick up a little more info. If MadDog can get "scraps" of info under Paul's table, our Minister of Flies and Flying Machines can probably do even better!
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