Why the company exists
Three rules, and they are the same three we apply to our own money, because it is our own money.
We buy a stake to keep it. Our money goes in on the same terms and at the same time as the money of the people we invest with, and it stays in for as long as the business keeps compounding. There is no fund to close and no investor asking us to sell by a date decided in advance.
We have built and run companies in advertising and technology, so we can be useful on the things that decide the outcome: pricing, hiring, commercial strategy, the first hundred clients. Where that experience is worth nothing to a business, we are only money, and we would rather pass.
A few positions understood properly beat a long list nobody follows. We would rather turn down something good than dilute the attention we can give to what we already own.
Three habits of his, and they are the three we look for in the companies we back.
He drew machines that could not be built with the materials of his century, and they were right anyway. Cognitive was founded on the same move: a bet on the end of the third-party cookie years before the industry accepted it. The businesses worth owning are the ones designing something that is not there yet.
Anatomy, hydraulics, painting, optics: he refused to stay inside a single field, and the answers came from the crossings. Advertising technology, data, quantitative analysis of listed companies and industrial businesses look like separate worlds. They are not, and what we learn in one we use in the others.
He dissected bodies himself instead of copying the anatomical drawings everyone trusted, and found that the drawings were wrong. We read the accounts ourselves, we sit in the businesses we own, and we prefer what we can verify to what the market takes for granted.
A mission is worth what it costs you when it is inconvenient.
DaVinci Capitals invests the capital of its own shareholder in advertising technology, in club deals and private equity transactions in European companies, and in listed securities.
The clearest test of the mission is what happened in 2024: at the closing of the sale of Cognitive AI the company could have taken the money off the table, and instead it reinvested for 35.55% and kept the operating responsibility that comes with it.
