Marc Indeglia Interviewed at the Microcap Conference in Atlantic City
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Microcap Conference coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Marc Indeglia, Co Chair of Corporate Dept. at Glaser Weil, Fink, Howard, Jordan & Shapiro LLP, explore the Microcap Conference.
About Marc Indeglia
For 25 years, Marc Indeglia has provided personalized counsel, representation, and advice rooted in a principled approach designed to give each client the individualized attention needed to achieve results. His private practice experience focuses on business, corporate, and securities law, and he has represented individuals, public and private companies, and a variety of financial institutions, including broker-dealers, investment banks, venture capitalists, private equity funds, and hedge funds. In the financial transactions area, he has represented parties in private placements, venture capital financings, public offerings, APOs, PIPEs, lines of credit, term loans, and other secured financings. In addition, he has negotiated M&A transactions such as mergers, acquisitions, reverse mergers, divestitures, spinoffs, reorganizations, and recapitalizations. He routinely advises clients regarding corporate governance, SEC reporting compliance, executive compensation, fiduciary obligations, ethics, and general corporate matters.
About Glaser Weil, Fink, Howard, Jordan & Shapiro LLP
Glaser Weil is a premier law firm headquartered in Los Angeles with outstanding experience and market-leading successes in litigation, corporate, intellectual property and real estate matters. We represent both corporations and individuals in their most significant cases and most transformative deals. Our approach is uniquely effective.
Watch Full Interview:
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I’m , in Atlantic city, New Jersey is my first time here.
And let me tell you, it’s been a lot of fun. I’m at the micro cap conference specifically, and we cover this conference for the last couple of years remotely, and this is the first time I’m here in person. And let me tell you the energy in this place, the amount of companies, the crowd, the networking, the people.
Party last night, I mean, next level. And I was able to snag one of the speakers who is actually going to be speaking tomorrow. Mark. So Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. All right, Mark. So I’ll tell you, this is my first time. As you just heard I’m in person at, at one of these micro cap conferences.
Have you been to this conference in the past? Or is this your, I have not been to the micro cap conference. This is my first time. Another newbie. So what your impression, first impression. Oh, I think there’s, I agree with you. There’s great energy here. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of companies. There’s a lot of investors and there’s a lot of people who are in the industry and in the community who have come here to, you know, promote their companies, promote their ideas and their products.
And I think it’s great. I think it’s, it’s the right time for, for a lot of people to be here. I understand this. Folks who were here last year, they said that the crowd growth is pretty impressive for year over year. And so I think that that’s a good community, right? Like, I feel it’s almost like a community of people that are like, you know, it really hard to say that, but it is, I considered a community.
I mean, I’ve been doing this for, you know, close to 30 years now. And I know a lot of the folks in this room from prior transactions. I’ve represented some of them. I still represent some of them. And, you know, I’ve worked with many of them across all the different platforms. And so it’s good to see a lot of new faces and familiar faces.
And it’s good to hear people talking about the industry in the space. You know, the micro cap community and the micro cap business is a huge driver of, you know, the economy. There’s a large number of companies that. You know, they’re smaller in size, but they provide jobs and technology growth and, valuable industry pieces.
So it’s great to see. It’s great to see. I was at a conference, a similar conference a few months back which was more focused on, on pipes. It was the pipes conference also a deal. I was at pipes. I was at pipes, man. That was awesome. You know, the hard rock cafe and casino in Hollywood, Florida, it took me a couple of took me a couple of tries from to get that one.
I remember when I was doing it. That’s right. That’s right. The hard rock. It was yeah. That was a great event as well. And I think you’re starting to see a big comeback in the community in terms of you know, a number of transactions that are happening types of companies that are going in and seeing a lot of quality companies with a lot of really great ideas, great products, great management teams.
Yeah. So I want to, I know the panel hasn’t happened yet, or the speaking tomorrow that you’re going to do, but can you maybe say high level? What are some of the ideas that you’re going to be talking about? Sure. So our panel is going to be focused on methodologies for capital formation and the regulatory and exchange requirements.
My panel is going to have representatives from the New York Stock Exchange, from OTC markets from the Canadian Securities Exchange. And we’re going to talk about what are the barriers to capital formation for companies that are, you know, in the microcap space, which are. You know, depending on how you define it, anywhere from a billion dollar market cap and under some people have it at 250 million and under, you know, we’ve heard some people talk about companies that are in the, you know, tens of millions in terms of market cap.
So smaller public companies that don’t get the type of media coverage that you normally see with the large cap, big, you know, Fang type companies. So. We’ll be focused on, various paths for companies to go public and mostly to access capital, access capital once in the public markets or through the public markets.
And we’ll be talking about a lot of the hurdles that face the industry that are unique to the microcap community in certain ways. Microcap community has been singled out by the regulators and treated as a, you know, almost a different class of company than a small cap, a mid cap, a large cap.
And, you know, we’ll be talking about how that different classification, put it, I’m sure we’ll be talking about whether or not that’s appropriate whereas. But we’ll also be talking about, well, how do you navigate that, you know, there is sort of what is and what should be, and we’ll talk about both of those.
Talk about, speaking of what is and what should be, we had a lot of, speculation around this. We, nobody knows, and by the way, for everybody watching this at home, we’re recording this in January, almost February 2025. I like to always put that timestamp just in case. But. You know, new administration, new things, possibly lightening up, maybe, maybe not in this space.
Like any comments on that in general? Oh, sure. I think, we talk about pendulum swings when it comes to the political arena, and cultural swings back and forth. And, and I think generally speaking, people view the election and the new Trump administration as a, a swing to the right that.
in recent days have been pretty drastic. There’s been a lot of headlines since the inauguration on a daily basis. A lot of the events that have occurred, you know, yesterday, the day before they froze all the federal funding which caused a panic. And so you’re seeing sort of a drastic aggressive maneuvering by this administration very, very early on with respect to capital markets.
I think. We’re going to see something similar. The outgoing commissioner, Gary Gensler was the pendulum is typically between investor protection on one side and capital formation on the other. Whereas when you’re very in investor protection, you’re putting up more and more barriers to capital formation under the auspices that you’re protecting investors from harm or fraud.
And I think there’s a fundamental debate about how true that is, but. Putting that aside, the reality is that during the Gensler administration, they proposed a large number of regulations and proposed rules, many of which were adopted that really did make it more difficult to access capital in the microcap space.
I think you’re going to see a very big shift away from that. the existing commissioners that are, that have been on the commission that will stay on have been. outspoken in their opposition to Gensler’s mission. And the incoming nominee Paul Atkins is a former commissioner from the George W.
Bush era and under Chairman Cox. And he is generally known to be much more capital friendly. So I think, and there’s a uniqueness in the, some of the turnover that’s occurred that. The commission is going to be instead of normally five people, it looks like it’s going to be three people and they’re all going to be Republican appointees.
So they’re going to have a period of window where they completely control what’s going on at the SEC, which of course is the main regulator of capital markets and securities exchanges. So. I do think you’ll see a big, a big fundamental shift. What that means in terms of specifics, we don’t know yet. Mr.
Atkins has not yet been confirmed. It’s going to be a few weeks before he gets his turn at the table with all of the new appointments that are coming in. So, but we do, I think most, most people in the room and in the industry feel that there is going to be an opportunity to provide better guidance for the micro cap community in terms of what, is and what isn’t appropriate in terms of how you can raise capital and how you can go public and what Requirements you need to meet in order to do that.
Can you talk a little bit about just your work in general and what you do at your firm? Sure. So I am the co chair of the corporate Weil, which is a full service law firm based in Los Angeles. We have offices throughout California. And our practice focuses on fundamental corporate transactional work, capital markets, mergers and acquisitions.
And you know, Fund formation those are those are the primary areas. So we represent issuers companies looking to raise capital We represent investors. We represent brokerage firms. Yeah And, you know, we provide them with, you know, what we think is a very high level of sophisticated legal advice and representation.
Earlier in this conversation, you mentioned, we talked about this conference in the, in the community you’ve been around, you know, in this industry, 30 plus years, I believe you said, we talked about the community concept. Now you are president of an organization, the. Small public company coalition. Talk to me about, talk to me about that organization.
Sure. So the small public company coalition is a registered 501 C six trade organization that advocates with the government for change, for ideas of capital formation in the small public company community. We’re an advocate for. The community itself, which includes addressing rules that are proposed by the SEC and providing our feedback as an organization on behalf of the community as to whether we agree or disagree or propose changes that we would make to the proposed rule.
We file what they call amicus briefs or amicus briefs in court cases involving federal securities laws relating to. You know issues that affect the microcap community and the small public company community There’s been a chain of enforcement actions that we followed very closely and have advocated against And filed briefs in support of the industry and are actually argued before the courts in that regard.
We lobby so we’ve had we developed a relationship with with lobby groups and had conversations and meetings and proposals with members of the Financial Services Committee, House Financial Services Committee, the Senate Banking Committee, a number of representatives and senators and also with some of the commissioners directly.
Yeah. Who’s a good fit to be a part of a community there? Like, is it a small public company? Yes. But like, what do you find is normally the right type of member? So, or if you call them members, do they call members? We, yeah, we call, that’s right, that’s right. So we have members who are Our membership kind of falls into four categories issuers themselves, companies, small public companies.
We believe that we are representative of their needs that are specific to the small public company community relating to characterizations as, you know, penny stocks or micro cap companies. And what that means. In terms of being able to raise capital at the different market levels, whether they’re New York Stock Exchange companies or NASDAQ companies or OTC companies.
So that’s one category are the issuers. Another category are the investors. You know, high net worth individuals, family offices hedge funds, or private investment funds who also face their. Specific set of challenges and ironically are treated differently than other investors in, in the space as compared to, the broader markets, the micro cap community has specific issues that materially impact the capital formation process.
So we try to advocate to, have fair, clear guidelines for investing and how you can set up your investment portfolio, set up your investment fund. What types of transactions, how they’re structured. Yeah. So that’s two, you said four, two more. The, the third are the bankers, the broker dealers and the bankers who are putting these deals together.
They’re obviously hugely important to the community. They make the community run. And, and so, you know, they’re another constituent. And then the fourth one are what I would call the service providers that includes the lawyers The accountants, the transfer agents the consulting groups, you know, everybody who works in this space, right?
Our organization is, it’s mission is to help the community as a whole. Advance, really capital formation while still maintaining integrity and investor protection. what we, where we find challenge and where we find that we have to advocate most. Is whether something the government or the regular regulators or the exchanges, whether what they’re doing actually provides any level of real investor protection, or are they just making it harder for small business to raise capital and to run their business?
I got to say, man, this has been great having you on the show today. Last thing I want you to do, look into the camera. If people want to follow up, learn more about your firm or about the small public company coalition how do people follow up? How do they learn more? So for our firm, you know, we are at glazier wild.
com and we have a LinkedIn presence and, and, and. You know, Xfeed and all of that but it’s www. glazerweil. com and you can find out about us and our history and, and some of the amazing things that we’ve done as a firm over the last, I think it’s now 35 years or so. And then for the Small Public Company Coalition, that’s, that’s it’s at VSPCC T H E S P C C dot com.
And you can always reach out to me at mark at the S P C C dot com, that’s M A R C. And or Emendalia at GlacianWild. com or you can find me on LinkedIn. And we can give you as much information. We’d be happy to talk to you. We’d love to, love to, love to have a conversation. Awesome. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so you can just click on the link 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 new content. new ideas, new interviews, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Mark, man, appreciate you making some time for us. Thank you so much for having me. It’s great.