$POETF $POET CC Transcript 2: Vivek Rajgarhia Excited

$POETF $POET CC Transcript 2: Vivek Rajgarhia

Excited to have Vivek aboard and looking forward to seeing what he can accomplish in tandem with Suresh and the team.



10:35 Suresh: And with that I want to transition to the other significant announcement we made this past week, the appointment of Vivek Rajgarhia as president and general manager of POET Technologies. He’s a highly accomplished thirty-year veteran of the optical communications industry, including previously having founded two different optical companies. I will let Vivek speak in more detail about his background in a moment, but I will say he brings with him an enormous amount of credibility as well as extensive relationships throughout the industry. We have known each other and stayed in casual contact over a number of years and I’m very pleased he accepted the opportunity to join POET’s team. Given my background in semiconductor and process technology and Vivek’s history in the optical industry, we contribute a unique combination of strategic, technical, and operational execution expertise in both photonics and semiconductors. As a result, I believe POET will benefit from a further refined go-to-market strategy and expanded strategic customer engagements that will ultimately drive accelerated commercialization and adoption of our interposer platform solutions. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Vivek to discuss his background and decision to join the company, as well as his perspective on the current state of the optical industry and the substantial opportunities for POET’s optical interposer platform. Vivek…



12:09 Vivek Rajgarhia: Thank you Suresh for the kind introduction and good morning to those on the call. It’s my pleasure to be here and have the opportunity to speak with you today. Let me first say, I’m equally excited about joining POET and this new role helping to drive the company’s ongoing efforts to fundamentally change how most of my peers currently think about the optical industry. To help put my subsequent remarks in context, I’ll start a brief overview of my background. Most recently, I was Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Lightwave Business Unit of MACOM. The original “?” was an acquisition in 2011 of Optomai, which I co-founded and which was focused on high-performance opto-electronic ICs, with a product portfolio that included modulated drivers and transimpedance amplifiers. This acquisition served as MACOM’s initial entry into the optical market, after which I helped to identify and lead a series of strategic and complimentary acquisitions by MACOM in the optical space that eventually became the Lightwave Business Unit. Prior to Optomai and MACOM, I served in senior management roles at a number of innovative companies in the optical space. This included leading sales and marketing in Asia for the opto-electronic components for what, at the time, was Lucent Technologies—now Nokia—as well as adding global product marketing and business development for OpNext, which was a spin-off of Hitachi’s Fiber Optics Division. I also had product marketing and global sales positions at JDS Uniphase—now Lumentum—and GigOptix.



14:20 Now to bring the discussion back to today. Following the public announcement of my appointment one week ago, there has been one recurring question that I’ve received most from peers and prior colleagues: Why POET? And because I think the answer to this question could be insightful to those participating today in this call, I want to briefly share a few of the motivating factors behind my decision to join POET. First, it’s important to know I’m an entrepreneur by nature and have a history of building businesses from the ground up. So after multiple discussions with Suresh about a potential role at the company, I became increasingly convinced that POET represented a unique opportunity to change the optical industry. Following the divestiture of DenseLight the company could still be considered early-stage in terms of achieving full commercialization and revenue yet, at the same time, it has several huge advantages compared to most early-stage opportunities. The company is in the final validation phase of commercializing a new technology platform. POET has, and is actively working with, a lead tier-one strategic networking customer. The technology is poised to be highly disruptive in the data-center and 5G markets. It’s providing a wafer-level integration platform (that’s?) a game-changer and expandable to other applications such as IoT and LIDAR. And: strength and expertise of the existing team. These advantages, as well as being a part of the ground-floor team, with line-of-sight to fully commercializing and bringing truly disruptive technology to market was too compelling of an opportunity to pass up.



16:40 Now to describe what Suresh and I believe to be the strategic growth objectives for the company. Firstly, commercializing the platform and cultivating additional strategic tier-1 customers. Developing new optical devices and creating a menu of functional components. Finally, extending the market and customer base beyond the data-center to adjacent applications and markets. In my several years of dealing with the hyper-scale cloud customers, and the leading optical networking equipment vendors, it is clear to me that they are looking for a true integration platform that can provide them the viable cost and scale comparable to the semiconductor supply-chain, and being able to bring next-generation technology to commercialization in a rapid and cost-effective manner. The current supply-chain challenge is evidenced from the industry’s delay in the ramp for 400G, where cost and complexity are the impending challenges. With 800G and co-packaged optics this exacerbates these challenges. POET’s interposer platform is a solution to both cost and scale, and provides the ideal platform for the integration of these next-generation technologies required for the data-center. Completion of the final platform building-block deliverables, that Suresh referred to, will open expanded engagements opportunities with leading hyper-scale cloud and system customers, ultimately resulting in design wins and future revenue growth for POET. I am excited for the opportunities that lie ahead of us and I’m looking forward to creating significant value for all POET shareholders. That completes our prepared remarks.

thanks to ITTR on agoracom for this work
https://agoracom.com/ir/POETTechnologies/foru...63#message