The Ledger
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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: 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”
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: 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: 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: 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.”
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…”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford accepts liquidity risk if compensated on entry price
“On the sort of path to exit and path to liquidity, I think this is where Having a very long-term time horizon, like, we are willing to take a little bit more risk there, again, just provided we are being paid to take that risk.”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford Directs Carry to the Firm, Paying Partners via Bonuses
“So Cary goes to the firm. And then we remunerate people through, through bonuses, which is a synthetic carrier, I suppose.”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford hires non-finance backgrounds to avoid narrow worldviews
“And so the reason we hire from a range of academic backgrounds is because we bring in people with lots of different perspectives. Perspectives on the world rather than hiring people who grew up dreaming of being fund managers where you might well end up with a…”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford's moat analyses look like dynamic meditative essays
“We are not trying to accurately nail down what a company's competitive advantage is or will be. Actually, if you look at the reports we write, the analysis that we do on competitive advantage, it looks more like a meditative, meditative essay than a set of ass…”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford usually leans toward continuing support during ambiguous struggles
“I think we probably fall more often on the side of continuing to back businesses and sometimes those are the best decisions we ever make, and sometimes they're the worst decisions we ever make but Founders and companies will more often find us leaning on the s…”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford avoids investing in M&A-focused companies
“Very few of our investments get acquired. And that's partly because we steer away from any company where we get a whiff of them potentially being bought.”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford's one bankruptcy was late-stage diabetes company Intarsia
“So that company that I mentioned, the one that went bankrupt, was a business called Intarsia. It was a company that was developing a therapy for type two diabetes, and when we invested in it was a very, it was late stage in this, in the sense of being in phase…”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford began researching and buying Tesla stock in 2012
“I was working on Tesla in 2000 and 12, and we went on to buy that for various strategies.”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford passed on multiple private investment rounds in DoorDash
“One of the ones we really missed was DoorDash. We had a few opportunities to invest in that privately.”
Singlehurst: Intarsia Was Baillie Gifford's First Portfolio Company Bankruptcy
“Like, the first company we invested in that went bankrupt was a company called Intarsia. It was a, it was actually a biotech company that was developing a GLP-I. I mean, imagine if that company had managed to stay solvent, it would have been an astonishing inv…”
Singlehurst: Wise grew from $50M-$60M revenue at initial investment to multi-billions
“Wise was actually a little bit smaller than that when we first invested. I think it was probably about 50 or sixty million dollars in revenue. It's now a multi-billion dollar revenue business.”
Baillie Gifford is a shareholder in chip developer Tenstorrent
“We are shareholders in business, a company like Tens Torrents, which is working at the sort of the chip and the infrastructure layer.”
Singlehurst: Many 2024 Baillie Gifford Investments Were Already Profitable
“Last year, you know, quite a few of the companies we invested in, they were already profitable, or they were all turning profitable this year.”
Baillie Gifford reviewed 600 private rounds and made 11 investments last year
“So just as a team, we met a thousand companies. We looked at 600 private financing rounds. We did 65 first cuts of our diligence process. We did 30 deep dives, and we made 11 new investments.”
Baillie Gifford trims large private holdings to fund new growth investments
“So some of our large high profile companies that we have trimmed in the private markets and we've recycled that capital into new interesting high growth private companies.”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford evaluates deals via probability-tested upside scenarios
“We create scenarios in which we are deliberately contrived where a company can be a very high returning business and a high returning investment for our clients. We think about the probabilities or the things that would have to come to pass for that to be the …”