At the Bass Group, David quickly earned a reputation for taking on groundbreaking deals and often difficult turnarounds.
It was also at Bass that David met Jim Coulter, his business and investing partner for more than 38 years. In 1992 they left Bass and made a bold bid to acquire Continental Airlines out of bankruptcy.
In 1993, after making that successful bid, David, Jim and Bill Price founded TPG. The $66 million investment in Continental ended up turning a 10x profit and became indicative of TPG’s differentiated approach to investing.
TPG has always reflected David’s unique and eclectic style – unafraid of risk, willing to take on financial restructuring and operational complexity, and always looking to back strong executives. And maybe, above all else, with a distinctive culture of openness and collaboration. David, in speaking about TPG’s formation and culture once said: “We came out of a family business. We didn’t have any senior people who’d spent any time in the investment banking world and that gave us a different outlook on things and different cultural positioning. You have a different view of risk. You have a different view of what life is about and it allowed us to do things that other people didn’t do.” Together, David, Jim and their partners transformed TPG from a three-person investing office to a publicly traded global alternative asset manager with nearly $240 billion of assets under management and 28 offices around the world.
Through his years at TPG, David’s innovative thinking landed him at the center of several large industry transformations – from restructuring the airline and banking industries, to getting in front of massive investing waves in technology and healthcare. David built an astonishingly broad and diverse resume of investments and was the architect of some of the most well-known, complex, and innovative transactions in the history of private equity. Throughout David’s career, there were few industries he didn’t touch and explore. He was a valued leader broadly in the business world, serving on more than 80 diverse corporate boards: from Continental to Ryanair, from General Motors (at 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, keen wit, and inability to suffer obfuscation.
Despite David’s success, he never changed. He remained curious, meeting constantly with young entrepreneurs to learn about their ideas. And he possessed an extraordinary set of interests and pursuits that took him all over the world and created friendships across the business, sports, music, philanthropic, environmental, conservation, and academic communities.
Rarely the loudest person in the room, but often the smartest, David remained humble, once saying that his personal strength was “Not knowing a lot about something but knowing enough to make a decent decision.”
Although David was primarily known for his business acumen, he was quietly a passionate advocate for a range of causes, particularly those related to environmental conservation, education, and healthcare.
