I recall back in the day, whe Copetti stated a few times that he would "monetize" Poet's intellectual property - the patents. Try as he did, he failed, which left a lot of investors confused. The solution was to get someone else to do the job, so he got us Ajit and his rolodex. I recall there was about a year of silence from Ajit, so the conclusion in retrospect is that the rolodex didn't bring forth any suitors. So Ajit hired Suresh, who eventually concluded that the problem is, no one would invest in Poet unless they were offered some proof. The burden was on Poet to prove the Lab work can be applied to Fab.
So Suresh came up with the VCSEL and AOC, as the surest way to the holy grail. Sometime around that same time period, he was casting a wider eye, and thought manufacturing products would give an even greater return. Poet had a decent market capitalization that could be used, so he bought DenseLight and B.B. Photonics. The problem is, DenseLight required a cash investment and was going to be an on-going financial drain.
And in the meantime, things unexpectedly were not going well with the VCSEL. No NRE. And finances were looking stretched.
Which brings us to where we are today.
That's how I see it.
