I also have read "ThreeFive photonics: Searching for the Holy grail? (teaching case)" now and can only recommend it. The case study shares insight into relationships between inventing an outstanding technology, starting and managing a company, coping with investor and customer requirements, and last – but definitely not least – try to find a way to act under adverse market conditions. Worth reading!

There are a couple of lessons to learn and compare to the POET Technologies story:

• Being a brilliant inventor is definitely not enough. Being a Master of the III-V Universe does not necessarily mean you have any idea about running a company, let alone about the stock market.
• It is crucial to demonstrate a working product to potential customers. As Suresh pointed out in the September 2015 conference call: "It first becomes imperative to showcase the capabilities of the technology platform in a real product, use in real applications, and solving real problems for customers." And: "The path to revenue generation goes through first providing engineering samples of the product. So that it can then be validated in customer systems."
• Developing the right product(s) is also crucial. You might develop something that requires your potential customers to redesign their products in order to deploy your solution and they might not be willing or able to do that, at least not on short term. The POET AOC product is brilliant in this regard, because it is just a cable. Anyone who is willing to give it a try essentially just has to replace a copper cable between two of his boxes by a POET cable. Not even opening the boxes is required, let alone redesigning them.
• For more complex products you have to know what potential customers need. As the ThreeFive Photonics story shows, it is not at all self-evident that you know what that would be. Therefore Suresh visiting customers around the world and getting their input is very important for the next steps and for the development of our business.
• Product development is expensive and takes time. ThreeFive had to spend $100,000 on a single test run and did one or two test runs per month. I don't know what POET expenses are, but you can imagine that tweaking parameters and testing them takes at least two weeks, which might shed some light on what Ajit's "few weeks" could mean.
• POET Technologies should be careful to not fall victim to the perfectionism trap. Gerard Montanus, an experienced investment manager from ThreeFive investor Atlas, explained that in the ThreeFive story. He had repeatedly stressed the importance of developing a product that would be market-ready. "There was a constant tension as we tried to decide between entering the market with a good enough product that we could sell, or with the ultimate product. Developing the ultimate product takes longer and costs are higher. I often argued that we should think about products that are good enough, rather than the best product."

There's more to learn from the ThreeFive Photonics story, but I think I'll leave it at that.