The way I understand it is that in order to create a successful company a paramount fact of its financial life is that it must have Capital, that is at least until the point that it receives sufficient income from its activities to sustain its costs and inventory and make a profit on these activities which then iniself adds to the company’s capital.

A further fact is the need for young companies to grow inevitably means that more capital has to be raised by further issues of shares and warrants at various points in time. But the inescapable fact is that Capital is effectively a company’s life blood.  

However there is a problem; who in their right mind would hand over their hard earned cash at risk to a startup company .  Surely one has to be mad to take such risks, well that’s what I think SPARTA is trying to tell us. He is quite right we are all mad. So to justify my long status as a MAD POET shareholder and to try and illicit a sympathetic response from our accuser I must say that my personal rationale has two parts.  

1. My conception of the rewards for doing so, a Risk/Reward analysis.

2. An altruistic pride in contributing to furthering the development of a unique technology in an industry that fascinates me, I worked in and was trained for, to a sufficiently advanced level to understand the essentials of what must be one of the most complex industries.

The first point is something I have studied formerly, the perception of the degree of reward which in my case was the thought of untold millions, balanced by my capacity to support the costs/efforts of doing so, (spare capital in my case) is a key part of motivation.  Keeping that in mind, as regards my second point, I feel I can justifiably say that there is a significant degree of success now very visible in the conduct of our Management and the pride that Suresh Venkatesan exhibits in his creative efforts running the POET team.

The consequence is that I have a growing sense of a successful outcome to my madness in being involved as a sharehoder which justifies my involvement with POET .  Overtime I have had to adjust my perception of the financial rewards involved (1). But certainly, on the altruistic level (2) I think us longs have every reason to be very proud of our involvement in the success that POET is now showing.  Without our capital this would not have been possible.

My involvement in POET is over six long years I therefore find it intriguing  that SPARTA bothers us so much with his judgements and disturbs us all with financial advice on what our perspective of this investment ought to be.  The degree of reaction here he has caused here is I think attributable to the arrogance of his accusationsl. This little furor is really nothing but an interesting observation in the vagaries of human nature for us to observe. Does anyone else think these feelings are too reminiscent of the Stockhouse raids of the past, perhaps best ignored really.

sula