Adam Torres and David Koch discuss The PIPEs Conference.
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Show Notes:
Listen to The PIPEs Conference coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews David Koch, Managing Director, Co Head of Capital Markets at Brown Gibbons Lang & Company, explore Brown Gibbons Lang & Company and The PIPEs Conference.
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About David Koch
Experienced Managing Director with a demonstrated history of working in the financial services industry for the past 23 years in both the U.S. and Europe. David Koch is skilled in Investment Banking, Equity Capital Markets, Fund Raising, Market Risk, Business Development, Client Relations, and Team Management. Bi-lingual in Italian and English. Strong professional with a Bachelor of Arts – BA with a Biology major from The Johns Hopkins University.
About Brown Gibbons Lang & Company
Brown Gibbons Lang & Company (BGL) is a leading independent investment bank and financial advisory firm focused on the global middle market. The firm advises private and public corporations and private equity groups on mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, capital markets, financial restructurings, valuations and opinions, and other strategic matters. BGL has investment banking offices in Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, and real estate offices in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Antonio. The firm is also a founding member of Global M&A Partners, enabling BGL to service clients in more than 35 countries around the world. For more information, please visit www.bglco.com.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. Today, I am at the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida at the Pipes Conference held by the DealFlow Events guys. And my guest is David Koch. David, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. All right. So David, what brings you to the conference today?
It’s a interesting conference for capital markets. I co head capital markets at my firm, BGL, and it’s interesting to hear all the different perspectives on all the changes in regulation and, you know, just growth in the market across all the different parts of deals that are being discussed today.
Have you been to a deal flow conference in the past, or is this one year for you? This is my first time attending in person, by the way, and I’m impressed. Yeah, no, I’m impressed too. It’s actually my first deal flow conference. And I’ve been to several conferences over the years, but from a deal flow perspective is my first one.
And I think they’re doing a great job. How about the casino, man? This whole, like this, I don’t know. Maybe you’ve been here before. I haven’t, I was like, what I’m driving into a big like guitar. What’s going on here? Yeah, it’s funny. I’ve driven past this place a lot and never gone in. It’s a massive property.
It’s massive. And my Uber driver, when he pulled up, he said, You’re really going to like this place. It was completely unprompted. I didn’t ask him if I was going to like it or not. You know, a lot of conferences are held in casinos. I think they’ve got great convention space. And this is a good one. It’s really nice.
It’s clean. It’s got great facilities. You know, I think they, they, they chose the right one. Awesome. So let’s get a little bit further into what you do. So in capital markets, so tell me a little bit more about you and your day to day and your firm. Yeah, sure. So I cohead our capital markets group, as I mentioned.
I’m responsible for all capital formation for companies. So the way that I run our business at BGL, we think about companies across our entire growth cycle. So we start with early stage, you know, series a type transactions and take them all the way through to the public markets and then in the public markets, how the best way to fund them, you know, maybe.
So we think about this from a holistic approach, you know, with the customer centric model, you know, don’t think that it makes sense to striate and kind of keep in certain silos, different aspects of the growth cycle. And we try to find investors that are willing to support the companies that we bank through those cycles.
Sometimes they go public, and in which case, you know, we work as you know, advisor to to take the companies public, sometimes they get sold. You know, we’re a full service investment bank, and so we look at all options, but I think what’s interesting, which what’s been happening over the last few years, you know, obviously we had this big.
SPAC boom, and then SPAC bust, but the SPACs really an interesting product because it crosses over between private and public markets. And so it gave an alternative to the IPO. This is not a new product, but the way it evolved in sort of 2018, 2019, essentially was new and much more investor friendly. And so, you know, you had this alternative.
Which was readily used and and certainly in 20, 21, it’s a good statement, readily used. And and then and then obviously when the market went south and we had the great reset you know, in 22 the SPACs fell with it. I think though the SPACs, you know, show to issuers and, and to the market and investors is that, you know, capital has really become fungible.
It’s become fungible between private markets and public markets. It’s become fungible between different structures. So whether we’re talking about a common equity structure, a convertible preferred structure, you know, structured credit, et cetera, and there’s different ways to raise capital. And so, you know, our mission is really to help companies identify what’s the right product and at the time.
That they’re looking to raise capital in order for them to sort of create the long term growth that they believe that they can, they can achieve. Yeah, I think this conference here is great for that because pipes are a product, you know, that does help companies that have already listed, obviously find larger chunks of capital when maybe their existing trading volumes just don’t allow them to do that in the more traditional ways.
You know, the pipe markets obviously become an extremely important market, but it crosses over as well, you know, and, and I think that’s the interesting part for me is to hear about all the different alternatives. And the education, just to elaborate on that a little bit. No, you’re, you’re good. The education component, when you say that, like the difference, one of the differences I saw in this particular conference was the programming.
Everybody’s in there listening and learning, like nor a lot of conferences. As you go to everybody’s in the hall. I was a little shocked in this one, rather. So the program I’m obviously doing interviews, so I don’t get to go hang out. Right. But that being said, like the program is pretty good, right? Like programming is very good.
I think, I think that this you know, this topic is very technical and, and there’s a lot of changes, a lot of requirements to be sort of available around sec requirements, et cetera. And, and so, you know, there’s always updates. What are investors doing? How do they feel about the products? You know, what are.
Crankers like, like us, you know, telling their companies what our issue is doing, you know, and then more importantly, or, or, you know, in some cases, you know, what are the changes then, you know, regulation is created that require. A company that wants to raise capital through a pipe or whatever to pivot.
And so I think, you know, that’s where you get a lot of audience attention is really okay. So, you know, there’s, there’s reg a, there’s, you know, reg B, there’s reg CF, there’s a rule one 44, there’s always all these regs that aren’t necessarily new. But they’re constantly being updated and changed and hearing, you know, you know, different case studies, experiences from different market participants, I think is, is part of the reason why this conference is interesting.
Yeah. And then you just, you just now recall my memory. Now we covered for deal flow, the reggae and SPAC conference that was last year, or was it a couple of months ago? I don’t even remember earlier this year. I don’t know. I know they have a micro cap conference coming up too. That’s going to be another, I think I might head out to that one.
There’s a lot of different things that they’re putting on. Curious about in terms of your firm. So is there any particular niche that you’re focused on versus another as an investment banker? I appreciate that. I mean, yeah, so we’re a full service investment bank. Yeah. You know, we cover all industries and sectors.
Obviously the capital markets. And, and, you know, when I, it’s important to, to note that, you know, we covered the full spectrum of the capital markets, you know, direct lending all the way through to common equity issuances, you know, so we, we don’t, we’re, we’re pretty agnostic when it comes to, when it comes to industry, you know, we’ve got about 120 bankers now.
Across the United States, we also do cross ocean transatlantic transactions, I should say. But the you know, the focus is the U. S. And the the historical footprint of the firm has really focused in the middle markets. And so that’s really where we, we excel. From a capital formation perspective, we’d like to go and broaden that out a little bit.
And think about bigger deals, bigger companies. One question I get a lot around you know, in conferences or just in general is, is, you know, the elections and how that’s impacted my business. And I would say that, you know, what we’ve seen is, you know, obviously something that’s probably not unexpected in the sense that, you know, the markets have traded up, they performed well.
Since the elections. And that’s something that usually does happen when you get the election uncertainty taken out of the equation for what that means for business. And what that means for, for prospective issuers is that the market is open. Even more people are ready to deploy capital, put, put risk to work.
And and so we’ve gotten materially busier since November 5th. So, or six, I guess, because it took a day to get through all that, all that vote counting. Yeah. Not mad at that. Well, David, Matt, first off, thank you for making some time for us. What I want you to do now is look into the camera. If people want to follow up, learn more about the firm, connect with you on LinkedIn or otherwise, how do people do it?
Absolutely. Probably the best way is to DKOCH. At bglco. com. We also have our website, Brown Gibbons Lang website. You can just look it up or reach out to me, David Koch on LinkedIn. Fantastic. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put links to the website in the show notes, so you can just click on them and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you the latest news. New content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow and David, thanks again for coming on. I appreciate it.