In the last ten years there has been in the UK, and to a lesser extent Europe, a concerted attempt by policy makers and academics to make setting up a business a trendy, sexy career choice. Campaigning organisations, business support structures and public policy initiatives to support early-stage entrepreneurs have evolved across the world and even the World Bank and the United Nations now see entrepreneurial activity as the key to economic growth and development funded largely through microcredits. Following the apparent success of the US in reinventing its flagging ‘old’ economy in the late 1980s and 1990s through high growth potential entrepreneurship, the world’s policy makers have gone stir crazy – now everyone should be an entrepreneur. 

How refreshing it is, then, to read a book that has such an understanding of entrepreneurs and of the entrepreneurial process. It is a tour-de-force covering both the economic history of entrepreneurship and private equity from the late sixties and real, experience-based stories about successes and failures that are designed to make the reader assess their own entrepreneurial potential. At last, someone who does not think that entrepreneurship is for everybody but instead takes the reader on a journey through the key steps and matching them with the characteristics that you, the entrepreneur, will need to have if you are to be successful.

Individually, many of the insights are not especially surprising: entrepreneurs need to have an appetite for risk, they need a clear vision and understanding of opportunities and the potential return, a strong team, ambition to succeed, growth finance, a robust and appropriate business model, a clear exit strategy and, of course, the capacity to create their own luck through sheer, bloody-minded determination. 

Yet Ronald Cohen’s goal when he began on his entrepreneurial journey, first as a student at Harvard, then developing funds that matched the entrepreneurs and opportunities with the money they needed right the way through to founding, growing and developing Apax Partners, was to "climb the North Face". What he wanted to do was no less than to "remove the prejudice against wealth creation and risk taking" in Europe. Effectively he and his partners were "building the sector as they built their business", developing the British Venture Capital Association and European Venture Capital Association as well as the EASDAQ high- tech market to create an effective exit route for investors in Europe along the way. 

So there are really two things that differentiate this book from all of the other books on entrepreneurship and building businesses that are around. The first is that the author has well and truly been there, as an entrepreneur and as an investor. His authority on the subject of entre-preneurship is second to none and any entrepreneur would be foolish not to take his advice. The opportunities are in the "second bounce of the ball" – in other words, where the market will go next, not where the market is now. For him, this meant building the infrastructures of a private-equity sector in Europe while building Apax as well. 

The second key merit of this book goes deeper. To remove prejudice against entrepreneurs that, as the author argues, was still apparent at the end of the Thatcher era, he needed to grow a business that not only created wealth but that also created value. Europe’s mistrust of entrepreneurs and of the private-equity industry could only be addressed if its largest champions were seen to be creating wealth that extended beyond the bank balances of the sector’s top executives. Apax as a business was built on the absolute commitment to the creation of value in its broadest possible sense and, as the world slowly begins to realise that entrepreneurs are going to be key to developing a socially and environmentally sustainable future, maybe it is this emphasis on value throughout that has really been Sir Ronald Cohen’s ‘second bounce of the ball’.