Today TIP's assets are over 3 billion. Great gurus of the time said it was illegal to do these things. I don't care. I'm convinced there is a terrifying bubble. How much money do you want? 3.5 million. Boom, I sent the transfer and our, I think, 14.5 million have become at least 300.
And instead the biggest regret, and now we can say it, would have been to enter into one of the biggest investors in the world. He is Roman and spent 3 billion to buy the most famous companies in Italy.
I'm talking about Giovanni Tamburi, founder and CEO of Tamburi Investment Partners, born in 1954. In 99, Giovanni left a highly paid job in investment banking to found TIP, a company that in 27 years has invested more than 3 billion in companies like Moncler, OVS, Bending Spoons and Amplifon. And from 2015 to 2025 it generated a return of 21% per year, beating even Warren Buffett.
So we at Chapo reached him in his office in Milan to discover his story and the biggest regret of his life.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I played with toy cars and that was enough for me. The first years of my life I wasn't very well, and so every injection there was a little model given and there's a nice collection at the end.
From the positive side, the positive side of illnesses.
And what did your parents do?
My mother did nothing, in the sense that she was the mother of four children, which was already a good job. My father worked at the FAO.
And already as a child you did some small jobs?
At 11, instead of going to the countryside or playing tennis, I sold cigarettes from the tobacconist. Then later with some friends and my brother I set up a small advertising agency, I was 17-18 years old.
And it was already billing.
It was billing.
We had been quick to intercept the trend of those cubic paper sheets printed on the sides, which didn't exist in Italy. We had seen them at a trade fair abroad and so we helped sell these cubes to companies that printed their logos on the sides. Then with another brother I enjoyed buying, selling, fixing up mopeds. I started working during university in a consulting firm, as an assistant to the founder. I dealt a lot with tourism, for example Valtur, the elite of Italian tourism. One client was a large construction company that asked me to work for them permanently. But a friend of my father who had a large construction company, Cogefar, told me 'You can't work for the competition, come to me.' So on September 1, 1977 I went to Milan, which I didn't want, but it was one of my great fortunes because from there I worked for Bastogi, a large financial company, and it started my work in investment banking and merchant banking, and it all went well.
So, after graduating in economics at La Sapienza in 1977, Giovanni works 3 years at Bastogi, one of the largest financial groups in Italy with stakes in dozens of companies. In the 1970s, however, Bastogi is in deep crisis and to avoid bankruptcy must sell most of its holdings. So at 24, Giovanni gets his experience managing the sale of million-dollar companies until he receives an offer from Euromobiliare, one of the first banks in Italy to do mergers and acquisitions.
How did that transition happen?
By chance, in the sense that I indirectly knew one of the founders of Euromobiliare who one day asked me if I knew someone good at M&A in Bastogi. I said, 'Look, there's no one.' After a few months they called me back and said, 'Why don't you come? We'll pay for your courses in Italy or abroad on M&A because we need to set up this sector.' And I started as a young assistant of M&A at Euromobiliare.
And how old were you there?
26.
It was the great school of my life because with Guido Roberto Vitale and Alberto Milla we got into real merchant banking while in Bastogi we sold a company a month to pay salaries. There was intermediation, asset management, a foot in insurance. We invented M&A on medium-sized companies in Italy in those years in the 80s at Euromobiliare. I became a young M&A assistant, then managing director in 10 years, and then at the end decided to leave because the company was bought by Midland Bank, which was bought by Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and I had no desire to be an official of an Anglo-Chinese bank. I took a sabbatical year, a year writing books, teaching at university, because I've always been a bit against New York, London, Milan finance, closed, reserved, you can't say anything, you can't do anything.
So, after becoming CEO of Euromobiliare at 36, in 1991 Giovanni decides to leave everything to dedicate himself to writing and teaching. But that same year he receives an unexpected call from the Italian government. After a few months he was asked to join the privatization commission of the Ministry of the Treasury because in his last year at Euromobiliare he had been sent to England to Midland Bank, where there was also the privatization part, the Thatcher era. So he studied a lot about what Thatcher was doing, and one day he gets a call from Professor Cappugi, who had been tasked by the minister to set up the privatization commission, but nobody knew what these things were and he remembered that at a dinner Giovanni had talked about this, so he said, 'Listen, come here because nobody knows what we're talking about, but the state debt is so monstrous that we need to try to save it by selling some jewels. Can you give us a hand?' Giovanni gladly accepted because what could be more beautiful in a sabbatical period than to go and help the Italian state. Most people said it was unconstitutional to privatize ENI because of the oil, unconstitutional to privatize ENEL because of the bills. But with a certain stubbornness, he convinced almost everyone, they wrote the law and the law started the privatizations of pieces of Enel, Eni.
Is there any particular anecdote that stuck with you, because I know that you with Tamburi haven't invested in utilities since.
There would be many anecdotes, especially of all the great gurus of the time who said it was unconstitutional, illegal to do these things. I believe the strong bet was to say 'I don't care about all these holier-than-thou people who think only they know. Let's try to do good for the country and not for lawyers, notaries, bureaucrats.' The best anecdote was when Professor Cappugi realized that there was all this resistance, he called Matelda Grassi, a lawyer, myself, and said: 'Let's ignore everyone else, we three lock ourselves in a room, write the draft of the law, take it to Giuliano Amato and see if he marries it.' He married it and basically the commission was shown an already finished work against the majority of them.
So at 38, Giovanni is already CEO of one of the largest investment banks in Italy and has also written the law that starts the privatizations of giants like Enel. That was another era, but if today for a thirty-year-old having a steady job is already a half-miracle, how exactly does he do all this before turning 40? Well, a fundamental role is played by his three mentors.
The first master was Valerio Levi with consulting during university in Rome. The second master was Nanni Fabris, general manager at Cogefar and Bastogi in those 3 years. The third master was Guido Roberto Vitale, with whom I was 10 years at Euromobiliare, already recognized as one of the great gurus of Italian finance.
Are there specific lessons they left you?
One thing that stayed with me from Nanni Fabris was simplification. At a time when universities were teaching financial statement analysis with 100,000 ratios, 27 ratios and so on, he maintained that to understand truly important things you only need three or four items, and that was one of the most important lessons of my life. From Guido Roberto Vitale, it's putting together work ethic, passion for intelligent corporate finance, because pure finance only interests up to a point. We were never into derivatives, structured products, complicated operations.
Also thanks to Vitale's teachings, in 1992 Giovanni makes the most important decision of his life and after 15 years of working as an employee, he goes independent.
I finished the sabbatical year. I had many clients knocking on the door saying 'Why don't you set up some M&A activity again?' Gardini, Carlo De Benedetti, Giulio Malgara, and I founded Tamburi Associati Finanza e Privatizzazioni S.r.l. Alone, without even a secretary, we started giving some consulting to some of the clients I had before who weren't happy with the Midland-ized Euromobiliare. This reputation I had built on privatizations made me called by the mayor of Rome for privatizations in Rome, the mayor of Milan for privatizations in Milan, the mayor of Como for Como, a green council on one side, a red council on the other.
What was your typical day? What exactly did you do?
I always went to the companies, I never waited in Milan, in a place like this, for the client, and this was always appreciated. So my life was on the road. I did 50-60,000 km a year by car, going to companies, trying to listen to entrepreneurs, trying to understand what they might want in strategic terms, generational transitions, capital alternatives. The activity developed quite well, so after a short time Alessandra Gritti came to work, who later became my wife, and the current CEO of TIP, Claudio Berretti, was my student at Castellanza. He took the exam with me, I found him smart, I said 'Why don't we do the thesis?' He did the thesis before even discussing it, he was already working here.
Having hired the first people, in the 1990s the turnover of Tamburi Associati explodes thanks to the contacts he made at Euromobiliare and the Italian privatizations that from 1992 to 1999 bring 185,000 billion lire to the Italian state, about 1/8 of the GDP. But there is a problem. Giovanni is fed up with doing mergers and acquisitions, having done nothing else since 1977 when he entered Bastogi. So in 1999 he has an idea.
It was the era when private equity funds were being born in Italy. I realized there could be a different role. First, not being a fund that by definition must buy and sell. Second, that substitutes by putting in its own director tied, but being its own CFO with the idea of controlling as if it didn't trust the entrepreneur. We came up with this minority model for long-term development with Alessandra and Claudio Berretti. Whoever wants to sell can go to funds, whoever wants to accelerate growth through M&A, investments could have us, not just as a consultant, but someone who by participating in the capital risked with him and even risked while leaving him the trust of management, but putting in money. Obviously not wanting to do a fund because I didn't want to do something that would imply reselling the company. Also, TIP project was launched wanting no banks, only families. We were about fifty families, we later listed the company on the stock exchange after 4 years and then the families doubled to about 100.
And how did you convince the first families to give you money?
We were born with five, me and four others. The four were clients from the M&A part who had understood that this formula could work. Through me, Alessandra and them, word of mouth made it 50 because it was a new project. We were in 2000 so there was also the dot-com bubble which helped because everyone said 'Wow, we want to invest in these innovative, modern things.' In fact, the initial focus was more on that world than on traditional companies.
So in 1999 Giovanni founds Tamburi Investment Partners, a company that buys stakes in the most successful Italian companies and helps them grow, making money from the increase in value of their shares and the profits they distribute. The idea is brilliant, also because in 1999 the value of tech companies had risen so much that even my grandmother invested in them. The next year, however, the internet bubble bursts. In one month the market loses 40% and almost one in two internet companies fails. Were there any problems from the bubble burst or not?
