"Start young, think big, stick with it", Ronald Cohen (founder of Apax)

I just finished "The Second Bounce of the Ball", a required reading for entrepreneurs written by Ronald Cohen, the father of Venture Capital in Europe.

Ronald Cohen, McKinsey alumni, founded in the 70s Apax Partners, now the largest private equity firm in Europe with over $20B under management. Apax backed companies such as AOL, Apple, Vueling or Edreams. In the book he shares his experiences as an entrepreneur and with entrepreneurs. Some topics are cliche and some chapters a little bit repetitive. But overall, I recommend the book.

A compilations of quotes:

• All entrepreneurs share certain personality traits: a high level of confidence and high levels of optimism, energy and determination. But the people who become entrepreneurs come in all ages, shapes and sizes, and their entrepreneurial skills vary considerably.
• Start young, think big, stick with it: that is valuable advice that I did not get, but which I can now offer the aspiring entrepreneur.
• Building a business is like climbing a mountain. It presents a great challenge and, if you get to the top, there is a great sense of achievement. That desire for achievement was our motivation.
• There have always been privately financed companies. Private equity existed in 14th and 15th century Italy, where merchant bankers would fund enterprise and trade. In the 16th century, when European traders were travelling to the New World, voyages were funded by private investors, each of whom took a share of the risk and a share of the profits in proportion to his or her own investment. But custom, the captain of the ship took 20% of the value of the cargo. The rule still applies.
• You must find an opportunity that matches your skills and ambition. When I started out there were opportunities in hi-tech, but I am not a high tech person. I could not have built Google. Had I stayed at McKinsey I would have been able to use my analytical skills in calibrating the strenghts and weaknesses of companies, identifying their best opportunities and putting in place structures to take advantage of these opportunities, but that did not satisfy my ambitions.
• Your business will grow to match the size of your vision. Once you have decided on the business you want to build, fixing the vision is the biggest constraint on the scale of your future success.
• Perseverance: If you have matched the opportunity you have chosen to your skills and ambition and if you have a clear vision of your goal, you must stick with it.
• This is a favourable time to be an entrepreneur. If you are one for whom the North Face is an exciting, even irresistible, challenge, aim high. The higher you aim, the higher you will go.
• Uncertaintly and opportunity go together. The first taks of the entrepreneur is to seek out opportunity in uncertaintly. Where there is uncertainty there is the possibility of great success
• I realized that compared to most people, I have a powerful desire to achieve and an unusual capacity for hard work
• While I do not discount the value of experience and maturity, my general advice is to start early rather than late. You are never going to be 100% ready. "You cannot learn to swim by exercising on the beach".
• The world of entrepreneurship is a world of seizing opportunities. Defining correctly which market you are in, how large it is and the size of the opportunity you have identified within it: these are the fundamental questions about calibrating risk and return.
• "Good is the enemy of great": if you start off recruiting people who are merely good, great people will not join the team
• Every recruiting decision is an investment decision: it has a cost, a level of risk, and if it works, a great reward
• Identifying the most talented people, persuading them to join you, and leading an organization that empowers them, are three core skills for an entrepreneur. The moment you put the right person in a senior position, you feel it. The load on you is significantly reduced.
• My own starting point at Apax was something close to the film The Dirty Dozen, which told the story of a group of tough individualists with complementary skills, whoc come together to achieve the most challenging of wartime missions. I recommend that film to any budding entrepreneur.
• It takes wisdom to build a great company. Wisdom leads eventually to FULFILLMENT, which is ultimately about achieving a healthy balance between what you do for yourself and what you do for others.

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