Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford expects 5x ByteDance return despite US TikTok ban
“I mean, like, our base case is that it does get banned, and we still see a path. After making at least five times our money, even with TikTok not being part of that investment case.”
Opinion
Singlehurst: China remains a massive investment opportunity
“I think it does. I think it does remain a big opportunity.”
Opinion
Singlehurst: VCs use operational services as air cover to justify high fees
“There's a sort of industry of using that as kind of air cover to carry out quite a lot of window dressing around sort of so-called value creation in order to justify very high fees”
Disclosure
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford's Investment in Northvolt Failed Due to Execution Issues
“Northvolt's been a very bad investment for us. What was the mistake there? I think we were too enamored with the idea of a business like Northvolt needing to exist for, you know, all the reasons of energy sovereignty in, in, in Europe. But what we got wrong wa…”
Insight
Singlehurst: Return on equity is critical at scale, yet anathema in VC
“One of the single most important factors is the return that you make on equity. And this notion, this concept is, is almost it's almost an anathema within the venture world.”
Insight
Singlehurst: Expecting an 80% probability of a 5x return is delusion
“If you think that there's an 80% chance of making a five times return in investment, like, you're probably deluding yourself in the levels of probability and confidence that you can have in a long tail or, you know, high outcome scenario, like a five times ret…”
Insight
Singlehurst: Post-2021 trauma drives venture investors to herd into safe consensus deals
“I think that there is like a herding into a much smaller number of names. I think that's quite a sort of understandable, like, human psychology here, right? The industry is still digesting the trauma of twenty-twenty-one and the pullback in twenty-twenty-two. …”
Insight
Singlehurst: Evaluating Tech Companies Should Focus on Return on Capital
“Everybody talks about like this trade off between growth or profitability. It should never be about growth or profitability. It should be about incremental return on investor capital. It should be about long run return on equity.”
Assertion Supported
Singlehurst: Stripe trades at a lower multiple than Adyen while growing faster
“Stripe is priced even, even less than Adyen. If you just look at it on a multiples basis, and it's growing quicker.”
Opinion
Singlehurst: The London Stock Exchange is in a dire state
“Yeah, I do share the sentiment that we're in a dire state for the London Stock Exchange, and I think.”
Opinion
Singlehurst: LSE suffers from dual supply and demand crises
“I think it's a combination of there not being loads of amazing high growth companies in the UK, enlisted in the UK, so there's a supply problem, and I think there's a demand problem as well.”
Insight
Singlehurst: Bending Spoons targets broken VC-backed businesses
“And their addressable market basically is the broken parts of the venture capital ecosystem, which is companies that are good products, but really bad businesses. And they can take these good products and make them amazing businesses. By virtue of being part o…”
Opinion
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford wouldn't buy OpenAI, Grok, or Anthropic currently
“I think at the moment I would say that I would buy none of them. And it's not because I have a particular, and it's not because I'm critical of those businesses. It's because I don't know what the answer is to enduring competitive advantage at the large langua…”
Opinion
Singlehurst: The public-private market divide is an artificial financial construct
“I really think that the public private divide is an artifact of the financial universe rather than anything that you would come up with if you were thinking about investment or company formation from first principles.”
Insight
Singlehurst: Probability-adjusted upside can grow as companies scale and execute
“I think that the probability adjusted upside of companies can often grow as they become larger. And so even though ostensibly the price, yes, might be lower in the previous round, As I said, I think sometimes the probability of outsized returns can grow as com…”
Assertion Supported
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford deployed $10B across 100 private companies with one bankruptcy
“Over the last 10 years, we've deployed something like ten billion dollars into about a hundred private companies. We've had one bankruptcy of a company which is nothing to be proud of for sure, but I think we thought it was going to be much higher than it was.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singlehurst: Uninformed investors will create hardship for startups in downturns
“I think the sad thing about that is the people that will suffer from that is, is the companies themselves, because they will have ended up with shareholders who don't fully understand what it is they've invested in. And that's kind of fine when everything's go…”
Insight
Singlehurst: 10-year public equity investments should be treated as illiquid assets
“If we're investing in a company with a 10 year view, You probably shouldn't be doing anything two or three years into that investment journey. You should really be thinking of it as being pretty much as illiquid as any private holding.”
Insight
Singlehurst: Founder zeal matters more in growth investing than competitive analysis
“The thing that I should have placed a much greater weight on. Was the founder of DoorDash and, you know, why he'd started the business and the level of commitment that he had to these small businesses that he was wanting to help and kind of bring online and he…”
Disclosure
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford Passed on Later Capital Requests for Northvolt
“We did make additional investments beyond our first investment, but there were times after that where we all asked for more capital and for reasons around the execution, but also for reasons around the structure of The financing rounds themselves that we belie…”
Disclosure
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford's median initial investment target has $200M revenue
“The median company in our portfolios is doing about two hundred million dollars in revenue, is still growing at about 70% year over year and is still very slightly loss making, -14% EBITDA margins”
Insight
Singlehurst: Investor discipline means selectively paying high prices for breakout companies
“Like being a disciplined investor doesn't mean I will never pay more than X multiple, because when you find a really special company, you should lean into valuation. Now, the danger is that you can tell yourself a story that every company is a special company,…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singlehurst: Pre-AI companies with hard-to-replicate products will remain exceptional
“I think there's a possibility of that, but I would say that there will still be companies that, that are from that sort of pre AI era that will still be exceptional companies because they have a particular way of building a product that is just very difficult …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford will always invest at 30-50% chance of 5x
“If something is in the range of 30 to 50% probability of going up fivefold, well then we'll take those bets every time.”
