I am Gianluca D'Agostino and this is 10 minutes to Inspire. Welcome to Techy Motion 10 minutes to inspire. We have with us today Giovanni Tamburi, one of the greatest Italian investors, so a great pleasure especially for me because it's a conversation from which I would also like to learn something important, since I too, let's say, have been in this world for a few years. So, Giovanni, listen, the question we typically open with is: 'What is the enterprise that best defines you in your life?'
But I believe it is what we do, that is, what we have created. Since university, I have dreamed of creating a circuit of excellent companies, markets, savings. I succeeded, it took me almost 50 years, but the thing works. So I think our company is the expression of what I would have liked to do, I managed to do with great luck and which today, I believe, is working rather well.
And from what did you draw inspiration throughout your career? Was there an initial moment that later guided your subsequent steps, or was it a continuous journey with inspirational moments, and maybe an anecdote to tell us?
I had great fortune, I had great fortune to have a person who, for example, brought me to Milan from Rome where I was doing very well, having fun, etcetera. He forced me to come to Milan, forced me to do a job that I didn't even know what it was at the beginning, but he pulled me into this finance situation which I don't love as a concept of finance, but I tried to interpret it in a very corporate way, very close to entrepreneurs, in a psychological, attentive, not very numerical way, absolutely not speculative, very long-term and very transparent in the markets. So the real inspiration is not there. There is great fortune in having found step by step over time the right people, the right operations, and nothing else, a lot of luck.
And also through clearly moments of success, moments maybe of difficulty, you told one on stage just now, another difficulty maybe more inside your world, the construction of your project that struck you and held you back and then you overcame, that you can tell us about.
But things went so well since we started investing that we got a bit carried away, and so we wanted to do too many things. For example, I delegated to a couple of people the idea of saying 'very well, beyond what passes through the top, that is, me and the people closest to me, I give you a budget, invest and do these things.' And they made many mistakes because they found a way to dress up with multiples, with these trivial things, superficial stuff that doesn't work. Meanwhile, we also grew in personnel, another mistake I made and from which we recovered. I understood that you have to dole things out carefully, you have to look at them very attentively, you have to study them deeply. As I said before, there is a lot of psychology on people, both shareholders and the companies you invest in, and therefore our work can only be done if you are very careful about the individual operation. It cannot be done by the kilo. I find myself a lot and I am exactly at this moment in building the team and in the mission, almost, of facing the steps in a disciplined way every day. However, this phase is a bit different from the phase when we started working in the 1980s and 1990s.
More and more is being said about impact, for example, right? Impact, indicators. How do you think you can have a positive impact? Have you had a positive impact on the world and society, here not only on shareholders but on stakeholders, right? with your business, with your trajectory.
But now I don't want to exaggerate with a spot on ourselves, but we are the most profitable holding in Europe for about ten years of our type. We are the largest group of families with aligned interests to make real economy investments. We are listed on the stock exchange and we are a true public company because once I had 100%, today I have 8.5%. Shareholders that are larger than me, so I tried to bring together savings of these families with investments in excellent companies through a transparent market, without the typical opacity of our world which I tried to avoid. We have 15 listed companies in our group and so there too I tried to communicate the maximum transparency, the maximum freedom, the maximum accessibility for the individual saver. Also yesterday, the day before yesterday in Trento I saw people approaching me and saying 'Ah, I am a small shareholder.' There, the joy for me to have these people who have followed you buying maybe 100 shares, 200 shares on the market and the fact that through the stock exchange listing you can reach people like that is an immense satisfaction.
I find it brilliant, precisely the approach in which the underlying is listed on the stock exchange, but the entrepreneurial trajectory is 7, 10, 20 years, even of the accountant, right? And so in this sense a different private equity compared to the world I also experienced and I identify a lot with venture capital, which starts from very young companies and takes them far ahead. But during this trajectory there are also clearly personal aspects, there are emotions that guide, there are also elements of life. What is the real emotion that always guides your life that you have also brought into your profession?
