Peter Singlehurst: The Most Powerful Investor You've Never Heard of | 20VC #907

Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination.

Peter, I'm so excited for this. I've been looking forward to this one for a very long time, actually. So I'm s- thrilled that we could do it. And thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me, Harry. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, listen, I'm super excited for the discussion, but I do you want to start on you 'cause Baillie Gifford's a really fascinating organization. So I want to hear how did you make your way into the world of investing and come to be at Baillie Gifford and in the investing world?

Uh, in short, somewhat by accident. Um, uh, my ac- academic background was in philosophy. Uh, I did a master's in philosophy looking mainly at 20th century European philosophers. Finished my master's, didn't really know what to do, but heard about this thing called investment management, this firm called Baillie Gifford, and I quite liked the idea of, of living in Edinburgh. So I applied for the, uh, graduate training scheme, which is how pretty much all of our investors at Baillie Gifford start. Um, a lot of people go on to spend their entire careers here, and it's a partnership, uh, owned by people who started their careers on the, the, uh, the graduate training scheme. Um, so when I first joined, Baillie Gifford was really just a public markets, um, investment firm. Um, I spent time on various, uh, public teams, um, and then ended up on a team called the Long Term Global Growth Team within Baillie Gifford, which sort of does exactly what it says, um, on the tin. And it was roundabout this time that we started seeing more, uh, more of the businesses that we sort of always invested in, high growth companies, staying private longer. Um, and we sort of thought that, you know, maybe this was a structural change that was happening. We thought that maybe actually the process of analyzing these companies might be pretty similar to the process of analyzing a lot of the public companies that we'd always invested in, and that maybe we might be able to access some of these companies because, well, these were really the businesses we'd always invested in, these kind of pretty substantial high growth companies. Um, and so we, we start- we set off doing that from within, uh, a permanent pool of capital that we've managed for the last 114 years, uh, called the Scottish Mortgage Fund. It's confusingly named. It's got nothing to do with mortgages. Uh, it's a, it's a 100-year-plus permanent pool of capital. And we set about trying to do things a bit differently, so being very long term within this evergreen fund, being very low cost in terms of the, the fees that we charged our clients for investing in these companies, and doing it in such a way that was really joined up between our private and public company investing activities. And so that's how we started, uh, doing this, and we, we created a dedicated team in 2017, um, which has continued to grow. We've continued to deploy more of our client's capital into high growth private companies, and I think increasingly, we're cognizant that it's strategically important for how we invest for all of our clients, public and private. Um, and I think that sort of joined up approach is sort of integral, really, to how we operate.