Sir Ronald Cohen, founder of UK's largest Venture Capital Company, at Oxford University.

Apax Venture Capital, $51 Billion in assets.

I was lucky to get an invite to this exclusive video call from Exeter College, Oxford University, where Sir Ronald Cohen was an undergraduate.

After graduating with an MBA from 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 money for many others, including AOL, Virgin, Waterstone's, and PPL Therapeutics, the company that cloned Dolly the sheep. 

One of the firm's co-founders, Alan Patricof, was an early investor in Apple Computers. 

My favorite 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 cookery, electrician or plumbing school! 

Harvard Business School has the most famous MBA program in the world where titans of industry, like Steve Schwartzman, founder of The Blackstone Group, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, and Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, all studied.

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 eighteen or nineteen at Oxford, studying a subject like PPE, you would have had various intellectual stimulations. But getting an MBA is a much more focused endeavor. 

Below: Steve Schwartzman, Founder of Blackstone Group.

This webinar suffered somewhat from the same malaise as the Steve Schwartzman of The Blackstone Group interview that 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 was too deferential for my liking.

- Don't you find these types of talks more entertaining when the interviewer throws in a few hardball questions? 

Also, these interviews with the Super-rich talk about how awful inequality is, has been done to death. 

I would have loved to hear more about his career and the birth of the VC industry in the UK, which he described in his excellent book 'Second bounce of the ball: Turning risk into Opportunity'

On a macro level, how effective will these initiatives be? Government can do more to 'level the playing field'. But I'm still open-minded, and Sir Ronald did make some excellent points worth considering, on how social investing can benefit society. 

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 300% this year? 

Here's Sir Ronald Cohen's new book: Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to drive real change.

And his previous one, which I enjoyed reading: The Second Bounce of the Ball: Turning Risk into Opportunity.