Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2030
Singlehurst: ByteDance will eventually go public in Hong Kong or US
“I think it'll be public at some point. I think either in the US or Hong Kong, obviously one of those is probably a little bit more likely than the other.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singlehurst: Private company secondary exchanges will not work
“I don't think we'll end up in a world where you have sort of exchanges for private companies. I think you just have too much complexity in the share class structures. You have, you know, things like rofers, you have like company control. I can't see those exch…”
Disclosure
Baillie Gifford maintained pro rata in Databricks' $60B round without doubling down
“Remember we did our pro rata in the sixty billion round, which is a little bit different from saying we're doubling down, right? So it's, we stood our hand, we put a small amount of extra capital into it, but we didn't double down in the 60 round.”
Disclosure
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford passed on Stripe's $50B down round
“We first invested in Stripe at about a thirty billion dollar valuation but we didn't take part in the down round that they did whenever that was, 20, 22?”
What-if
Singlehurst: Passing on Stripe's down round was a mistake
“I think that was a mistake. I think we should have put more in them.”
Opinion
Singlehurst: Europe should establish a unified growth stock market
“Yeah, I think we probably should.”
Assertion Supported
Singlehurst: Active growth-stage private market participants have consolidated since 2020-2021
“But I think there are fewer participants in the growth stage today than there was in 2020 and 20 21. And you could say, well, those are anomalous years, but I actually, I still think there has been consolidation within the growth stage of the private market.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singlehurst: Consistent institutional growth investors won't double or triple in number
“But, you know, I think we're already at the stage where there are a handful at the growth stage of, you know, let's call it 10, maybe you get to 20, of institutions that are consistent presences in this part of the market. And I could probably name you those. …”
Opinion
Singlehurst: Carried interest and fixed fund lifecycles force misaligned exits
“When you get into the tail years of limited life funds, I worry that you start to get misalignments of interests. I also worry that traditional carried interest structures can drive misalignments of interest because of the value that can flow to individual inv…”
Insight
Singlehurst: Investors can only truly understand a company by becoming shareholders
“You only really ever understand a business by being a shareholder, and so we feed that into our, you know, to our portfolio construction, and of course then we don't add to those companies where we're not building that conviction.”
Insight
Singlehurst: Diversification should focus on capturing outliers rather than mitigating downside
“Diversification is normally thought of in terms of downside risk mitigation. We would think about it much more in terms of diversifying to maximize the probability of capturing outliers.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Singlehurst: Rapid 2021 funding rounds prevented proper due diligence
“I mean, I think the way it really changed things, particularly last year, was it changed the time frames that rounds were happening in. So we were seeing rounds happening last year at speeds that certainly wouldn't have enabled us to do our necessarily diligen…”
Insight
Singlehurst: Going public should aim to deter misaligned investors
“They should actually treat the process of going public as much as an exercise of trying to put off the wrong kind of investors.”
Insight
Singlehurst: Long-term investors will inevitably look foolish during winning investments
“If you are sufficiently long-term even in your most successful investments, there will always be a time when you look and feel really stupid.”
Disclosure
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford takes business model risk over product risk
“And have really been for the last kind of five or six years on companies that we define as being true growth stage companies. So where we're not taking product risk, we're taking business model quality and scalability risk.”
Insight
Singlehurst compares overcapitalizing startups to force-feeding foie gras
“Because it leads to overcapitalization of businesses, and it leads to companies being, I sort of have this, like, sometimes this mental model in my head, and it's not a very nice sort of mental image, but you know how they make foie gras.”
Insight
Singlehurst: Fintech offers prime investment opportunities at reasonable valuations today
“If you want to invest in a fintech company today, like actually a lot of these companies are making amazing strides towards profitability. They're not having, you know, everyone and their mother throwing capital at them. And you can find some really good busin…”
Insight
Singlehurst: AI tools will not completely disrupt core fintech complexities
“And again, like, you know, I think coming back to financial technology, I think this is quite a good area where the difficulties and the nuances of those kinds of companies is, you know, a lot of it is about like how you manage regulation. And like, will AI so…”
Disclosure
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford Employs Public Valuation Methods for Private Investments
“Our valuation methodologies probably look a lot more like the sort of public market valuation methodologies, because we're trying to find companies where we think we can have very long term intrinsic value, which is much, much greater Than the market price tha…”
Opinion
Singlehurst: Bending Spoons' moat is M&A integration and shared services
“It's a business strategy, and it's, ah, it's an approach to how you are able to integrate a business that you've acquired into a shared set of services and tools that you've built out to enable those businesses to grow and become even better products, and, you…”
Disclosure
Singlehurst: Nine of Baillie Gifford's Top 10 Investments Are Founder-Led
“I think these numbers will be a little bit off. It's something like nine out of nine of our 10 biggest investments are still founder led.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford models a 5x base upside for every investment
“So we are very consistent in how we model upside for every company we look at. We try to model to a five times upside.”
Assertion Supported
Singlehurst: Random stock selection yields a 5% probability of 5x returns
“The probability of any given company going up five times, if you were just picking randomly, is something like five percent.”
Disclosure
Baillie Gifford paused 2021 fund deployment through 2023 over inflated valuations
“So the last fund that we raised, we did a, we closed it in 20, 21. We deployed very little in 20, 22 and 20, 23, because valuations were still too high. There were all kinds of games being played with convertible notes and everybody sort of Pretending that com…”
