YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Singlehurst

lines on the record: 93
first: 2025-03-19
most recent: 2025-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I mean, like our base case is that it does get banned, and we still see a path to making at least five times our money, even with TikTok not being part of that investment case.”
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“So, I mean, there are two main applications in China Tao Tiao. There's not really a direct comparable, but a better version of Apple News, and Doyan, which is like TikTok in China. They're the market leader in online advertising in China. And I think at the moment they're about number three in e-commerce in China. It's enormous. It's an absolute monster. And look, so TikTok has a big user base. And I don't want to sort of dismiss the impact it could have on the investment case if it were to remain in the US and go on to become very successful. But our investment in Byte dance is predicated on the business in China. And the quality of that business is quite something to behold.”
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“And it all shut down TikTok doesn't make any difference with By Dance. I mean, Bite Dance is the most astonishing revenue and profit generation company in China. The users, the profit that they make in China is just off the charts.”
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“I mean, I think Amazon for us as a firm was a formative investment. We first invested in Amazon as a firm in, I think, 2004. And we saw the growth of that through many, many years of unprofitability. And then into many years of profitability. Tesla, another example of that. We first invested in Tesla in 2013. We've been on the journey of these companies that have not been profitable when we first invested, where we've been considered, in many cases, daft for owning those companies for a really long period of time, but we've seen that scalability and that growth, those enduring competitive advantages manifest themselves into scale and profitability.”
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“I think this is the misnomer of our industry again, right? Like everybody sort of talks about 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. Does Amazon play into what you're doing?”
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“Yeah, we do think about it. We want to make sure that we have an appropriate balance of kinds of capital needs. quite a few of the companies we invested in, they were already profitable or they were turning profitable this year. And then the question of dilution becomes much less of a risk to the investment case because companies become self-funding.”
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“Yeah, look, so I think that when it would be naive to say there isn't more macro market risk, but you then need to make sure that you're paying a price that rewards you for taking that risk. And in a sense, that is our job as investors. It's to price risk appropriately. And as growth investors, we're trying to price the risk and uncertainty around companies becoming many times their current size. 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.”
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“I think that's true. And so look, this is where trying to have as broad a universe as you possibly can means that where appropriate, you can kind of dip into those hot areas if you find something of good enough quality. But you can also look elsewhere, right? So our universe consists of probably something like two to three thousand companies. Yeah, as a team, we can cover that universe. And if you look at what we did last year, we invested in six different countries. That's not because we were like trying to be exotic. It's just that we were finding great businesses all over the world. And a lot of them really off the beaten path. So obviously Benny Spoo's Milan, but we invested in a Portuguese business last year, invested in a Brazilian company, an Indian company, an Israeli company.”
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“I think it's totally right. I think that there is a herding into a much smaller number of names. I think there's quite a sort of understandable human psychology here, right? The industry is still digesting the trauma of 2021 and the pullback in 2022. What happens when an industry or an ecosystem goes through a traumatic period? You look for safety and you look for safety by not being too different from what your peers are doing. I think we've always been.”
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“So we deployed very little in 2022 and 2023. And it was really only as we got into last year that we started finding great businesses, but at great prices. And some of the games around valuation and structure starting to diminish a bit. And so we started deploying more in 2024.”
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“It slightly depends what fund you're talking about. We have some funds where we're able to recycle capital. And so within those funds, we are able to trim from companies that have gone public that we first own privately and recycle that capital into new private businesses. And we do that when we think that there is greater upside to be made in whatever the new companies that we're investing in from continuing to own that additional capital and that public company. In other more traditional fund structures that we manage, they are more sort of traditional limited life fund vehicles. We can do a little bit of recycling, but there I think the important thing is just about always keeping your bar high and being patient. So the last fund that we raised, we closed it in 2021. We deployed very little in 2022 and 2023 because valuations were still too high. There were all kinds of games being played with convertible notes and everybody sort of pretending that companies were still worth what they were in 2021.”
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“So, no, it's certainly not as high as that. And 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 high outcome scenario like a five times return. So for us, there's a long answer to this question, which is looking back at 30 years of public market data, but the short answer to the question is the probability of any given company going up five times if you were just picking randomly something like five percent. So if you can find a company where you think there is something like a 30 or 40% probability of it going up fivefold, well, actually, that's a really good odds. And so we're not looking for 80% probability of a company going up fivefold. If something is in the range of 30 to 50% probability of going up fivefold, well, then we'll take those bets every time.”
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“Yeah, 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. So we're being consistent in the levels of upside in our modeling. But then what we are testing is the probability and assumptions that you need to make to get to that level of outcome. And that's so that you can kind of have a mental, you can have a mental comparability across investment cases. Of course, we are also looking at longer tail, greater levels of upside in the companies that we're investing in, but the base modeling is always to that five times.”
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“Yeah, I mean, I think these numbers will be a little bit off. It's something like nine of our ten biggest investments are still found in Lab. So overwhelmingly, we still skew towards founder-led businesses, even at these levels of scale that we're operating at, right? And that's largely because if you're looking at companies that are doing 200 million dollars in revenue, if a founder isn't able to get to that level, often you've seen the churn before you're even kind of getting to our stage. And then we're still like selecting very positively towards businesses that are founder-led. It doesn't mean there aren't some great businesses out there that are led by non-founders. I think Vinted is a good example of that.”
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“It's a business strategy. 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 to be able to generate free cash flow from those. And then the competitive advantage often is also deeply integrated into the culture and the character of the founders and the kind of organization that they build. So can that erode over time? Yes, it can absolutely erode over time. But is it something that...”
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“I think it depends whether the competitive advantage lies in product or in something else, often the most enduring competitive advantages don't lie in a particular product, yeah, they don't lie in sort of like this, my mug is better than your mug and I'll continue to be able to sell more mugs than you can. And again, like the risk of sort of overusing the example, what is the competitive advantage of bending spoons? It's not any of their particular applications, right?”
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“The particular ambition or mission that that company has. So those enduring determinants of success at the second camp, third camp is financial analysis. Like, can this be a high return on equity business trying to look at precedents for high-returning businesses in industries? What is it in a given industry that means a business versus a business in a given industry can earn a high return on capital or a low return and the valuation? And 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 that we're able to pay today.”
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“So, yes, we do. And this is a framework that actually goes right the way back to when I was on the long term global growth team that came out of that team. We call it our 10 questions framework. The questions basically break down into four areas. The first couple of questions are about the growth opportunity over the next five years, but also over the next 10 years and beyond. So trying to look really far out. The next set of questions are about the enduring determinants of success. So product is one of those, but competitive advantage. And then importantly, how competitive advantage will evolve and change with time and scale. And then the third is probably the most intangible, but I think you could say the most important, which is organizational culture. And within that, we would, of course, include management team and their ability to execute. And I think the important thing to note here is that it's not about good cultures or bad cultures. It's about the alignment and the integration of the culture of an organization with”
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“Think there's a possibility of that, but I would say that there will still be companies 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 for AI to replicate. And again, like I think coming back to financial technology, I think this is quite a good area where the difficulties and the nuances of those kind of companies is a lot of it is about like how you manage regulation. And like will AI sort of have an impact here? Yes, I'm absolutely sure it will. But there's still foundational problems in building those kind of products that I don't think are just going to be totally blown apart by the fact that we now have these incredible AI tools.”
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“A disciplined investor mindset doesn't mean you should ever just not look at certain areas or not look at particular entries. Because if you can build conviction and why one company can be a breakout success, then you really should lead into valuation. 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 and then you lean into valuation too much. But the trick is not paying high prices. It's being judicious and selective about when you choose to pay a high price.”
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“The infrastructure level. I think we know what it looks like at the distribution level. But when you have these forces of commoditization within the LLM space, such as open source models such as deep-sea,”
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“We don't look at it and say, no, we don't want to be part of this. We look at it and we say, where do we think value is going to accrue? And if we're going to own a business for the next 10 years, what is going to define the right to win in terms of revenues, but also in terms of profits over the long term? And that comes down to things like competitive advantage, culture, these kind of quite intangible things. So we have companies that are part of this revolution of these amazing products in the AI space where shareholders in Databricks, we are shareholders in business, a company like TensTorrant, which is working at the sort of the chip and the infrastructure layer. And so we've done tons of work on this area. We haven't taken the plunge into any of the big AI LLM companies, not because they're not amazing products and they don't have big revenue bases, but because we still are trying to define what we think competitive advantage will look like at the large language model level. I think we know what it looks like.”
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“And then you can find some astonishing businesses. And I know that you had Luca Ferrari, the founder of Bending Spoons, on the show a little while back. I think that's an amazing example of this company that largely bootstrapped, has created the most amazing, scalable business model. Profitability like most companies would give an arm for. And they did it by sort of circumventing that world of overcapitalization.”
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“I think it's happening in certain parts of the market today, but it's not universally true. I'm going to use this as a slight kind of straw man schematic example. But if you want to invest in an AI LLM company, then this challenge that you highlight certainly continues to persist. If you want to invest in an area or a sector that was really, really hot three or four years ago, but where everybody's got a little bit bored and fed up and gone off and looked at looking at other things.”
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“I mean, the pipe down. Yeah. And it's like capital. And I think this has started to change, but I think that if you kind of go back in sort of the 2019, 2020, especially 2021, companies just were given too much capital.”
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“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 how they make foie gras.”
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“And I don't think that's necessarily a criticism of the venture world because by definition, right, if you're investing in a company where it's first being started, the question of return on equity is probably going to be somebody else's problem down the road. So it's not necessarily a problem for their business model, but I think it is a problem for the quality of company formation.”
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“Small amount of equity that was in the business, and anybody that comes from the world of public markets that comes from the world of trying to understand good quality businesses at scale knows that one of the single most important factors is the return that you make on equity. And this notion, this concept is almost an anathema within the venture world.”
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“Yeah, so that's when we first invest. And where we've done a really good job for our clients in investing is where we found companies that are kind of in that sort of ballpark and then they've gone on to become many, many times bigger than that. So take an example that's close to home wise. Wise was actually a little bit smaller than that when we first invested. I think it was probably about 50 or $60 million in revenue. It's now a multi-billion dollar revenue business. It's continued to grow in its core consumer to consumer FX market. It has this whole part of its business that didn't even exist when we first started investing, which is their business FX transfer market. And it's now a company that has a really high return on equity. But it was loss making when we first invested. What we got right there was like, yes, it was the total addressable market and all this kind of stuff, but it was also a business model that was able to scale and at scale would be able to earn a large amount of profit relative to the relative.”
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“Yeah, so we think about what we do in a quantitative and a qualitative way. So in the qualitative sense, we're trying to invest in companies that have been de-risked on the product side and you're then trying to analyze whether they can become exceptional businesses, meaning can they become many times bigger than their current size and can it be a business that earns a high return on its equity? So, and I'll come to your question on a tangible example, but if you look at the median company when we invest, the median company in our portfolios is doing about $200 million in revenue, is still growing at about 70% year over year, and is still very slightly loss-making, minus 14% ebit down margins, but these are median stats, right? So some are already profitable, some are still loss-making. So look, if a company is doing $200 million in revenue, chances are it's got a product that works, that people want to buy. So we're not taking, you know, product market fit risk.”
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“I think as ever when you're investing, you try over time to narrow down your area of focus and lean into those areas where you believe you have greater competitive advantage. So today we probably wouldn't invest in a company like Intarsio. We're much more focused today 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. And so what you've seen in our portfolios over the years is a continued refinement and a continued narrowing and focus of the kinds of companies that we invest in because those are the kinds of companies that we believe we have the greatest edge.”
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“We did make additional investment 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 believe were going to lead to real misalignment within the cap table, we passed on putting additional capital in.”
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“Look, there's always signs with hindsight. I think there were signs that we started to see over the course of our investment. And when we started to see those signs, we pulled back on providing additional capital to the company.”
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“But I think kind of part of the business of investing. Another example that I would put in the second camp where there are things that we got wrong in our analysis would be, quite topical today, Northfolt. Northfolt'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 Northvault needing to exist for all the reasons of energy sovereignty in Europe. But what we got wrong was the team's ability to execute. They didn't execute properly. They didn't execute well. And that's where that didn't work. And that's something I kick myself for because I think that is.”
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“Lanthroom mistakes. When you think back about the most painful mistake that caused the biggest learning, is that one that comes to mind, that there's lots of investments we've made that have been painful experiences. But ironically, I would say not all of our bad investments are necessarily mistakes. So when you invest, you are trying to predict what's going to happen in the future or estimate the probabilities of what will happen in the future. Sometimes you take on uncertainty when you invest.”
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“And I wish we'd been aware of some of those trade offs earlier on. Why were you not? I think often when you're investing, the things that give you some kind of edge or capability are the things that are different from how other people go about things. And there are some differences that you can have that are core to those advantages. And then sometimes there are differences that are not actually core to those advantages. And sometimes it's quite difficult to distinguish them. So, I mean, just to give you an example, I mean, We're a little bit different in terms of like how we recruit people, the kinds of people we bring into the organization. We're a bit different in terms of where we're based. We're based in Edinburgh and Scotland. These are the things I think are really important. I thought that those permanent capital vehicles were also something that was really important. And in some senses they are, but I think I probably overestimated how important they were as a difference. And actually, as it turns out, I think we can do a perfectly good job for our clients in permanent capital vehicles and also in more traditional structures. You mentioned there the learnings from mistakes, and it's really the craft of investing that is.”
2025-03-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Telling that younger self entering the position you were. That's a really hard question because the natural tendency there is to give advice that would help you avoid all the mistakes that you made. But the mistakes that you made are the things that have helped you learn, right? So I'm not sure I would give myself specific advice about the craft of investing because I think that's something you can only learn by experience. I think what I would say to myself is when it comes to thinking about how you can bring this capability in this offering to more of our clients, I would say to myself, be a little bit less purist. When we first started doing this, we were doing it from within these permanent capital vehicles. And we continue to do that. And it's amazing for being super long term. But the result of that was that we had a lot of our clients who wanted to be investing with us in the kinds of companies that we were investing in, these kind of high growth, often quite large private companies, but they just couldn't do these permanent capital vehicles. And they were sort of saying, look, can you just do a more traditional funds?”
2025-03-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this Like Airbnb and Spotify. Private companies. And I just put my hand up. I said, Well, I'll do it. Nervous. No, maybe I should have been. If I'd known what I was letting myself in for, I would have been nervous. What would you advise yourself now knowing all the”
2025-03-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-03-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-03-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-03-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I am excited for the show today. If you hadn't guessed it already, I'm a bit of an investing nerd, and one of the best, most thoughtful, most long-term investors is Bailey Gifford. They just do things differently. They don't care what others think, and they manage two hundred seventeen billion. Yes, $217 billion. Today, I'm so excited to welcome Peter Singlehurst, an old friend of the show. He's head of private companies at Bailey Gifford, where he's worked on deals like Epic Games, bending spoons, and Girille, Grammarly, Airbnb, and affirm, to name a few. But before we dive into today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow. Second, Kajabi's users keep 100% of their earnings, with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30,000.”
2025-03-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what people realise today is that you can build a better business by staying private for longer. You're starting to see the evolution of these very large company-facilitated secondary rounds. I can see those starting to become more of a feature. There's lots of investments we've made that have been painful experiences. But ironically, I would say not all of our bad investments are necessarily mistakes. We haven't taken the plunge into any of the big AI LLM companies. We still are trying to define what we think competitive advantage will look like at the large language model level.”
2025-03-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source