EE Times has a new article which is very worth reading:

Inside a $125 Million Silicon Startup

You can draw a couple of parallels and links to POET Technologies.

Mahesh Lingareddy, the young CEO, was a nobody in Silicon Valley when he started his business. Nevertheless he succeeded to persuade quite a couple of investors to put money into his idea. Now imagine what happens if it's not the unknown Mahesh Lingareddy looking for partners, but the well-known Ajit Manocha!

Technically this is also quite interesting, because it shows what is possible with an improved processor architecture blowing away traditional designs. And none of the big companies came up with a similar idea! Now give those guys a much improved hardware layer (POET), and they will design their next-generation architecture. Obviously they are able to think out of the box and probably able to also use the novel PET or POET devices that are more than just transistors.

Very impressive! Here's a quote from Lingareddy which might translate one-to-one to POET shareholders:

The biggest thing I learned is it's a roller coaster ride. One day, underwriters were pricing an IPO, and the next month, they couldn't get financing to make payroll, so their people left. The team will leave if you can't pay them.

I hung around for the next six months or so to sit with the CEO as he explained what happened. I learned you need to be pragmatic. If you get emotionally attached to a particular outcome, like being in The Wall Street Journal or having an IPO, you start making wrong decisions.