The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 79 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Singlehurst: China remains a massive investment opportunity
“I think it does. I think it does remain a big opportunity.”
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”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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. …”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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”
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,…”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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?”
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.”
Singlehurst: Europe should establish a unified growth stock market
“Yeah, I think we probably should.”
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.”
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. …”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”