Good analogy. I am still pessimistic that it will

Good analogy. I am still pessimistic that it will take a little longer than expected though, but that is only based on my experiences with humans. By that I mean we all have priorities and those priorities dictate our senses of urgency. While I believe that a partnership and cutting a check for a large sum of money is going to be viewed as important and priority for the people directly involved at the unnamed pharma company, it may not be as high on the priorities list of every one of the middle and upper level execs who also need to sign off on it. They are a global pharma with, I assume, many irons in the fire at once. I dont think something like this purposefully gets ignored or delayed for final signatures (once all the pertinent criteria are all met) but we also must factor in the priorities of each person who needs to sign off. If it is just another task to do, then I can see sign-offs being put into the standard work queue and those folks get to it when they get to it. This may take days or if vacations happen, personal life interruptions happen, new more important assignments are given, market changes effecting business happen, then the sign-off may take weeks. Plus what kind of protocol do they follow? Is it a sign-off done in series of rank and position in the company or do they do groupings of parallel approvals to expedite the process? All things we dont know.

I am not trying to be negative or cast doubt on our pending partnership, I am just trying to continue to temper my expectations on how fast things are going to happen. Humans are a pesky lot and hard to predict; therefore, I am going to assume the worst case timing of more months to go and hope for a pleasant surprise PR one morning in the coming weeks of partnership announcement. We will get there, it just requires that hardened level of patience we longs have had to develop over the last ~6-7+ years.

Either way, in the long run this is still an investment of a lifetime and I am glad I was lucky enough to stumble on it.