Jeremy Frommer
Founder, CEO, CFO & Executive Chairman
Thanks, everybody, for being here. I’m just going to take a few minutes, and then I’m going to pretty much turn it over to you guys. Your questions are worth a lot more than my monologue. My career began at a firm called Kidder, Peabody in 1990. I sat on what was called a distressed debt desk. Drexel Burnham, which is where a guy named Michael Milken had created the junk bond industry now called the high-yield bond industry. Drexel had just gone up in flames. And the savings and loan institutions that were built out of the ’80s, they were on fire. And everyone I knew thought the market was ending. It wasn’t really ending. It was clearing.
The wreckage of that era became them raw material over the next 30 years. You had firms like Salomon Brothers and Kidder, Peabody give way to Citadel and Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater. And every one of those firms, they were born in distressed environments. They were built by people who understood that a debacle of value isn’t necessarily a graveyard. For some people, it’s inventory and that’s kind of where the micro cap space is right now.
There’s thousands of subscale public companies real operators, tracked inside broken cap structures, the shells and zombies and dilution machines sitting shoulder to shoulder with good businesses. And nobody can really see through that noise. The space doesn’t need more commentary, it actually needs filters. It needs fixers. It needs people who are willing to kind of do the slow ugly work of consolidation, balance sheet to vendor contracts, transaction by transaction