Apax Venture Capital, $51 Billion in assets.
I was lucky to get an invite to this exclusive teams webinar from my dad, who attended Exeter College, Oxford University in the same year as Sir Ronald Cohen. After leaving Harvard Business School, Cohen worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company in the UK and Italy. In 1972, along with two former business school colleagues as partners, he founded Apax Partners, one of Britain's first venture capital firms.
The company grew slowly at first, but expanded rapidly in the 1990s, becoming Britain's largest venture capital firm, and "one of three truly global venture capital firms". Apax provided startup capital for over 500 companies and provided money for many others, including AOL, Virgin Radio, Waterstone's, and PPL Therapeutics, the company that cloned Dolly the sheep. In 1996 Cohen helped establish Easdaq, a technology-focused stock exchange intended to be the European counterpart to the American NASDAQ,
My favourite part of the discussion was when Sir Ronald Cohen was talking about his career progression. Ronald said that Oxford was the more intellectually challenging of the two institutions he attended. He said that Harvard Business School was more 'like a trade school'.
Sir Ronald made the world's most prestigious business school sound like a place you go to learn how to become an electrician or a plumber, not a Titan of industry, like him, Steve Schwartzman (below), founder of The Blackstone Group, or my old friend Bela Hatvany.
To be fair, Ronald said later that he wouldn't have achieved the success he did if he hadn't attended Harvard Business School. If you are 18 or 19 at Oxford, studying a subject like PPE, you would have had such a variety of intellectual stimulations. But getting an MBA is a much more focused endeavour.
Below: Steve Schwartzman, CEO & Founder of The Blackstone Group, who set up scholarships with LSE, and Tsinghua University, in China, creating a Master's degree in Global Affairs in 2018.
This webinar suffered from the same malaise as the Steve Schwartzman of The Blackstone Group interview that my father and I attended at the LSE a few years ago. Just like the LSE student who interviewed the founder of Blackstone two years ago, Sir Ronald Cohen's interviewer as too deferential.
There was one point when the interviewer made some comment about how 'incredibly illustrious and accomplished' Sir Ronnie was, and I thought the interviewer was going to fall on his knees.
- Don't you find that these types of talks are more entertaining when the interviewer throws in a few hardball questions along with the softball ones? I know I do.
Also, these pieces with Millionaires and Billionaires talking about how awful inequality is, have been done to death. Many argue that they are part of the problem, not the solution.
I'm sceptical of how much millionaires and billionaires can do to alleviate inequality. For example, during the Great Depression of the 1930s in the USA, it was government and the leadership of President Roosevelt, not the business community (mainly behind the inept President Hoover), that created a 'New Deal' and provided the population hope in a time of crisis.
On a macro-level how effective will these initiatives be? But I'm still open-minded, and Sir Ronald did make some excellent points, worth considering, on how social investing can benefit society. On the strength of this talk, I do intend to read his book, since I also enjoyed his first book, which covers his career progression in Private Equity.
I don't want to be too critical about such an excellent talk; Sir Ronald Cohen did explain how the importance of responsible investing has grown as an idea; That investors are increasingly considering all aspects of the businesses they back - not just how much money it makes, but also how much the industry contributes to society.
Is the company a significant polluter, like BP or Shell? Or does it have a vision for a greener future, like Tesla, which has seen its share price grow 265% this year? His points about how millennials and Generation Y and the new generations coming, care more about values. Many of them would not invest in or work for companies that have the values they hold.