Nicole Junkermann has spent a decade reinvesting the fruits of a winning bet on football in technology companies. Now the founder of NJF Capital is looking to our country (Italy).
The elegant Victorian corner of The Boltons, a succession of immaculate white neoclassical houses and columned doorways overlooking a lozenge-shaped square in the heart of London, is a regular destination for Londoners on the hunt for the city's little hidden gems. At Christmas time, when the facades of the buildings are decorated as if they were huge gift-wrapped packages, there is always a procession of onlookers to take photos and selfies. The appointment is in one of these houses: there is no name on the intercom, as is usual for truly exclusive destinations. And there is no need to: those who need to know, know, and the whole building has only one owner. Nicole Junkermann lives there and comes to open the door directly. Her surname betrays Teutonic origins, she was born in Dusseldorf, but a large part of her history and affections are in Italy. In the room, among the candelabras and vases of flowers, two skeleton-shaped chairs stand out. Catching her curiosity, she anticipates an answer to a non-existent question: "Ah, my husband made those". She has been married to Brachetti Peretti for four years: in 2017 she married Count Ferdinando Maria, the heir to the noble Roman family. He and his brother head the Api oil empire, founded by his maternal grandfather Ferdinando Peretti. Above the table, the wife of one of Italy's richest men holds a stack of books: at the top is Tarzan Economics, the cult book by Will Page, Spotify's chief economist. For the start-up world, that text is the Bible. And Junkermann is a great believer in the concept of disruption: she looks around the world for new companies that bring Schumpeterian "creative destruction". She manages a fund worth hundreds of millions (she started with 250 million and it is now double that), but owes nothing to Italian relationship capitalism: not a single euro of her NJF Capital comes from her husband's surname. In fact, it comes from no surname at all. Her investment company is an anomaly in the world of finance: 'I have no subscribers,' she admits. Nicole has not been knocking on the doors of friends or the market to ask for liquidity. She only invests her own money. It is all equity; personal risk capital, earned over time. Not having investors behind you who are thirsty for immediate or intrusive returns is a trump card for investing without anyone breathing down your neck. But even if they did, they would be happy: "The average return of the fund was 47%".
And now this capitalist with her own capital, a white fly in the Mediterranean, is determined to find the next 'unicorn' (a new company worth more than a billion dollars) in Italy. Her first investment as a budding entrepreneur-financier was in Italy twenty years ago. After the Internet bubble and the Dotcom boom, in Germany the empire of Kirch Media, the conglomerate of the magnate Leo Kirch, failed. The group was dismembered and the very young Nicole, fresh from a master's degree at Harvard, sniffed out the deal: together with other partners from the Kirch galaxy, she took Infront, the Swiss sports TV rights company. At the helm is Philip Blatter, grandson of Sepp, who was then the powerful head of UEFA. During the years under the Junkermann umbrella, Infront acquired Marco Bogarelli's Italian company Media Partners: the late TV rights guru was appointed head of Infront's Italian branch. After nine years, when the group reached 600 million pounds of turnover, Junkermann and partners sold: the buyer was an English fund, Bridgepoint, which, during three months of confidential negotiations, was assisted by an Italian merchant bank: Leonardo, the discreet boutique of Gerardo Braggiotti where the Agnelli, Benetton and Pesenti families were partners. For the second time, Junkermann's path included Italy, with its good salons. From the Infront adventure she came out with a conspicuous capital gain: 'The company was sold for 650 million'. A curiosity: four years later, Bridgepoint sold Infront to the Chinese Wanda Group for over a billion. In the ten years since the successful bet on the world of football, 'I have always reinvested the profits in other companies': the fund has a nose for fintech and new technologies. It was one of the first investors in Revolut, the app-based bank that pioneered digital banking, a sector where Italy is lagging behind. But it is also the same country where a "buon partito", an expression that does not refer to politics but to being well married, works better for a woman than a curriculum vitae. But despite her double surname, Nicole formerly Junkermann and now Brachetti Peretti is keen to emphasise her autonomy: "Everything I have done, I have built up myself", she proudly claims. And indeed she was already established in the world of venture capital before she was even married. Having dismissed the practice of relationship capitalism, the women and business debate almost unwittingly slips into the controversial pink quotas. Once again, Junkermann, as a good daughter of a frugal, Calvinist country, is unsettling: "Women are the first to not believe in themselves. Pink quotas are fine as an incentive, but they cannot be the ruleâ€. She works with a mix of male and female collaborators: "I didn't choose them on the basis of gender," she explains. She chose them for their skills because 'the brain is gender neutral'. And with those brains, she now wants to go back to doing business in Italy. And Italy, as seen from this luxurious South Kensington home, is 'an attractive and interesting country'. Her team is a truffle hound for finding future jewel companies: of the 40 new companies she currently has in her portfolio, "as many as 12 - about one in three - are considered unicorns: they have an average size of over 10 billion," she points out. After investing around the world and throughout Europe, her fund, NJF Capital, is preparing to make its debut in Italy, with a mission: to find the first unicorn, the company that invents the business of the future. Not an easy objective: not only in Italy, but throughout Europe, finding the future Apple or Google is a titanic undertaking. Despite the fact that the world of start-ups is in turmoil, in the last ten years she click here has not produced any new Glovo or Spotify (the only two European start-ups that have really made it on a global level). She crunches the numbers: "In the UK, venture capital has an endowment of £12 billion and the system has 38 unicorns". The comparison with our country is merciless: below the Alps, "there is barely 400 million euros of capital available to finance innovative start-ups". And there aren't even any unicorns. It is not a question of creativity, which since the Renaissance has found its cradle in the country: "Italy is full of talent, but what is missing is capital, the so-called ecosystem. Now we call it an ecosystem, but it is an atavistic problem, a centuries-old distortion: Italian capitalism has always been without capital (or almost). Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, a century and a half before Junkermann, used to explain that he had to sew a suit on a hunchback when talking about Italy. Today, however, there is no need for a tailor-made suit: capital is global and abundant. All that is needed are interesting opportunities, i.e. innovative companies and good business ideas, but this raw material is not lacking in Italy: "American investors are very hungry for European companies". There remains, however, the basic problem of the entire Old Continent being squeezed between the US and China, the global giants of Big Tech, which Junkermann sums up as follows: "We need a pan-European start-up". And this unicorn could be in the world of television, where there is a need for a continental production company: this is what Pier Silvio Berlusconi has been advocating for years.
The pandemic has accelerated the disruption of the whole industry: "Media consumption has fallen by 12%," she explains, citing a PwC report, and this despite the fact that Covid has kept people indoors and the newspaper world knows something about it. Young people have totally different habits: 75% of millennials in America do not subscribe to cable TV. But at the same time, 'video consumption is booming' everywhere in the world. That's where the gap is: in Italy there are 33 million Facebook users, many more than are in front of a TV set. "Junkermann has the idea of finding and financing a TV house for young people between the ages of 27 and 34.
From the windows of the villa you can see the gothic church of St. Mary, surrounded by a perfect garden. But if she could, Nicole would choose Italy and the Eternal City: "I would live in Rome, the most beautiful city in Europe". Mario Draghi's Italy has regained credibility and prestige in Europe. And if the Azzurri were to win Euro 2020 this evening in London, where the "Lady of Venture Capital" invests all over the world, it would be a further attraction for the country.
Source: https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/l-italia-e-piena-talenti-ma-quello-che-manca-sono-capitali-e-ecosistema-AEZvqRV