Lot's of handwringing of late, and I thought it time to insert my thought, opinion, and point of view into the Brainchip angst some have,....maybe even more than just some. Staff retiring, staff leaving, Sean Hehir, lack of contracts, too many shares being sold by executives,.......on and on. Pick your poison. There's a lot to pick from if that's what you want to do.
However, I believe too many of us here have become myopic, or have misplaced or just plain lost the abilility to see the forest through the trees to say it in another way.
Let me start at my beginning of my peronal Brainchip experience, because it is the reason I invested in the first place. Back in the days of Covid, late 2019, early 2020 I had found myself isolated, in literal lockdown with zero outside life (I'm retired and only went to doctors appointments). Out of boredom I decided to learn about a subject I had a thimbles worth of understanding at that time,....artificial intelligence.
I read, and read, listened to YouTube, looked up words and abbreviations I didn't understand, and began a VERY interesting journey into the growing tsumomi generally referred to as artificial intelligence or A.I.
I learned about the cloud. It is amazing to me how many people don't understand what the cloud is even today, but I digress. I encountered for the first time IoT, or the internet of things. My understanding grew, almost daily.
I saw AI as a gigantic subject matter with many sub topics having subtopics and so on. I likened AI to a huge church (the church of AI sounds terrible, but the picture a big building - AI, with many AI subparts as the pews) with one of the intriguing words, or pews, that picqued my interest being "neuromorphic"
I learned about the EDGE. Reference to edge compute began to make sense to me and when combined with the sheer number of what were edge devices in the world and that that number would continue to grow, I started to see some companies that were involved in the space that was crystalizing in my head as an area of interest and excitement... "edge and neuromorphic computing". Computing like the brain works? Wow. This makes incredible sense I thought.
First up,....Intel (Loihi) and of course IBM and their neuromorphic compute projects. I felt nothing, to be honest. And then I encountered another phrase, "spiking neuromorphic network" compute or "SNN". Now I felt something, and the attributes alledged to apply to that technology got my attention.
So I went into the discovery of SNN neuromorphic compute and eventually discovered Brainchip, a tiny company that was low power, reduced latency and alledgely a good solution for that vast amount of edge devices that was continuing to grow in the world. I eventually bought some Brainchip shares with a massive $50 foriegn transaction fee that almost had me walking away on principle. 3,000 shares at 27 cents seemed like a gamble I was willing to take without knowing what this company was really doing. Info on Brainchip was scant at that time.
Honestly, that was so stupid. It was akin to betting on a horse because you liked its name and knew nothing else about the horse, or the color green the jockey wore. But I did love the name Brainchip.
As I said, back then there really wasn't much info on Brainchip or neuromorphic computing. Not like today. As time went by I accumulated more and more shares because I saw that this technology made so much sense I felt it was a no brainer investment because of course this type of computing would be successful. Ubiquitous possibly,...at least for edge devices. It was that clear to me, and I'm not bragging. What I'm actually saying is that if I could see it then it is in fact that obvious, because even I could see it.
So, ... I bought Brainchip as a flyer, as a speculation that the very reason for its existence made so much sense to me I just knew that this technology was the real deal. It was a small speculative startup in a nascent area of AI, and I entered the stock with the knowledge that the company could fold any day. My eyes were wide open to the risk, so to speak.
I never had a feeling about the stock other than as one way to inexpensively gain some exposure to what would become an inevitable explosion of new edge compute technology, or what we all know to be SNN. It was the burgeoning industry and future prospects that attracted me and the horse that I decided to ride happened to have a name that attracted me to it. Let me repeat, a pretty damn stupid reason to invest.
But as time went by I learned much more, bought more, and long story short remain unfazed by lack of significant IP contracts or deals, employees retiring, NDA's, or anything including Sean Hehir or the BOD. This horse is just barely out of the gate and hasn't even run a furlong. But it is in the race and has a head start imo thanks to the initial success of Akida 1000.
This is my opinion, my Brainchip story, not written to dissuade or persuade anyone from thinking whatever you want to think.
However, as Arm CEO Rene Haas once said on Fox Businuss, CNBC, Bloomberg business and elsewhere,.....it takes 3-5 years for new products to even begin to enter the fab stage. I am remaining patient, undeterred that I have chosen a great horse in a great big edge compute market for which I fully expect to be handsomely rewarded some day. But, then again I may be wrong and that is the risk I took. No regrets.
The forest (spiking neuromorphic compute processing at the edge) is the main and only reason I invested. The minutiae of problems every company has every day has not in any way affected or altered my reason for remaining invested in the company. Brainchip is in a much better position now than they were in 2019 and 2020. That's progress and progress is good enough for me.
Do your own research. Do not take my words as investment advice. And thanks for reading.
Regards, dippY