I am Gianluca D'Agostino and this is 10 Minutes to Inspire. Welcome to Techy Motion 10 minutes to inspire. We have here with us today Giovanni Tamburi, one of the greatest Italian investors, so a great pleasure especially for me because it's a conversation that I would also like to learn something important from, seeing as I too have been in this world for a few years. So, Giovanni, listen, the question with which we typically open is: 'What is the enterprise that best defines you in your life?'
But I think it's what we do, what we created. Since university I've had the dream of creating a circuit of excellent companies, markets, and savings. I succeeded, it took me almost 50 years, but it works. So I believe our company is the expression of what I wanted to do, I succeeded with great luck to do, and which today is working, I think, quite well.
And what inspired you throughout your career? Was there an initial moment that guided the subsequent steps, or was it a continuous journey with inspirational moments, and maybe an anecdote to tell us?
I was very lucky. I was very lucky to have a person who, for example, brought me to Milan from Rome where I was doing great, having fun, etc. He made me come to Milan, he made me do a job I didn't even know what it was at first, but he pulled me into this finance situation, which I don't love as a concept of finance, but I tried to interpret in a very business-oriented way, very close to entrepreneurs, psychologically, carefully, with little numbers, absolutely not speculative, very long-term, and very transparent in the markets. So there is no real inspiration. There is great luck in having found step by step, over time, the right people, the right operations, and that's it, a lot of luck.
And also through, of course, moments of success, and maybe some moments of difficulty. You told one about that on stage earlier. Another difficulty perhaps within 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 full of ourselves and wanted to do too many things. So, for example, I delegated to a couple of people the idea of 'Fine, beyond what goes through the top, meaning me and the people closest to me, I'll give you a budget, invest and do these things.' And they made quite a few mistakes because they found a way to dress things up with multiples, those superficial tricks that don't work. Plus, during that period we also grew our staff, another mistake I made and from which we recovered. I understood that you have to ration things carefully, look at them very closely, study them in depth. As I said before, there's a lot of psychology about people, both shareholders and the companies you invest in. So our work must be done only if you are very attentive to each individual operation. It cannot be done on a per-kilo basis.
I really relate and I find myself exactly in this phase of building the team and almost the mission, of facing each step in a disciplined way. But this phase is a bit different from the phase when we started working in the 80s and 90s. People talk more and more about impact, right? Impact, indicators. In what way do you think you can have a positive impact? Have you had a positive impact on the world and society, not just on shareholders, but on stakeholders, with your business, your trajectory?
But I don't want to exaggerate with a plug for ourselves, but we are the most profitable holding company of our kind in Europe for about ten years. We are the largest group of families with aligned interests for investing in the real economy. We are listed on the stock exchange and we are a genuine public company because I once had 100%, today I have 8.5%. There are two shareholders who are bigger than me. So I tried to bring together the savings of these families with investments in excellent companies through a transparent market, without the typical opacity of this world, which I tried to avoid. We have 15 listed companies in our group, and there too I tried to convey maximum transparency, maximum freedom, maximum accessibility for the individual saver. Even yesterday, the day before yesterday in Trento, I saw people approaching me and saying, 'Oh, I'm a small shareholder.' The joy for me of having these people who have followed me, buying maybe 100 shares, 200 shares on the market, and the fact that through listing on the stock exchange I can reach people like this is an immense satisfaction.
I find the approach brilliant where the underlying is listed on the stock exchange, but the entrepreneurial trajectory is 7, 10, 20 years, or even more. And so in this sense, it's a different kind of privateness compared to the venture capital world I also experienced, which starts from very young companies and takes them very far. But along this trajectory, there are also personal aspects, there are emotions that guide, there are elements of life. What is the real emotion that always drives your life that you also brought into the profession?
It's all emotion. I am a passionate person. I am someone who looks entrepreneurs in the eye more than I look at balance sheets or analyze them. My first mentor taught me not to look at balance sheets as an analyst. That is, don't exaggerate with all that stuff. Three numbers on assets, three on liabilities, and two on the income statement. End of story. It was a great rule, a great lesson. At the end of the day, companies are simple. You have to find the heart of their problems, if there are problems, or the opportunities, if there are opportunities, and you have to do those little things. So I believe that impact and indicators are very simple. You need to understand if the company is strong, if it's strong because of its brand, its product, its production process, or other factors. Bet on that, invest heavily in it. As you said, we are very long-term. In the sense that we never have exit agreements. We have been in Interpump for over 20 years, in Prismian, Amplifon, and others for over 10, in Moncler for 12 or 13, etc. Because we believe that the beauty of a company is extracted little by little over time, and I am against all those who, the better the company does, the faster they sell it to profit themselves. I believe that the beauty, especially in a country like Italy, complicated, articulated, etc., is to stay close to the entrepreneur, never take the wheel, stay beside, stay behind, and accompany them in the long term. If you're lucky, everything goes well.
And if you are more passionate, you are also more empathetic, right, with the entrepreneurs. And seeing as you mentioned earlier on stage that the job is often between being a psychologist and a psychoanalyst, I was very struck and I really relate. This is clearly perceived, evidently, by the companies you invest in. That is, this empathetic and emotional availability of the investor is perhaps quite rare, not very common.
