"The Second Bounce of the ball" : "One of the best books written on entrepreneurship in recent years. It will reward any reader, from start-up to City Banker" Financial Times.
The Second Bounce of the Ball is the distillation of Cohen's 33-year career building Apax Partners into the largest global private-equity firm based in Europe. When he left in 2005, Apax had more than than $20 billion under management and offices in eight countries. He draws upon Apax's experience of backing entrepreneurial businesses across the world, among them AOL, Apple, Computacenter, Tommy Hilfinger, Inmarsat, Kabel Deutschland, Calvin Klein, Mölnlyke, Panrico, PPL Therapeutics, Q-Cell, Travelex, Waterstone's, Virgin Radio, Vueling and Yell.
Wikipedia Entry Review of Book, Wikipedia Entry of Sir Ronald Cohen
Extract of the book, Times, November 4, 2007
WHEN do you discover that you are cut out to be an entrepreneur? To answer this question, it might be useful to look at the example of my own career.
I was born in Cairo. As a child I spoke French at home; Arabic was my second language; I did not speak English at all. Then, when I was 11 years old, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s reaction to the Suez crisis made the life of a Jewish family like ours very difficult.
Because my mother carried a British passport, we were forced to leave. We were allowed to take 10 Egyptian pounds and a suitcase each; we had to leave everything else behind. I left clutching my stamp collection and remember worrying that somebody might take it away from me. We moved to London...
March 31 2008. It's that time of year when private equity funds have to account for any decisions they took and confess to writedowns. Sir Ronald Cohen, co-founder of Apax Partners, and Wol Kolade, chairman of BVCA, discuss the sector.
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