BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Sir Ronald Cohen
I was born in Egypt and left at eleven as a refugee, my family having lost everything. Britain took us in. From the moment we arrived I knew two things: I would have to look after my parents, and I wanted to make a positive contribution to the world. Oxford in the early sixties was an idealistic place for both ambitions.
At business school in America I heard a professor describe how he had invested $70,000 in a minicomputer company that was going to be worth $100 million. I thought: this is a very interesting business model. He was one of the first venture capitalists. I was twenty-six when I started Apax. You build the field in order to lead it.
As Apax grew, I realised that the gap I had set out to narrow — between rich and poor — was actually widening. The CEO-to-employee pay ratio in America forty years ago was forty to one. Today it is two hundred and forty-nine to one. Trillionaires are appearing. Venture capital and entrepreneurship do allow people from modest backgrounds to become successful, but they also create an ever-growing gulf between those with education and those without. At fifty-three, I told my partners I would leave at sixty to deal with two things: social issues, and the Middle East — where my wife’s father was the commander of the Exodus and my own roots lay in the Egyptian camp.
In 2000, Gordon Brown’s Treasury rang me. The message was blunt: the more money we throw at poverty, the less we seem to achieve. I led a task force whose conclusion was simple and revolutionary: we had only ever relied on government spending and philanthropy. We had never brought investment to bear. We had invented venture capital to fund those who wanted to make money. We had found no equivalent for those who wanted to improve the world. That phone call put me on the path to impact investment.
Philanthropy amounts to perhaps two to three trillion dollars a year globally. Investment markets run to fifty to three hundred trillion. The difference is not incremental — it is civilisational. Impact investment — the idea that you can make profit and deliver measurable improvement in lives or the planet simultaneously — is now a movement that has become an industry.
If I were advising a twenty-year-old today I would say: go to a firm that is conversant with AI and has the ambition to use it, preferably for an impact purpose. The convergence of artificial intelligence and impact investment is where the largest companies of the next generation will be built. We didn’t anticipate the PC, the mobile phone, or the internet when the microchip arrived in the seventies. We are at an equivalent threshold now, and this time the stakes are considerably higher.
Britain missed the foundational AI race. DeepMind was acquired by Google. We find ourselves behind in a competition where large language models confer enormous strategic advantage — not merely to the firms that build them but to the entire national ecosystem of companies that cluster around them. However, the quantum race is not yet won. If Britain were to make that commitment now, we would have real chips to play with America and China. It is not too late. But it will be, soon.
