You've heard of high net worth, but we're talking about high net purpose. We want to find out how entrepreneurs and global leaders in our network are allocating financial, human, and intellectual capital in pursuit of purpose. But more importantly, we want to understand the compromises, the paradoxes in their approaches, pitch decks, and philosophies.
This is the episode we wanted to record from the start. Widely known as the father of both European venture capital and impact investing, we sat down for an in-depth conversation with Sir Ronald Cohen. Having co-founded powerhouse Apex Partners, investing billions across tech, healthcare, and consumer, he informed his partners that he wanted to devote his time entirely to what he calls the impact revolution. The idea that every investment decision should optimize for risk, return, and impact on people and planet. His argument is simple but radical. Governments are broke. Inequality is rising. And the old model of relying on taxation and philanthropy to solve social problems has failed. The answer is to redirect the trillions already flowing through capital markets by measuring impact the same way we measure profit. What also makes Sir Ronald's story so compelling is where it starts. A refugee child who arrived in London speaking almost no English, made his way to Oxford University and then Harvard and then rose to the top of an industry that didn't yet exist and who then chose to spend the next chapter of his life trying to reshape the system he helped build. Finally, we also get to discuss the next bounce of the ball. We get an insight into how AI is changing the next generation of impact investing. This is a Sir Ronald Cohen episode.
So, Ronald Cohen, welcome to High Net Purpose. We're sat here in London in April 2026 at a point of heightened tensions globally in terms of geopolitics. We're seeing a retreat away from sustainable investing, but at the same time, everybody's talking about AI technology and the potential of it and social impact. So if there was any guest that I could think of having today as the father of European venture capital and the father of social impact investing, it's yourself. So thank you for taking the time.
Delighted to be here with you, Joe.
So we will start with the same question, which is: do you have an articulation of your purpose?
Articulation is a strange word in a way because I think the whole essence of purpose is a feeling. And my feeling is that if you want to find fulfillment, then you don't find it in just doing things for yourself. You find it by a balance between doing things for yourself and doing things for others.
And so that's been a driver of how you think about projects that you take on and that...
That's been a driver of my life in a way. When I got into venture capital, I did so because I wanted to do something that was useful for Britain and for the world at large. At the time, in 1972, I think there were a million unemployed in the UK. It was a way of making money. I had to make money, Joe, because my parents came here as refugees from Egypt. I was 11 years old. We lost everything, but I didn't just want to make money. I wanted — and I was at Oxford, as you know, in the 60s, it was a very idealistic time — I wanted, in today's impact parlance, to do good and to do well at the same time. To make financial returns but also to have social impact, and venture capital seemed a good way to do that. And then as I funded entrepreneurs, I began to realize that actually the social gap between rich and poor wasn't getting any smaller; it was actually increasing as a result of venture capital. And although the people who were lifted up came from nothing and they benefited and benefited their families and their communities as they became wealthy, there had to be a more equitable type of society that we could create. So as I was nearing the age of 60 — the age of 53 — I said to my partners at Apex, I'm going to leave at the age of 60. We'll have a constitution for the firm. You'll carry the firm on. I would like to deal with social issues and the Middle East conflict. Well, the Middle East conflict, we don't need to say very much about. As you were saying, we're at the worst point of my lifetime.
But taking a step back before we get into Apex, some of the experiences of your younger life though had a determinant as to you having this sort of sense of purpose about helping other people.
I think undoubtedly. Although I was brought up in a family where you gave to the poor every time anything good happened to you, and 10% was the amount, and so you could say that my parents inculcated in me this sense of responsibility for others. But leaving Egypt as a refugee, coming here without speaking English, being helped at a wonderful grammar school, albeit not a very prominent one, with an amazing teacher called Richard Fley who helped me get into Oxford, created a sense in me that I should help others in my turn.
And because you're 11 years of age when you left as a refugee and then you sort of jump forward to being president of the Oxford Union, which is a pretty big room to go into. Was it that teacher or was it the family and the concept of tithe and all of that working together that gave you the confidence?
I mean, after the Union, I thought I could do anything. I could do absolutely anything. I was lucky enough to invite Bobby Kennedy, you know, to come and speak, and he came. You know, even today it's like one of the historic occasions of the Union. I felt I could do anything. I was also taught to be entrepreneurial. My father always said to me, you shouldn't work for anyone. You should do your own thing. And when I was at the Harvard Business School immediately after Oxford, it was the beginning of entrepreneurship as we know it today. It was the very beginning. Venture capital hadn't really started as a profession. The average size of a venture capital fund when I left Harvard in '69 was at two and a half million dollars.
Wow. And so what was in the air was this new idea that young people can achieve anything, and Europe was pretty much a barren landscape for venture at that point.
And Europe at that stage was viewed as barren territory. Entrepreneurs were all American. In the UK, in Europe generally, if you fell on the way, then you were kicked and beaten down. Whereas in the US, you were helped up. Entrepreneurship would never work here. Well, that just didn't sound right to me.
And I know we're making a giant leap forward through an incredibly successful career as a venture investor, but in your early 50s is when you approached the partners and said, 'Look, age 60, I'm out.'
Yeah. By the age of 53, I'd done well enough financially that I could see that I would be able to devote my life and my resources to doing something more meaningful than just making money. As I wrote in my book, I didn't want my epitaph to read, 'He delivered a 30% IRR.' I aspired to achieve a bit more meaningful objectives.
What was that? When is enough enough? Was it actually a number or was it that, no, I'm in my 50s and I feel...
When I left Oxford, I thought I needed to make £300,000 to become financially independent. Right. Now, as you become successful, it's an upward-moving escalator. The number gets bigger and bigger. But it had got sufficiently big that I could see that I could live off my wealth without trouble. So that was enough.
And at that point, had the UK government contacted you to start the work or...
So there's a big element of luck in all our lives, in yours like mine. And in 2000, five years before I left Apex, I got the phone call from the Treasury. Gordon Brown was then Chancellor. Tony Blair was Prime Minister, asking me whether I'd look at the issue of poverty with a more entrepreneurial eye, because the phone call went, 'Government's thrown a lot of money at it, but we don't seem to be able to make a dent in it,' and whether I would lead a social investment task force to try and come up with some recommendations. Although I was leading Apex and was hugely busy, I said yes. And that task force published a report after one year, which you can find on the web, saying, you know, what we've done for people who want to make money by inventing venture capital, we have to do for people who want to improve other people's lives. And the reason we haven't made more progress in tackling issues like poverty is we've relied only on government and philanthropy, not on investment. Well, if you look today, the total philanthropy giving annually is about two to three trillion. The amount of money in the investment market, as you well know, is 250 trillion. So if you can bring investment to tackle social issues, it seemed to us in 2000, then you make a much bigger dent in it. And so we set out, in a way, a goal which was to innovate in finance so as to enable this to happen, for money to be attracted to those who want to do good. And not just to do well, and that it would be necessary to create a social investment bank, as we called it, to innovate, to invent some new ways of attracting capital. And that, in a way, set the goal for me that led to the creation of Bridges, of Social Finance, of Better Society Capital, of the Education Outcomes Fund, and so on.
And in your early 50s, had you seen what the solutions could be or you could just see a kernel of an idea?
No. In 2000, four years before I left Apex, I couldn't see the mechanism. The mechanism became visible 10 years later, after we'd created Bridges and then Social Finance. And two youngsters at Social Finance came up to my office in Portland Place from the basement — we created startups in basements. Both Bridges and Social Finance were created in basements, not garages as they do in Silicon Valley — and said, 'What do you think if we tie a reduction in the number of prisoners going back to jail, which is the problem they've been working on, to a financial return for investors?' And as would have happened to you if you'd heard that, a light bulb went on in my mind. I said, 'You found the key to the capital markets for social entrepreneurs.' If we've all assumed we can't measure anything when we're dealing with societal issues, but we can measure a percentage reduction in the number of prisoners, young prisoners who go back to jail — the number was over, it still is over 60% come back within 18 months in the UK and in most countries — you can measure that. And if you can pay according to that measurement, then it's a brilliant mechanism because it gives investors a way of backing people who have social objectives and getting a return if these objectives are achieved. And that Peterborough was the first one.
And Peterborough was the first one. And the path for social investing. It seems that the trend is obviously going up, but it's not been without its challenges. What do you think were the biggest challenges to it, and have some of those challenges actually changed how you think about the model?
It's an interesting question. I think when the first social impact bond, the Peterborough bond, was launched in 2010, my expectation was that government would seize this mechanism with both hands, because if government committed to pay for social improvement and investors put the money up, you'd begin to get innovation in the way of doing it, and you shifted the risk from government to the investor. So it seemed a very obvious thing for government to do. Similarly, philanthropists who had invested in the first social impact bond didn't want to raise any money other than the charitable money for the first one, because they didn't want to be accused of helping people make money off the back of prisoners. So they were all foundations. But they didn't grab it either. Markets grabbed it. Ten years later, you began to see the sustainability-linked market develop. Today, it's a trillion-dollar pool — or it reached a trillion-dollar pool. It's receded a bit since the Trump administration came in, but still a huge pool of capital where if a company borrows and achieves preset social or environmental targets, the interest rate it pays falls. So it was completely the opposite of what I had expected. Governments and philanthropists didn't go for paying for outcomes, and financial markets understood its scope and took it way beyond anything I could have dreamt of. If you'd said to me on the day we launched the Peterborough bond in 2010, '15 years later, you'll have a trillion-dollar pool of securities inspired by the social impact bond,' I'd have said, 'Unbelievable.'
So how do we think — because we missed a step in terms of how you started to think about risk differently when you went into venture, and then you've thought about impact differently and how that is added to the equation. But that trade-off — because if we are investing into bonds of an issuing entity and getting a lower rate of return than bonds that they've issued elsewhere in the market, how do we manage that trade-off?
You know, it's a misconception that there needs to be a trade-off. I actually believe that optimizing risk, return, and impact today is the way to deliver a superior return. The reason is that the level of risk that you achieve by taking impacts into consideration is reduced. The risk of carbon taxes or other taxes coming in on employment or the environmental effects or anything else. The risk of consumers moving away from your company's products because they object to the harm that you're causing. The risk of talent leaving for companies that have bigger aspirations and give them, if they're young, much greater meaning in their lives. Secondly, if you look at what technology achieves — what technology achieved in the first revolution was to disrupt every business model. Right? The microchip disrupted virtually every business model. Now we have AI doing the same. And where AI meets impact, there's going to be another huge disruption today. So the technology is also enabling new business models that include impact, and Tesla would be the first example of that. If you didn't think impact, you wouldn't create Tesla. If you didn't think environmental impact, you wouldn't create Tesla. You'd miss out on a trillion-dollar company that was created in 20 years. Whatever we may think of Musk's idiosyncrasies, he was the first person to create a major company with impact at its core. So it also obscures the existence — if you don't look at impact, it obscures the existence of opportunities.
But jumping back to the first element of that response — the governments and potential for future tax on carbon. A couple of years ago we put together a climate scenarios session for about 48 hours looking at a whole range of things into 2040. But one of the insights that came out of it was from some work that we had from NBER and MIT as to what actually moves the dial in terms of reducing carbon emissions and abatement in the future, and it was carbon tax. Everything else hardly touched the surface. It was carbon tax. So do we need to be thinking as investors today that a key premise is that this carbon tax will come in despite what we have with Trump or...
Thirty-two countries are already levying carbon taxes these days. Yeah. Everyone's going to be levying carbon taxes. Everyone. For one thing, they're easier to levy. They're more difficult to evade or avoid. So any investor today that does not take into account the possibility of future taxation is missing a major risk.
So data centers, anything like that where you've got a long time frame — if you're not factoring in that there will be some tax on the carbon emissions at some point, you'll be missing a big part of the equation. Consumer preferences. So 2025, Edelman did a very good barometer of trust, but they also looked at consumer preferences in terms of whether they're going to be global or getting more national. And they talked about sort of insularity — that the consumer had moved from being worried about climate change and everything else to being more nationalistic and worried about themselves and looking for comfort and things like that. Is that just part of the cycle or do you think the consumer will revert again?
I think we have to separate the cycle from the trend, and we mustn't confuse the two. We have a political cycle at the moment which has turned against the huge progress that had been made in raising environmental issues to the global consciousness. Young people today don't want to work for companies that are polluting the hell out of the atmosphere. Whenever I speak at universities, I ask, 'How many of you would work today for a company that's highly profitable but polluting the atmosphere in a very serious way?' One hand goes up out of 100 or 200 people. The sentiment amongst young people, as you know, is very different from that of the older generation. Now, I've just continued to make a point. Young people are beginning to shop now with apps. They point their phone to a barcode on the supermarket shelf and they can see on their phone the impact on the health or their looks of a product. They can see whether it compares favorably in terms of price with other alternatives and so on. Very soon they're going to be able to see whether the company that is bringing that product is a big polluter or a lesser polluter.
I sometimes worry that we could be in a bubble in that, you know, we're talking to university students, we're talking to people who may have some more choice in this versus the wider population and the global south who don't maybe have the opportunity to be able to price that and choose to go for something that's less damaging.
But climate change is visible to all. Right. And if you're young today and you wonder about the world you're going to be living in and your children are going to be living in — forget morally, prudentially you must be asking yourself, am I being an idiot by buying the products of a company that's going to make the lifespan of my family shorter.
