Some of you might remember Foldera (FDRA).  The company enjoyed a brief moment of prominence and seemed poised to be a Web 2.0 darling that was breaking the rules and suceeding brilliantly.  So charmed was the company that at one point they could even boast that the “Don of Web 2.0″ Michael Arrington was on their board of directors. (Disclosure: I was the SVP of Business Development and Chief Mobility Officer for Foldera from Jan 2006 to July 2007)

Alas, twas not to be.  The combination of an audacious goal, a talented but immature senior engineer who had never shipped a product, overblown promises and slipping deadline after deadline turned the company from darling to deadpool candidate in less than a year.

Over the past 12 months the company has been languishing with a $0.02 to $0.03 stock price, no sales, no product to sell, no real deals in the pipeline and what seemed to be little in the way of any prospects.  All this has apparently changed with a completely surprising letter to the shareholders that the company released yesterday.

It looks as if the company is mainly just providing a shell for an entirely new organization.  CEO Hugh Dunkerely – now being referred to as Interim CEO, although when they announced his promotion to CEO a few months ago the word “Interim” was conspicuously absent from the press releases – has stepped down and slid back into his prior  role  as SVP of Investor Relations.

It appears that Reid Dabney, Foldera’s CFO will retain his position in the new entity leading me to believe that he had some significant role in this new deal.

Aside from those two familiar faces – everything else about the reconstituted organization looks piosed to change.  No longer about collaboration and organization software, the company will now be the developer of software and hardware for the carrier class 10 Gigabit switch market.

Along with the new management team and new direction the company is adopting a new name; CeCors, an acronym for Carrier Ethernet Core Switch and pronounced ‘SeaCores.’ This will become effective in the coming weeks as the Company’s legal name, registrations, trading symbol and marketing materials are changed.

Another change looks to be the capitalization structure of the company.  According to the letter they say they sent, the company intends to do a 10 for 1 reverse split of the stock which could have very significant repercussions for those people that purchased stock when the share price was several dollars as well as for those employees now sitting on fully vested options that have been left un-exercised because they have been worth less than the strike price established to exercise them.

At present I’m not sure what to make of this information.  There are a lot of unanswered questions that I’m sure are shared by the hundreds – perhaps thousands of shareholders that were left holding the bag when the brokerage firm that underwrote this security, Brookstreet Securities abruptly folded do to unregulated trading of CMO’s in mid 2007.

There are certainly a lot of hard feelings among the investors that feel that they were screwed by  Brookstreet and in particular by Neal Dabney and Steve Kerr, two savvy Wall Street raiders that managed to bank tens of millions apiece while allowing the people that made that possible- both the early investors and the employees of the original Foldera to take it in the shorts while they sold the stock right out from under us.

It is my  understanding that there is already a class action lawsuit that has been filed against Brookstreet although I don’t know at this time if Dabney or Kerr (Not sure of the spelling; please correct me if you know it) have been named in this suit or in which court it has been filed.

It is interesting as well that this leader was released via PR  Newswire before it had even reached the shareholders whose money has been paying the salaries of Reid and Hugh for more than two years now.  You’d think that such a major change in direction – particularly when accompanied by a complete management change and a ten for one reverse stock split is the sort of thing that the shareholders deserve to hear about directly rather than from a Google alert turning up the “Letter to the Shareholders” on Yahoo Finance.  Classy guys.  Off to a great start.  Are you going to write to those of us holding worthless options to explain our rights given this turn of events or has that somehow slipped off the radar too?
What a costly and frustrating experience. One I am sure is shared by more of you than I even want to think about.  For what it’s worth, while I was AT Foldera I did my best to make something happen but it is awfully tough to generate deals that produce any revenue when you never have a product that is ready for sale.

And, as Forrest Gump says; “that’s all I have to say about that”.