Former Miasolé Employees Confirm Cuts

Pearce’s outing has been a long time coming. He probably burned through the last $50 million and still wasn’t able to bring out any commercial product. Miasole has failed to bring any substantial product to market, and now the company’s had to fire a bunch of employees. This is the reason Pearce was demoted a couple of months ago. Now that Miasole can no longer deny their production problems to their investors, Pearce is the albatross that needed to get tossed out.

They probably didn’t burn through the whole $50 million. That type of financing is usually done in stages and only a fraction of it is available until certain milestones are met to release the next chunk. My guess is that he burned through about $5-15 million and then had nothing to show for it.

Miasole must have burned well over $15 million just on their “production” sputtering machine that looked like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and couldn’t turn out cell material any better than 4% conversion efficiency.  With the pilot line and other spending, they certainly must have burned well over $40-45 million before bringing in the new ceo.  Kleiner always seems to fall for the strangest approaches to materials intensive “component” plays.  Iolon was a great example back in the ‘99 time frame - another bunch of ex hard drive guys who were going to revolutionize the tunable laser business, which was (and still is) based on quaternary III-V materials that require great MOCVD control.  Miasole’s sputtering approach for CIGS (another quaternary) was known long ago to be doomed by all the materials guys I know - you can’t control the deposited layer composition well enough…

Semi