The following week I met with Al, Dean Barnes and Mike Shaw and explained the situation. I asked them to work together to move the company forward. I told them with what energy I had I was going to focus on closing the Venture Capital funding. Al was Vice President of Engineering already but to reduce my workload I promoted him to Vice President of Technology which included Engineering, Product Support, and Marketing.
During this period I immersed myself in learning about my condition, and found out that there was a lot that had been discovered in the last few years, but a lot of unanswered questions. One thing I figured out right away was that the initial treatments with prednisone I received were exactly the wrong thing to do, but were extremely common. The medical community was very slow to move to new treatments and discard old ones, even after they were proven to be wrong, ineffective, or even harmful if at one time they were considered the “gold standard” in treatment.