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SuRo Capital Corp. 6.00% Notes due 2026 (SSSSL)

Q2 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 7, 2013

$25.05

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the GSV Capital’s Q2 2013 Earnings Call. (Operator instructions.) This conference is being recorded today, August 7, 2013. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Kristen McNally, Financial Profiles. Please go ahead.

Kristen McNally

Management

Thank you. Thank you for joining us for today’s call. I’m joined today by Michael Moe, GSV’s Founder and CEO; Steve Bard, the company’s Chief Financial Officer; and Dave Crowder, Executive Vice President. Please note that a slide presentation that corresponds to today’s prepared remarks by management is available on the company’s website at www.gsvcap.com under Investors, Events & Presentations. Today’s call is being recorded and webcast on www.gsvcap.com. Replay information is included in our press release that was issued today. This call is the property of GSV Capital Corp and the unauthorized rebroadcast of this call in any form is strictly prohibited. I’d also like to call your attention to customary disclosure in our press release today regarding forward-looking information. Statements made in today’s conference call and webcast may constitute forward-looking statements which relate to future events or future performance or financial condition. These statements are not guarantees of our future performance, condition or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statement as a result of a number of factors including those described from time to time in the company’s filings with the SEC. Management does not undertake to update such forward-looking statements unless required to do so by law. To obtain copies of GSV Capital’s latest SEC filings please visit the website at www.gsvcap.com. Now I would like to turn the call over to Michael Moe. Michael?

Michael Moe

Management

Thanks, Kristen, and good afternoon. I’m going to begin today with a review of our portfolio as of June 30, 2013, and recent key developments at some of our companies. Then Steve Bard will provide a brief financial overview and we’ll take your questions. Our remarks will follow the slide presentation available on the Investors section of our website at www.gsvcap.com. Let’s start with Slide 3. Net assets totaled $248.6 million or $12.87 per share as of June 30, 2013. This is up $0.18 per share from our NAV of $12.69 per common share at the end of Q1. Our top ten investments represented 62.9% of net asset value and the three top investments represented 30.5% of net asset value as of June 30. Twitter remains our largest position by a wide margin, representing 15% of the portfolio. Given the strong fundamentals of the social mobile market and the fact that Twitter is a native mobile company we feel very confident in the value that is being created in this position. We’ll have more to say on that in a little bit. As a whole, the hyper growth characteristics of our portfolio are one of the most attractive features of GSV Capital. Our estimate is of our top ten positions, seven are growing year-over-year from 2012 to 2013 at 100% or greater. Elsewhere in the portfolio, companies like Dataminr, CorpU, and NestGSV all successfully closed up rounds during Q2. Additionally Grockit sold its test prep technology to Kaplan, which by the way used to be called Kaplan which was part of The Washington Post, now it’s The Washington Post which is Kaplan. But that aside, what we’re excited about that is it’s providing additional capital to fuel Grockit’s new Learnist business which is experiencing tremendous growth – think Pinterest for…

Steve Bard

Management

Thank you, Michael. Now I’d like to direct everybody’s attention to Slide 11. As Michael indicated, net assets as of June 30, 2013, were $248.6 million. That included $4.6 million of cash, $8.7 million of Facebook stock, and $2.4 million of Silver Spring Networks stock which by the way is under lockup through September 8th. Again, Facebook and Silver Spring are two stocks that have moved up meaningfully since June 30th, but as Michael mentioned we’re of course holding them on our books based upon where they closed out the quarter. Our net assets of $248.6 million on June 30th translates to a net asset value per share of $12.87. That represents an increase of $3.5 million or $0.18 per share over the quarter ended March 31st. Now let’s look at the attribution of that increase in NAV during the quarter. First, operating expenses or net investment loss was $2.4 million or $0.12 per share. That figure includes management fees, administrative fees, director fees, legal, audit fees, as well as insurance and investor relations expenses. On an annualized basis that trend equates to an expense ratio of 3.9% of net asset value and it compares to a 4.2% expense ratio for the quarter ended March 31st. We’re pleased with the downward trend in our expense ratio and 3.9% happens to equal the average expense ratio for the universe of 42 business development companies researched by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. That said, we don’t want to be average. We want to be better than average and expenses will continue to be an area of focus for us. Next let’s turn our attention to our realized losses of $6.3 million or $0.33 per share. As you may recall we’ve been holding our investments in Serious Energy and Top Hat at zero. This quarter unfortunately we’ve also written off our $1.4 million investment in AltEgo. Since we believe that these impairments to our investments are permanent we are now realizing those losses. Finally and on a more upbeat note, the third component of our asset value is the net change in unrealized depreciation which increased by $12.2 million or $0.63 per share this quarter. As Michael mentioned, the largest contributors to that increase in unrealized depreciation were Twitter, Palantir and Dataminr where we concluded markups as of June 30th. In conclusion, when we combine operating expenses, realized losses and unrealized appreciation GSVC has experienced an increase in net asset value per share of $0.18, taking NAV to $12.87 per share for the quarter ended June 30th. And with that I’ll turn it back to you, Michael.

Michael Moe

Management

Great. Again, we just want to reiterate that one, we appreciate your interest in GSVC. We do believe that we’re in front of something that is very powerful and we think has tremendous potential for our shareholders by investing in the fastest growing, most dynamic public companies in the world. That’s our focus, that’s our objective. We work very hard at identifying and investing in those companies at a good price and we will continue to focus on how we can deliver shareholder value. Just to give an update, one of the things that we promised our shareholders the last few quarters is that we were going to turn up the volume in terms of letting people know what was underneath the hood in terms of the investments that we’re making. We’ve had a number of good meetings with investors as well as presented at some conferences, and having good conversations with analysts that have an interest in GSV Capital’s story. We will be presenting next week on Tuesday at Oppenheimer’s 16th Annual Technology, Internet and Communications Conference in Boston. You can tune into our presentation via webcast on our website. While you’re there you can also check out the news feed for portfolio companies for the latest coverage of corporate announcements. We’re going to be also gearing up to provide more video content, more information to allow our shareholders to have better input, better insight in terms of our portfolio to allow them to have appreciation for what the fundamentals and dynamics of the portfolio are. So with that I want to again thank you for your attention. I’ll turn it over to the Operator and we can start our question-and-answer session. Operator?

Operator

Operator

Thank you, sir. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator instructions.) And our first question comes from the line of Jon Hickman with Ladenburg. Please go ahead. Jon Hickman – Ladenburg Thalmann: Hi Mike, Steve. Thanks for taking my questions. Could you, Steve, talk to me a little bit about you were holding those assets you mentioned at zero already, and then you’re not double booking the loss, are you? I mean you’d already taken an unrealized loss.

Steve Bard

Management

No. The three positions which we realized losses on this quarter, two of them had been held on the books at zero – Serious and Top Hat – and we are simply realizing those losses, so converting those from unrealized losses to realized losses. And then we did write off Alt Ego during the quarter. Jon Hickman – Ladenburg Thalmann: So when you change it from an unrealized loss to a realized loss, I mean you’d already taken a… I mean isn’t there a line for unrealized losses here on your income statement?

Steve Bard

Management

There is. We actually have a net realized deprecation but we did convert. Last quarter those had been held on the books as unrealized losses and we converted those to realized losses as of June 30th. Jon Hickman – Ladenburg Thalmann: But it’s not a double.

Steve Bard

Management

It’s not a double booking if that’s what you’re asking. Jon Hickman – Ladenburg Thalmann: Okay. So my real question is now that you have the potential here in the next little while of actually realizing, booking some gains if you choose to do so, what’s your strategy or what’s your thought process on paying out gains to the shareholders?

Michael Moe

Management

What are commitment is is to pay out 90% of the gains offset against the losses, and that’s what we’ve committed to do – that’s what we’ve articulated we would do. And you know, again what we’re excited about frankly is, as everybody who knows about private investing, the lemons ripen faster. And what we’re looking at is a portfolio that is evolving in a way that we think will produce very nice distributions here over the next twelve to 18 months for sure. And that’s good. That’s a good thing and what’s nice about this is we’ve got kind of it’s not just something all at once – we’ve got just a nice backlog of companies that we project depending on the markets staying open and so forth that we’re going to have a series of what we think will be good events here for kind of a nice [drumbeat]. Jon Hickman – Ladenburg Thalmann: So as you book gains you’re going to net those against your losses, and then whatever’s left over you’ll pay out 90%.

Michael Moe

Management

Correct. Jon Hickman – Ladenburg Thalmann: Okay. So Steve, can you tell us what the total net loss is right now?

Steve Bard

Management

Sure. The net realized losses cumulative are $9.7 million. Jon Hickman – Ladenburg Thalmann: So that’s the hurdle?

Steve Bard

Management

That’s correct.

Michael Moe

Management

Just to give you a reference point, and again because I do think it’s important. So if you look at our Control4 position, and again, we’ll be under lockup for six months. We own that at about a $7 million total investment. Today that position trading over $21 is worth over $16 million. So basically that by itself kind of gets you there.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Larry Deraney with Raymond James. Please go ahead. Larry Deraney – Raymond James: Hey Michael. I’ve got a four-part question but it’s real simple things you can address. Cash on hand, $4 million – it seems a little low. Does that alarm you going forward? You’ve put together a beautiful portfolio and I wanted to ask you about Facebook, if you still own all the shares as of today and will it be added to the S&P 500? Is it eligible? You would think at $70 billion it would be. Twitter, worth about $10 billion and Facebook $70 billion – it seems like that would be a bigger markup for Twitter. And the final question is, is Palantir similar to Sourcefire in the cyber security area? Thanks, Michael.

Michael Moe

Management

Thanks, Larry. All good questions so let me kind of address them one-by-one. In terms of the cash on hand we made a conscious decision, both looking at what our cash needs were as well as what we saw as liquidity for us both in terms of publicly traded securities that we own, future realizations – because as we said, we see a pretty big backlog of companies that we believe will be public and liquid here in the not-so-distant future. And looking at other sources of liquidity for us we felt like what kind of prompted us to take it to a position that is lower than what we’ve kind of used as a benchmark was the opportunity to invest in Coursera. We made a very calculated decision that said we thought our shareholders would be far better off with us taking our cash position to something that is fine but lower than we’ve had historically because we think there’s such gigantic potential in Coursera. And we felt like making that $10 million investment, it wasn’t even much of a debate just because of what we think this can do for our shareholders. The one thing that people should have an appreciation for, just because it’s important, is as we look at sources of capital for us, cash for us – we will not be issuing equity. We will not be doing an equity offering even at current share prices. The stock has had a nice move recently but it’s still at in our view a pretty significant discount both NAV and then you add some other things that we discussed on this call. We’re not interested in that at all. We’re looking to do smart things that are accretive for our shareholders, and just to be very clear…

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Edward Woo of Ascendiant Capital. Please go ahead. Edward Woo – Ascendiant Capital: Yeah, thank you. You mentioned that the IPO market is relatively strong right now. Do you see that continuing and do you think that that’s going to accelerate potential IPOs or liquidity events for your portfolio companies?

Michael Moe

Management

Thanks, Edward. Yeah, as we referenced in our remarks, just looking at the filings – it’s up significantly year-over-year. And what we’ve historically seen, and there’s a bunch of factors at work here but the greatest leading indicator of future IPOs is how is the overall market doing and specifically how’s NASDAQ doing? And so typically what you see is as private company executives, as venture capitalists are kind of evaluating whether it makes sense to go out in the market or not they look and see what’s the overall health of the market and what other companies are going out and doing. And what they’re seeing, and which we should have probably got more specific – when you look at generally speaking the companies that are coming out, they’re pricing well and they’re trading well. Obviously NASDAQ’s up 21% year-to-date. Moreover I think growth investors, people that are investing in fast-growing emerging companies, many that I speak to are even having a better year than that. And so that’s all kind of an environment that encourages private companies to go out. That, coupled with the fact that you really have had a very modest IPO environment for a number of years – that creates a pretty substantial backlog. And so with this quiet filing you don’t see all the activity that’s going on, but I think what you will see here over the next six to twelve months is some really exciting companies coming public. We’re really fortunate to own a number of them. The Barron’s article over the weekend was accurate or was yeah, I think was a kind of good prospectus in terms of what’s going on, what that’s likely to lead to. We were lucky that it confirmed a little bit, they referenced a number of our companies, some that we didn’t talk about on this call like SugarCRM. So yes, I think that is something that’s going to be what happens and that should be beneficial for us. So what happens, I mean the pendulum is definitely swinging the right way and what historically happens is when it gets carried too far something will happen and will carry it back. But right now for the foreseeable future I think you see the pendulum going the right way. Thank you, Edward. Edward Woo – Ascendiant Capital: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

(Operator instructions.) And I’m showing no further questions at this time. Please continue with any closing remarks.