At the Bass Group, David shortly earned a status for taking over groundbreaking offers and sometimes troublesome turnarounds.
It was additionally at Bass that David met Jim Coulter, his enterprise and investing accomplice for greater than 38 years. In 1992 they left Bass and made a daring bid to accumulate Continental Airlines out of chapter.
In 1993, after making that profitable bid, David, Jim and Bill Price based TPG. The $66 million funding in Continental ended up turning a 10x revenue and have become indicative of TPG’s differentiated strategy to investing.
TPG has at all times mirrored David’s distinctive and eclectic fashion – unafraid of danger, prepared to tackle monetary restructuring and operational complexity, and at all times trying to again sturdy executives. And possibly, above all else, with a particular tradition of openness and collaboration. David, in talking about TPG’s formation and tradition as soon as stated: “We got here out of a household enterprise. We didn’t have any senior individuals who’d spent any time within the funding banking world and that gave us a special outlook on issues and totally different cultural positioning. You have a special view of danger. You have a special view of what life is about and it allowed us to do issues that different folks didn’t do.” Together, David, Jim and their companions reworked TPG from a three-person investing workplace to a publicly traded international various asset supervisor with almost $240 billion of belongings beneath administration and 28 workplaces all over the world.
Through his years at TPG, David’s revolutionary considering landed him on the middle of a number of giant business transformations – from restructuring the airline and banking industries, to getting in entrance of huge investing waves in expertise and healthcare. David constructed an astonishingly broad and numerous resume of investments and was the architect of among the most well-known, advanced, and revolutionary transactions within the historical past of personal fairness. Throughout David’s profession, there have been few industries he didn’t contact and discover. He was a valued chief broadly within the enterprise world, serving on greater than 80 numerous company boards: from Continental to Ryanair, from General Motors (on the request of the U.S. Government) to Ducati, from Kite Pharmaceutical to Oxford Health, from MGM to Univision, and from Korea First Bank to Fairmont Raffles. David was valued for his incisive judgement, eager wit, and incapacity to undergo obfuscation.
Despite David’s success, he by no means modified. He remained curious, assembly consistently with younger entrepreneurs to find out about their concepts. And he possessed a rare set of pursuits and pursuits that took him all around the world and created friendships throughout the enterprise, sports activities, music, philanthropic, environmental, conservation, and educational communities.
Rarely the loudest particular person within the room, however usually the neatest, David remained humble, as soon as saying that his private power was “Not understanding quite a bit about one thing however understanding sufficient to make an honest resolution.”
Although David was primarily recognized for his enterprise acumen, he was quietly a passionate advocate for a variety of causes, notably these associated to environmental conservation, schooling, and healthcare.
