Peter Singlehurst

Baillie Gifford’s private-company investor Peter Singlehurst uses a 10-questions framework (growth over 5 and 10+ years, enduring determinants of success, financial analysis, valuation) and enters at a median of $200M revenue, 70% growth, -14% EBITDA margins — product risk is de-risked, while business-model quality and scalability risk remain. The metric venture treats as “almost an anathema within the venture world” is return on equity: its absence produces the “foie gras-ing of startups” — overcapitalized companies force-fed cash.

Every investment is modeled to a consistent 5x upside, then tested on probability: a random company has ~5% odds of 5x-ing (30 years of public-market data), so 30–50% probability is a bet “we’ll take every time” — and “if you think that there’s an 80% chance of making a five times return… you’re probably deluding yourself.”

No LLM positions: offered OpenAI at 300, Grok at 50 or Anthropic at 60, “I would buy none of them” — not because the businesses are bad, but because “we still are trying to define what we think competitive advantage will look like at the large language model level” amid open-source and DeepSeek commoditization. They own the layers where the moat is legible: Databricks and Tenstorrent.

The bull case for ByteDance — the position he’s considered mad for holding: “the most astonishing revenue and profit generation company in China,” #1 in Chinese online advertising, ~#3 in e-commerce via likely Toutiao and likely Douyin. “Our base case is that it does get banned and we still see a path to making at least five times our money” — TikTok US is not part of the base case for a 2019 position.

Anduril rhymes with Tesla 2013 and SpaceX 2018: solved hardware problems that are software-enabled, proven product-market fit, decades-stagnant giant markets, and “clear water between them and their next nearest private competitor.” Its last round included only public-market crossover investors beyond insiders — evidence of the institutionalization of growth investing.

The mistake taxonomy: Northvolt was a true error (“too enamored with the idea of a business… needing to exist” while misjudging execution), Intarcia’s FDA rejection was known uncertainty manifesting. The omissions sting more — skipping Stripe’s ~$50bn down round (“I think that was a mistake”) amid discussion of a possible ~$91.5bn round, while it is priced below Adyen on multiples and growing faster, and passing on Coinbase because “my very clever model… was just wildly off.”

Discipline in practice: the 2021-vintage fund deployed very little in 2022–23 while everyone played convertible-note games “pretending that companies were still worth what they were in 2021,” then started deploying more in 2024 across six countries. On herding: eight sheep in a pen, one jumps out, how many left? None — “you don’t understand sheep.”

“You can build a better business by staying private for longer” — liquidity will come from company-facilitated secondaries (Stripe, Databricks) and maybe private dividends, not private exchanges. His one 10-year hold: Bending Spoons, “an immune cell that kind of goes around gobbling up all of these slightly broken businesses” — its addressable market is “the broken parts of the venture capital ecosystem.”

🔗 Original source & video: Peter Singlehurst: Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvalt