forward selling is where you sell all or an interest in a product that you don't yet have - what the two parties would do, if interested, is try to establish a value, and then start dinging it for risk of not receiving it, time it would take to get it, etc.
if you honestly think ONE of them is worth 300MM then it should be fairly easy to sell a 20% interest in one for 5-10MM bucks -
but to indicate that just because something's never been done before is reason enough to take the route chosen is disappointing -
there is a long, long history of screwy financings to companies of this type - to simply take the terms laying down was not righteous if all is what it is made out to be -
seymour probably needed better advisors in the deal - he did not get 500k worth of quality from the fees he paid the middle man -