I decided a few days ago it was best I kept my mouth shut about Mindstream. It seems like the more I say is the more some people like to twist it into ammunition to go after them. I have had several conversations with one of the employees before and after the silence started two plus weeks ago.
Most of it was confidential so I am not going discuss any of that with anybody. The only reason he talked to me was that he could see I was also from the industry and was not judgmental because I understood the problems a startup goes through. There are other people on this forum who know more than I do, but they have been silent which is probably what I should have done at the start. Instead I felt that offering some communication of the bits I could talk about would ease peoples anxiety.
I can tell you that what one person on here said about water testing companies going after them is absolutely true. I had heard that from the same employee before the long silence. He said they had been under constant attack by certain companies who saw the MS as a major long term threat to their business. I can also say that all the Blame people are heaping on the CEO and Employees of Mindstream is completely misplaced. All of the people who work for the company have been trying their hardest to fulfill the promises made. The main problem I am told was that when you have something that was viewed skeptically for years and thought to be a loss by nervous investors and is then launched and on the day of the launch it brings in a couple of thousand orders, suddenly people start to see dollar signs and chaos soon develops amongst the Titans.
The last communication I got was that something wonderful was probably going to be announce last week Tuesday. They stated that it was not a done deal and it could fall apart and if so it would need to be started again.
I have had former colleagues of mine who left secure jobs at our company and went to work for startup companies. Many of them ended up in this same kind of position and I know one of the root causes is that there is a sickness among a small group of people on social media who all seem to rooting for failure and feel personal satisfaction in seeing something other people built get burned to the ground just so they can say they were right!
I am not into that kind of thinking as I have known people who worked for these startups I know how devastated they get when people like us make our little jokes and they in turn loose their jobs and have an uncertain futures going forward. Like so many of you on this forum I have just stayed on point and tried to be only critical of their lack of communication and tried to give them time to work this out.
I am only making this post because I have seen how these kinds of caustic threads will typically kill everything in there path. My feeling is that any deal or ideas that have come up to solve the problems are most likely going to be gutted due to the damage done to the products reputation. Even though I would personally stick it out if something positive was announced, I have become doubtful it will.
I am not saying that MS is blameless in all of this. I am saying that the people who actually did the work and ran the company can only do what they are allowed to do by those people holding the strings. So given all of this I thought that the Ethical thing to do is come out and say to you guys that I am personally getting out of this one on Monday. It will truly suck if something changes and I have to join the back of the line but my gut feeling based on my last conversation is that things did not go as planned.
I am truly saddened by this. Not only for all the staff at SAI who put seven years of their lives into this but I am also sad to see one of the most innovative and useful products that I have seen released in my 35 years of reef keeping probably get boxed away for years before someone is able to get the patents and then resurrect it again. Yes we will have reagent and probe systems with pumps and calibration fluids etc. but the concept of just clicking in one disk every month and your done, was IMO the perfect solution.
Unlike some other buyers I had no illusions that the first, second or even third version of the disks would be perfect. I did know that if they just got a proper start and had some reasonable success they would have nailed the problem in a matter of months. I can tell you that they did have a few tanks that behaved like
@OLDREEFER44 and they identified the problem and had a solution that was being tested with very promising results just before things started to go to hell.
