Peter Singlehurst：拒投 Stripe、Coinbase，并在 Northvolt 上亏损的经验教训

I think what people realize 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.

Peter, we last did this on Zoom. I'm so pleased that we get to do this in person. Thank you so much for joining me today.

1. Accidentally Running a Global Investment Giant

It's a pleasure, Harry. Really nice to see you again.

It's so good to have you here. But listen, I actually scrapped the “How did you get into venture?” question because it was, bluntly, very obvious for a lot of people who went to St. Andrews, studied computer science, and then became what they did. But we were just chatting now, and you said something about how you got into private-company investing. It was so cool that I wanted to ask it on the show. How did you get into private-company investing at Baillie Gifford? What was that moment?

The specific moment was that I was on a public-market strategy. It's called the Long Term Global Growth strategy, and it's a $50 billion public-market strategy. This was in 2014. I was working with 3 very senior investment partners within the team: James Anderson, likely Mark Urquhart, and Tom Slater.

We were starting to see these private companies of real scale—the sorts of companies that we'd always invested in. Back then, it was businesses like Airbnb and Spotify. James, Mark, and Tom had their hands full looking after tens of billions of dollars of our clients' capital, so we were sitting in a room and James said, “Who's going to do this? Who's going to look at these private companies?”

I just put my hand up and said, “I'll do it.” That's how it all started.

Were you nervous?

No. Maybe I should have been. If I had known what I was letting myself in for, I would have been nervous.

What would you advise yourself now, knowing all that you do? What would you tell that younger self entering the position you were entering?

That's a really hard question because the natural tendency 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?

I'm not sure I would give myself specific advice about the craft of investing because I think that's something you can learn by experience. I think what I would say to myself is, when it comes to thinking about how you can bring this capability and this offering to more of our clients, 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. It's amazing for being super long-term. But the result of that was that we had a lot of clients who wanted to be investing with us in the kinds of companies that we were investing in—these high-growth, often quite large private companies—but they just couldn't do these permanent-capital vehicles.

They were saying, “Look, can you just do a more traditional fund structure?” I wish we'd compromised—or, not compromised, but 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. There are some differences that can be core to those advantages, and then sometimes there are differences that aren't actually core to those advantages. Sometimes it's quite difficult to distinguish them.

To give you an example, we're a little bit different in terms of how we recruit people and 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, in Scotland. These are the things that I think are really important.

I thought those permanent-capital vehicles were also something that was really important. In some senses, they are, but I think I probably overestimated how important they were as a difference. 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 the learnings from mistakes, and it's really the craft of investing that's learned through mistakes. When you think back about the most painful mistake that caused the biggest learning, is there one that comes to mind?

There are lots of investments we've made that have been painful experiences, but ironically, I would say not all bad investments are necessarily mistakes.

When you invest, you're 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, and the negative outcomes go against you. That's part and parcel of investing.

There are then other kinds of investments where they are mistakes because there's something you should have seen, there's something that you didn't weigh appropriately, and you missed it. Those are mistakes.

I'll give you 2 examples of both camps. The first company we invested in that went bankrupt was a company likely called Intarcia. It was actually a biotech company that was developing a GLP-1. Imagine if that company had managed to stay solvent—it would have been an astonishing investment. But it didn't. They had the therapy rejected by the FDA, and they went out of business.

That was a known uncertainty, and that risk manifested and went against us. We lost money for our clients. It was still very painful, but I think it was part of the business of investing.

Another example that I would put in the second camp, where there were things that we got wrong in our analysis, would be Northvolt. Northvolt has been a very bad investment for us.

What was the mistake there?

We were too enamored with the idea of a business like Northvolt needing to exist for all the reasons of energy sovereignty in Europe. What we got wrong was the team's ability to execute. They didn't execute properly; they didn't execute well. That's why it didn't work.

That's something I kick myself for, because I think that is something we should have seen.

Were there signs?

2. The 10 Questions Baillie Gifford Needs to Answer to Make an Investment

There's always a sign with hindsight. I think there were signs that we started to see over the course of our investment. When we started to see those signs, we pulled back on providing additional capital to the company.

That would have been my subsequent question. With those forgivable mistakes, like your first evaluation, the really painful ones are when you sink more and more in and can't detach your emotions from that investment. Did you continuously double down?

We did make additional investments beyond our first investment, but there were times after that when we were asked for more capital. For reasons around the execution, but also for reasons around the structure of the financing rounds themselves—we believed they were going to lead to real alignment within the cap table—we passed on putting additional capital in.

You mentioned Intarcia. There's a lot of risk baked into that. There's market-timing risk, there's regulatory risk with FDA approvals. That's a lot of risk that a lot of venture masters won't take, period. How do you think about the risks that you're willing to take on entering an investment versus the risks that you're not willing to take?

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 a greater competitive advantage.

Today, we probably wouldn't invest in a company like Intarcia. We're much more focused today, and have really been for the last 5 or 6 years, on companies that we define as true growth-stage companies. We're not taking product risk; we're taking business-model quality and scalability risk.

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 where we believe we have the greatest edge.

It's funny. I've got Mitchell Green from Lead Edge on the show. Lead Edge has been very successful in growth, and they have their 8 principles for what they invest in: profitable, high growth, good margins, no competition, and so on. I'm like, “Yeah, sure. I want to marry Mitchell, of course.” It's very obvious when you think about it.

When you think about your characteristics—business-model scalability risk—what does that mean or look like in an actual, tangible example?

We think about what we do in a quantitative and a qualitative way. In the qualitative sense, we're trying to invest in companies that have been de-risked on the product side. 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 they be a business that earns a high return on its equity?

If a company's doing $200 million in revenue, it's got a product that works and that people want to buy. We're not taking product-market-fit risk.

That's your entry point?

Yes, that's when we're first investing. Where we've done a really good job for our clients is when we've found companies that are in that sort of ballpark and then they've gone on to become many, many times bigger than that.

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 million or $60 million in revenue. It's now a multibillion-dollar-revenue business.

It's continued to grow in its core consumer-to-consumer foreign-exchange market. It has this whole part of its business that didn't even exist when we first started investing, which is its business foreign-exchange-transfer market. 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 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 relatively small amount of equity that was in the business.

Anybody who comes from the world of public markets, who 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. This concept is almost an anathema within the venture world.

I don't think that's necessarily a criticism of the venture world because, by definition, if you're investing in a company when it's first being started, the question of return on equity is probably going to be somebody else's problem down the road. It's not necessarily a problem for their business model.

But I think it is a problem for the quality of company formation because it distorts the quality of company formation. It leads to overcapitalization of businesses.

I sometimes have this mental model in my head, and it's not a very nice mental image. You know how they make foie gras?

I love this one.

We got the foie-gras-ing of startups pinned down, yeah. It's capital. I think this has started to change, but if you go back to 2019, 2020, and especially 2021, the companies were just given too much capital.

I think they still are, Peter. If we're actually looking at it, you essentially have this surge of growth capital. You have the supply side of cash going way up, and then those investors are going, “You know what? I'm willing to pay 2 years ahead of time for this $30 million ARR company because I know that it's going to be a $10 billion company. If I get in at $2.5 billion, I'm still going to get my 4x. I just guarantee it by getting in early.”

What they think is that the amount of capital doesn't change the outcome. I think we both agree that if you stuff something with so much cash, the foie gras blows up.

I think it's happening in certain parts of the market today, but it's not universally true. I'll use this as a straw-man schematic example: if you want to invest in an AI LLM company, then the challenge that you highlight certainly continues to persist.

If you want to invest in an area or a sector that was really, really hot 3 or 4 years ago, but where everybody's got a little bit bored and fed up and gone off looking at other things—if you want to invest in a fintech company today, for instance—actually, a lot of these companies are making amazing strides towards profitability.

They're not having everyone and their mother throwing capital at them. You can find some really good businesses that are either already profitable or making great strides toward profitability, still have enormous opportunities ahead of them, great products, and great management teams, and you're not being asked to pay the earth.

3. Why We Did Not Double Down in Stripe and Turned Down Coinbase

Or you can look even further afield. This is where, for us, we're globalists and generalists. We're not beholden to investing in particular sectors or geographies. You can find some astonishing businesses.

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 was largely bootstrapped, has created the most amazing scalable business model, and has profitability that most companies would give an arm for. They did it by circumventing that world of overcapitalization.

Do you sit internally in Baillie Gifford and say, “We're consciously not going to be a part of this new generation of AI companies because the pricing is so out of whack?”

We don't look at it and say, “No, we don't want to be part of this.” We look at it and say, “Where do we think value is going to accrue?” 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?

That comes down to things like competitive advantage and culture—these quite intangible things. We have companies that are part of this revolution of amazing products in the AI space. We're shareholders in Databricks. We're shareholders in a company like Tenstorrent, which is working at the chip and infrastructure layer.

We've done tons of work in this area. We haven't taken the plunge into any of the big AI LLM companies, not because they're not amazing products and don't have big revenue bases, but because we're still 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 at 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 and DeepSeek—

I completely agree with this. I think everyone agrees that there's commoditization within the middle layer, being the LLMs. But when you look at the application layer, the scalability of these companies in terms of revenue is unlike anything we've seen before, from what was likely Manus to Midjourney to Lovable to Bolt. They're scaling at $3 million, $4 million, $5 million a week, and so the price is exorbitant.

Can you play at the application layer and have your disciplined-investor mindset?

A disciplined-investor mindset doesn't mean you should never look at certain areas or particular industries. If you can build conviction in why one company can be a breakout success, then you really should lean into valuation.

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. 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.

The trick isn't avoiding high prices; it's being judicious and selective about when you choose to pay a high price.

Do you know what I'm really worried about? I'm really worried that we see this revenue scaling like we've never seen before, and there's a generation of enterprise companies we're invested in that are not growing from $2 million to $100 million in a year. They're triple-triple-double-double.

Have we misled a generation of companies about revenue scaling? Has that changed, and won't triple-triple-double-double be enough now to get that Series C, D, or E round?

I think there's a possibility of that. But I would say that there will still be companies from that 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.

Coming back to financial technology, I think this is quite a good area where the difficulties and nuances of those kinds of companies are about how you manage regulation. Will AI have an impact here? Yes, I'm absolutely sure it will. But there are still foundational problems in building those kinds 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.

Can I ask you, when you think about defensibility and trying to understand revenue quality, I looked at 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer. I think it's probably one of the best. I don't know if you've read it.

No.

Oh my God, I'm going to send it to you. It basically distinguishes what makes a company defensible and breaks it down into 7 different factors. Do you have a framework for trying to understand the sustainability of value in a company?

Yes, we do. This is a framework that actually goes right the way back to when I was on the Long Term Global Growth team. We call it our 10 Questions framework.

I won't run through all the 10 questions, but they break down into 4 areas. The first couple of questions are about the growth opportunity over the next 5 years, but also over the next 10 years and beyond. We're trying to look really out.

The next set of questions is about the enduring determinants of success. Product is one of those, but competitive advantage is another, and then importantly, how competitive advantage will evolve and change with time and scale.

The third area is probably the most intangible, but you could say the most important, which is organizational culture. Within that, we would of course include your management team and their ability to execute.

The important thing to note here is that it's not about good cultures or bad cultures. It's about the alignment and integration of the culture of an organization with the particular ambition or mission that that company has.

The fourth area is financial analysis. Can this be a high-return-on-equity business? We're trying to look at precedents for high-returning businesses in industries. What is it in a given industry that means one business can earn a high return on capital while another business in the same industry earns a low return?

Then there's valuation. Our valuation methodologies probably look a lot more like public-market valuation methodologies because we're trying to find companies where we think we can have very long-term intrinsic value that is much, much greater than the market price we're able to pay today.

You said “enduring competitive advantage.” One thing that I think we're seeing today is the cannibalism of a lot of existing business models with new AI tools coming out. Do you think it's possible to accurately predict enduring competitive advantage with the shifting sands and so much changing underneath technology companies?

I think it depends on whether the competitive advantage lies in the product or in something else. Often, the most enduring competitive advantages don't lie in a particular product.

They don't lie in, “My mug is better than your mug, and I'll continue to be able to sell more mugs than you can.” Again, at the risk of overusing the example, what is the competitive advantage of Bending Spoons? It's not any of their particular applications.

It's a playbook for M&A. It's a business strategy and an approach to how you're able to integrate a business that you've acquired into a shared set of services and tools you've built out to enable those businesses to grow and become even better products, and to generate free cash flow from them.

The competitive advantage is often also deeply integrated into the culture and the character of the founders, and the kind of organization that they build. Can that erode over time? Yes, it absolutely can erode over time. But is it something that can be destroyed by AI? I'm not sure. I think it's more enduring than that.

If the competitive advantage for Business XYZ is that its widget is better than somebody else's widget, could AI make a better widget? Well, maybe.

Is there a stark difference when you compare investments where the founder is the CEO and where the founder isn't? Obviously, Paul Graham eulogized this earlier this year, but I'm intrigued, when you talk about organization and culture, to see if you have data around whether founder-led companies endure and sustain much better than non-founder-led companies.

I think these numbers will be a little bit off, but something like 9 out of our 10 biggest investments are still founder-led. Overwhelmingly, we still skew toward founder-led businesses, even at these levels of scale.

That's largely because if you're looking at companies doing $200 million in revenue, if a founder isn't able to get to that level, often you've seen the churn before you're even getting to our stage. We're still selecting very positively toward businesses that are founder-led.

That doesn't mean there aren't some great businesses out there led by non-founders. Vinted is a good example of that.

I was seeing the same. I was actually messaging Thomas earlier. Project Europe, with the amazing Vinted business—

Yeah, and a non-founder that's totally transformed it.

It's sort of a refounding, to be fair.

It sort of is. I think that's a good way of putting it.

Totally agree. I'm a podcaster, so we're good at packaging.

You mentioned growth as the number one. When we look at something like Bending Spoons, I think quite publicly the round was at a $5 billion valuation. When you think about upside requirements on entry, do you do outcome-scenario planning and think, “If X and Y happen, then it's a $25 billion company and we've got a 5x”?

We are very consistent in how we model upside for every company we look at. We try to model to a 5x upside, so we're being consistent in the levels of upside in our modeling.

But what we're testing is the probability and the assumptions that you need to make to get to that level of outcome. That means you can have a mental comparability across investment cases.

Of course, we're 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 5x.

What is an acceptable probability? Is it that we feel there's an 80% chance, and if it's above 80% then we'll write the check?

Everything has a 1% chance, so no. It's certainly not as high as that. If you think there's an 80% chance of making a 5x return on an investment, 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 5x return.

For us, there's a long answer to this question, which involves looking back at 30 years of public-market data. The short answer is that the probability of any given company going up 5x, if you were just picking randomly, is something like 5%.

If you can find a company where you think there's something like a 30% or 40% probability of it going up 5-fold, those are really good odds. We're not looking for an 80% probability of a company going up 5-fold. If something is in the range of a 30% to 50% probability of going up 5-fold, we'll take those bets every time.

How do you think about duration? Your structure means that, technically, you're open-ended and don't need to think about it, but there's always the opportunity cost of cash. It can always compound better somewhere else. How do you think about duration and the willingness to wait for that?

It slightly depends on which fund you're talking about. We have some funds where we're able to recycle capital. Within those funds, we're able to trim positions in companies that have gone public, which we first owned privately, and recycle that capital into new private businesses.

We do that when we think there's greater upside to be made in the new company we're investing in than from continuing to own that additional capital in the public company.

4. What I Learned Losing 100s of $Ms

In other, more traditional fund structures that we manage, they are more traditional limited-life fund vehicles. We can do a little bit of recycling, but there the important thing is about always keeping your bar high and being patient.

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, with everybody pretending that companies were still worth what they were in 2021.

We deployed very little in 2022 and 2023. It was really only as we got into last year that we started finding great businesses at great prices, and some of the games around valuation and structure started to diminish a bit. We started deploying more in 2024.

It doesn't feel like it's much better pricing, Peter. Maybe we're in different markets, but it doesn't feel like the excessive excitement is gone and we're back to a state of rationality and calm.

It depends where you look. If you look at the data, multiples in Series C and beyond in the US are below 2021, although they're still at an elevated level.

I never care about these data reports that are always produced because they count a thousand Series Cs, and no one cares about a thousand Series Cs. I care about the 5 Series Cs that are going to be a 25x.

This is a game of outliers, and for the outliers, they're more known and more obvious. This excess supply of cash just concentrates more quickly, and we see those prices go way up. That's why you have unbelievably expensive $5 billion and $10 billion rounds for these Series Cs and Ds.

I think you're totally right. I think there is a herding into a much smaller number of names. There's an understandable human psychology here. 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 like that. That's why we did what we did in 2021 and 2022. It's a brilliant story about the boy and the teacher. Do you know this one?

It's fantastic.

The teacher says, in math class, “There are 8 sheep in a pen, and 1 jumps out. How many are left in the pen?” The boy is the only one to say, “None.”

The teacher says, “No. What do you mean? You don't understand math.” The boy goes, “No, you don't understand sheep.”

That's a great story.

It's exactly that. We're the most herd-like people. We just follow the herd, which is exactly to your point. If you go to fintech—or Web3, although I don't know if Web3 is still a thing—I'm sure you can get bargain pricing.

I think that's true. This is where trying to have as broad a universe as you possibly can means that, where appropriate, you can dip into those hot areas if you find something of good enough quality, but you can also look elsewhere.

Our universe consists of probably something like 2,000 to 3,000 companies. As a team, we can cover that universe. If you look at what we did last year, we invested in 6 different countries. That's not because we were trying to be exotic; it's just that we were finding great businesses all over the world, and a lot of them were really off the beaten path.

Obviously, there was Bending Spoons in Milan, but we invested in a Portuguese business last year, a Brazilian company, an Indian company, and a likely Israeli company that's really interesting.

When you look at the Brazilian and Indian markets—and I'm going to get a load of hate for this—Brazil has not shown pathways to liquidity at scale. They've shown Nubank, and everyone says Nubank—it's 1 in 20 years. There's dLocal and Bunny [?], but they're not at all at scale.

India has continuously actually been a darling of this technology ecosystem: “Now's the time, now's the time.” We're still waiting. How did you think about that macro market risk?

I think it would be naive to say there isn't more market risk, but you then need to make sure you're paying a price that rewards you for taking that risk. In a sense, that is our job as investors: to price risk appropriately.

As growth investors, we're trying to price the risk and uncertainty around companies becoming many times their current size, the path to exit, and the path to liquidity.

I think this is where having a very long-term time horizon helps. We're willing to take a little bit more risk there, again, provided we're being paid to take that risk.

Do you proactively plan ahead in terms of the capital requirements a business will need, and do you really think about the dilution that will be incurred? An Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, or very cash-consumptive business versus a traditional enterprise software company, which can be much less cash-consumptive—do you think about that?

We do think about it. We want to make sure that we have an appropriate balance of kinds of capital needs. But last year, quite a few of the companies we invested in were already profitable, or they were turning profitable that year.

The question of dilution becomes much less of a risk to the investment case because companies become self-funding.

It's terrible. They're clearly not growing fast enough. Back into growth, we don't see these in the black. It's always worrying.

I think this is another misnomer of our industry. Everybody talks about this trade-off between growth and profitability. It should never be about growth or profitability. It should be about incremental return on invested capital and long-run return on equity.

Does Amazon play into what you're saying? For years, Amazon didn't have profitability, and it continuously reinvested in new products and R&D. Does that play into what you're saying?

Amazon, for us as a firm, was a formative investment. We first invested in Amazon as a firm in, I think, 2004. We saw the growth of that through many years of unprofitability and then into many years of profitability.

Tesla is another example. We first invested in Tesla in 2013. We've been on the journey with these companies that were not profitable when we first invested, where we've been considered mad for owning them for really long periods of time. But we've seen that scalability and growth, and those enduring competitive advantages, manifest themselves in scale and profitability.

5. The ByteDance Investment Case

What company do you think you're considered mad for owning today?

ByteDance.

That's bold. You want to go there? Talk to me about why you say that, and how do you get comfortable with the knowledge that, bluntly, there's an invisible hand—the US administration—that could end it all? It could end it all and shut down TikTok. Does that make any difference with ByteDance?

ByteDance is the most astonishing revenue- and profit-generation company in China. The users and the profit that they make in China are just off the charts.

I have an incredibly Western view, which makes me feel incredibly naive. What is the ByteDance business in China? Why is it so good?

There are 2 main applications in China: likely Toutiao, which doesn't really have a direct comparable, but is like a better version of Apple News, and likely Douyin, 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 3 in e-commerce in China. It's enormous. It's an absolute monster.

TikTok has a big user base, and I don't want to 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 ByteDance is predicated on the business in China, and the quality of that business is quite something to behold.

If TikTok US were banned, or were no longer part of the core ByteDance business, to what extent would it have an impact? Are we talking 5%, 20%, 25%?

Our base case is that it does get banned, and we still see a path to making at least 5 times our money even with TikTok not being part of that investment case.

Wow. When did you get in?

2019, I think. We weren't super early in it, but it's grown astonishingly since we invested.

How do you think about liquidity there? I have many LPs who are also holders of ByteDance, either directly or through different funds, and they're all asking, “When's it coming?” How does it provide liquidity to its investors?

I think it'll be public at some point, either in the US or Hong Kong. Obviously, one of those is probably a little bit more likely than the other.

Do you think there's any chance now, with China–US relations, that it could go public in the US?

You can't rule anything out at the moment with the US and the things that are happening there. The company also, as I think has been publicly reported, buys back its own shares. They're so profitable.

We mentioned where you go public. The question I actually have to ask is: why go public?

When you look at the CEOs, they said very rightly, I think, on the show the other day, “If you need a 25-year-old analyst from a bank to tell you that you should increase your margins, maybe you don't actually have a great business.”

Why should companies go public anymore, given the extended privatization windows we have for capital markets?

I'm not sure I particularly have a good answer to that question either. That's why I'm a private-company investor, investing in private companies on behalf of my clients.

But you do this from within a large public-market organization. Has that changed for you?

No. It's just continued to accentuate.

Because of the excess supply of cash in private markets, meaning you don't need—

I think it's more subtle than that. I don't think it's necessarily about capital cycles within private markets leading companies to stay private longer. Of course, it matters.

I think what people realize today is that you can build a better business by staying private for longer.

Why do you think that is?

Focus. It's really hard to be a public company. It's not just the reporting requirements that you have; it's that you can have people owning your shares for all sorts of reasons that are misaligned with what you're trying to do as a company.

You have to do everything in the cold light of day. All your competitors get to know pretty much everything about your business because you have to tell your shareholders pretty much everything about your business. It's just really hard.

6. Why Would Any Good Company Go Public Today

I say this with an enormous amount of respect for companies that go public well and are able to flourish as public businesses, because it's really hard. I think companies realize they can have greater focus by remaining private for longer.

There are some good reasons for going public. I think it's right that employees should be able to get liquidity, but that's increasingly being served by these very large secondary private rounds.

If you're an acquisitive business, having a public currency can be helpful. If you're a business that operates in a regulated environment, it can be helpful for regulators to see you as a public company.

I was once a shareholder in Epic Games, which has been private since 1992. I once asked Tim Sweeney, the founder of that company, how he thinks about that. He had quite an interesting answer.

He said, “At some point, it will be easier to be public than it is to be private. At the moment, it's much easier to be private than it is to be public. But at some point, the very forces that exist within your business mean that the easier option is to be public.”

Those forces can be the need for liquidity, the need to be acquisitive, or the need to engage with regulators. Those can become good reasons for becoming public.

If we exist in this continued world of extended private companies being capitalized by large pools of capital, how do we get liquidity? We used to go through IPOs. How do you plan for a world where there's no IPO, Stripe stays private for another 10 years, and we just hold?

I think you're starting to see the evolution of these very large, company-facilitated secondary rounds. Stripe and Databricks—I can see those starting to become more of a feature.

I don't think we'll end up in a world where you have exchanges for private companies. There's too much complexity in the share-class structures. You have things like likely ROFRs, company control, and so on. I can't see those exchanges really working.

Maybe we also get into a world where these companies become very profitable, continue to grow, and start paying out dividends as private businesses. Maybe that becomes a source of liquidity for investors.

Did you do the $60 billion Databricks round?

I'm trying to remember. I think the first one we invested in was at about a $30 billion valuation. I think we did our pro rata in that round.

Do you see a 5x from $60 billion?

Yes, but remember, we did our pro rata in the $60 billion round, which is a little bit different from saying we're doubling down. We put a small amount of extra capital into it, but we didn't double down in the $60 billion round.

7. Growth Stage Investing Trends

Do you think a lot of these private investors that are putting billions of dollars to work now, and we're seeing them move from venture to this new IPO-style investing, are going to get burned?

I don't know. The trend we've seen in growth-stage private-company investing over the last 10 years looks a little bit like this.

These companies used to be public businesses, and the natural owners of them were public-market organizations. It was Baillie Gifford, T. Rowe Price, and BlackRock. Companies started staying private longer, so the natural owners and the long-term historic owners got pushed out of owning those kinds of companies.

That created a vacuum. Into that vacuum—and I don't mean this in a pejorative sense—the opportunists came. You had hedge funds and traditional early-stage investors spinning up growth-stage funds and owning companies that they knew, but had never owned at that stage and scale before.

After 2021, a lot of those people got pushed out, but some have remained, and some have remained at real scale. My hope is that they're developing real expertise in what it means to own companies at this stage and scale.

You want to have good owners of companies. You want to operate in a market where you have rational investors making rational decisions and doing solid analysis on companies, because you need that market to be pricing efficiently.

8. How Anduril Becomes a $200BN Company

I think there are examples of that, but I think what you're really seeing is more institutionalization and professionalization of this market.

To give you one example of what that can look like, we're shareholders in Anduril. We first invested in that company last year. In the round that we took part in, there were insiders in it, but other than the insiders, the only new investors that came into that round were investors that were traditional public-market investors but could also do some private investing.

That's because the company needed investors who were used to owning companies at that stage of growth and that scale, and who over time could help them transition into the public markets.

Can you talk to me about the rationale behind that one? I'm a big believer in Anduril, so I have many thoughts about why I'm excited for them. But why did you get so excited about them?

I could go into the specifics of the company, but what Anduril conjured in my mind was a pattern we'd seen in 2 places before. Those 2 companies were Tesla and SpaceX.

What Anduril has done is develop products that are largely software-enabled but still involve really hard technical hardware problems that they've solved. They've proven that the products work and that people want to buy them, so there's no question about product-market fit or whether they work.

They're operating in very, very large markets that have largely not changed in decades, and there's clear water between them and their next-nearest private competitor.

That was true of Tesla in 2013. It was true of SpaceX in 2018. I think it's true of Anduril today.

It's that combination of a really difficult hardware problem that they've solved, an industry that has largely not changed, and clear space between them and other private competitors.

You mentioned that they wanted people who were public but also did private. We've seen Sequoia do that Evergreen fund structure, believing that you have asymmetric information because you're a private investor, and that you should be able to manage the book more efficiently than your public-market LPs because of that exposure.

Do you buy that, or do you think there's a fundamentally different mindset required to manage a private book versus a public book?

I don't think there are big differences. There are differences, right? How you go about sourcing opportunities is obviously totally different in the private markets compared to the public markets.

The core analytical questions, I think, are pretty similar. You have different sources of information whether you're doing public or private, but you're still looking for the same characteristics.

To make it very simple, you're still looking for companies that can become many times their current size and earn a high return on equity.

I think one of the big differences is in what it means to be a good owner of a growth-stage company. There are big differences here not only between private ownership and public ownership, but also between growth-stage ownership and venture ownership.

You mentioned Anduril. 2 questions on the back of that. You compared it to SpaceX and Tesla, which I think are great analogies. We're seeing SpaceX and Tesla both be hit by Elon's political activity. How do you think about that as a risk?

I worry about it. The thing that people forget about SpaceX is that there's an amazing management team there that is not Elon Musk. You have Gwynne Shotwell, who is able to keep a very low profile, perhaps precisely because of the high profile that Elon Musk has.

That gives us a lot of comfort. But is it a concern? Yes, of course it's a concern.

It doesn't matter how low profile she is if you have whole states canceling Starlink contracts. That will continue. Canada is their second-biggest market, and Mexico is their third. At what point does it become a critical weakness?

I think that's a very big worry.

When you look at your Andurils, your SpaceXs, and your Teslas, and you're seeing more and more move to defense and hard tech—to really challenging technical problems—I worry that this generation of investors, potentially including me, is almost out of date in this new world of very challenging technical problems.

No longer is it triple-triple-double-double enterprise investing. Have the heuristics changed on what it takes to be a venture investor?

I've never thought of myself as an expert or an investor in technology. I invest in companies. I invest in businesses.

Those businesses will often use technology to create incredible business models that are very scalable and can be high-returning. But I'm not a student of technology; I'm a student of businesses and business models.

There are people on my team who are much more interested in technology itself and also love investing and love businesses. But my focus—and I think this is a focus that perhaps makes me better at growth-stage investing than I would be at venture-stage investing—is trying to understand great businesses, not great technologies.

9. Is 2024 Different to the Madness of 2021 and 2022

What do you worry about most today in the investing world?

Deglobalization. We're global investors. One of the things that's made us successful over the years is finding interesting companies all over the world.

This is a story we love to tell our clients: the very first investment Baillie Gifford had ever made was in a Malaysian rubber plantation that was producing rubber for the tires that were going to be needed on the Model T Ford.

We've always been global. The very first private investment we ever made was not in the US; it was in China. Sitting in Edinburgh, in Scotland, there aren't that many companies to invest in there, so our remit, our investment, and our client base have always been global.

From an investment perspective, but also just from the perspective of humanity, I worry about an era of more barriers and weaker ties between countries because I think it's better for investing and better for us as people.

Do you think China is a massive opportunity as the world's capital markets withdraw from it? Does China remain a big opportunity?

I think it does. I think it remains a big opportunity.

Are you still actively investing in China?

Yes. In the public markets, we have a team in China. We continue to look at opportunities in China.

Is there added risk in investing in China? Of course there is, absolutely. But you need to be rewarded for taking that risk.

I'm a big believer in the saying, “Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.” Everyone is fearful of China right now. If everybody is saying one thing—that China is uninvestable—you would be daft not to question that and say, “Hang on a minute. Is that actually the case? Maybe I should go and have a look.”

I'm hoping to get out there over the summer. I haven't been in far too long. But yes, we'll continue looking for investments in China.

10. The Decision-Making Process Inside a $217BN Firm

Can I ask, if we peel back the curtain on Baillie Gifford's investment process, when we look at private-company investing, what does that investment decision-making process look like internally?

The decision-making process is always a manifestation of that funnel. If I look at last year, we met 1,000 companies. We looked at 600 private financing rounds. We did 65 first cuts of our diligence process, 30 deep dives, and made 11 new investments.

How big is the team?

10 people. But we work within a team of 170 public-market growth-equity investors, and we're able to draw on that resource.

That was just your team?

Yes, just our team. We met 1,000 companies, looked at 600 private financing rounds, did 65 first cuts, 30 deep dives, and made 11 new investments.

On the companies that we put through our diligence process, we do our diligence, which culminates in the 10 Questions document that I talked about. If you were to see one of these, they look like essays. We don't use PowerPoint.

We sit down and discuss them as a team. We do that on Thursday afternoons every week.

Every week?

The whole team is there.

How long do you set aside for it?

We're slowly increasing the amount of time that we set aside for them because we always get to the end of the discussion hungry for more discussion. At the moment, the discussions are an hour and a half.

The investment committee then meets on Friday afternoons. It's a pretty small investment committee. There are 4 of us, and we decide what to do.

11. How Does Re-Investment Decision-Making Differ from Original Investments

Inevitably, there will be additional things you want to follow up on, but it's the core decision-making group for our dedicated funds. There are 4 of us.

What is the check-size range across the 11?

There's a large range because there are different pools of capital that we invest from. They can range from $10 million to $150 million.

How does that change when you're making reinvestments? Is it a different process psychologically?

When we're making reinvestments, we revisit the investment case. We do an updated 10 Questions document, and we re-examine that 5x upside case.

I guess there are 3 different decisions that you need to see 5x on the reinvestment.

Well, it varies slightly. If you're going to double down on a company, then absolutely, you need to see a 5x on a reinvestment.

If you're going to do a small pro rata check, I think pro rata checks, if they're relatively small, can just be part and parcel of being a good investor. We'll do them provided things are going in the right direction.

Then, of course, there's the decision not to do anything. We decide not to take part in a round where we're not seeing the execution that we need, or we think the valuation just doesn't make sense.

When did you not do that, and with the benefit of hindsight think, “Wow, we missed that”?

You mean missing a new investment?

No, you invested, and then it came back and you thought, “I'm not feeling it so much.”

Actually, I'll tell you about the round that we didn't take part in and came very, very close to. We first invested in Stripe at about a $30 billion valuation, but we didn't take part in the down round that they did in 2022, which was at $50 billion.

The down round?

No, we invested at $30 billion, it got up to about $90 billion, and then I think it came back to about $50 billion.

All right.

We didn't take part in that round, and I think we should have.

Why did you not?

That's asking me to go back. I think that, at that particular time, growth had come back. We had slightly more questions around the build-out of a more holistic software offering over and above the merchant-acquiring business.

It was quite nascent. I don't think they'd made the progress that we would have hoped they would have made. We said, “We've got meaningful amounts of capital invested in this company. Let's just see how this goes.”

I think that was a mistake. I think we should have put more in then.

You think it can be a $250 billion company?

I think Patrick and John are amazing. But Stripe is priced even less than Adyen if you look at it on a multiples basis, and it's growing quicker.

Their last round was what? I think they're doing one at the moment, aren't they, at $91.5 billion or something like that, which is double Adyen in terms of market cap.

I think it is.

Does that mean Adyen's undervalued?

You need to speak to my public-market colleagues.

Do you ever want to do public markets?

I did public markets, but we continue to own a number of our companies after they go public. We're still big shareholders in Affirm and Wise.

Would I ever want to go back to just doing public markets? I am so lucky and privileged in what I get to do. I think the reason I love doing what I do is because you get to expand the map—or at least expand the map for an organization like Baillie Gifford.

Of course, we're not doing Series A and Series B, but when we're looking at companies within the private-companies team, this will be the first time Baillie Gifford as an organization would have looked at these companies. You're starting with a blank sheet of paper, and you get to discover these companies.

You get to know these companies as people in a much more personal way than, by and large, you can in the public market. I think that's very special.

You've mentioned Wise several times. Wise decided to list in the UK. The UK public market isn't filled with optimism right now, and I have many friends who are public-market CEOs who say, “I wish I wasn't listed in the UK.”

How important is a local liquidity market, and do you share the sentiment that we're in a really dire state for the London Stock Exchange?

I do share the sentiment that we're in a dire state for the London Stock Exchange.

Why do you think that is?

I think it's a combination of there not being lots of amazing high-growth companies in the UK listed in the UK, so there's a supply problem. I think there's a demand problem as well.

UK investors, by and large—and perhaps as a function of there just not being that many really exciting growth companies listed in London—aren't as used to analyzing and investing in them. Their risk appetites are probably not as high as those of investors in the US investing on the Nasdaq, for instance.

I think there's a demand problem, and I think there's a supply problem as well.

If I were to put you in charge of the LSE today, what would you do?

That's a really hard question.

I think the problem starts before the LSE. If you're trying to diagnose it or solve the problem, I don't think you would start at the LSE level.

I respectfully disagree with you on the supply side. I could name you 10 companies that have over $300 million in revenue in London today that are phenomenal businesses. They just wouldn't list in London because it's a terrible place to list.

But I think that is the problem. You can name 10, and maybe you can name 20, but you can't name 100.

That's because I'm in a small technology niche. I'm sure if we went into biotech, real estate, and all the other markets, there would be far more.

I'm not saying that there aren't great companies out there. I'm just not sure there are enough companies at the scale you would need to make for a vibrant, diverse growth-equity public market in the UK alone.

If you were to combine all the growth-stage companies in Europe, I think you could have a really interesting market.

Do you think we should have a European public market?

I think we probably should, because everyone is struggling from the same issue. Frankfurt is struggling with the same thing. The French are struggling with the same thing. We're struggling with it.

How do you figure out when to sell?

It's really hard. When you're public, it's even harder because every day you have that permanent decision that you can sell. When you're private, to a relative extent, you're stuck.

You can look at it through a binary decision of when to sell, but you can also think about it through the lens of when to trim—when to take some of your winnings.

This is where I think increasingly, in the private market, secondary markets can be useful. For some of our large, high-profile companies, we've trimmed in the private markets and recycled that capital into new, interesting, high-growth private companies.

For those companies that go public, again, in the funds where we can recycle capital, it's not easy, but there's an opportunity-cost trade-off that you make.

Each time you look at a new company, you're asking, “I need to find some capital to invest in this company. Where's that capital going to come from?” It may come from a company where you have liquidity, but also where you believe there's the greatest disparity between the returns you can make by continuing to own that public company and the new opportunity you're looking at.

It's really an opportunity-cost trade-off question.

12. Future of Growth Equity Investing

Will we have far more capital in venture in 5 years than we do today?

I don't know about venture. I think we wrongly talk about venture as if it's one thing. It's kind of merged. Is Series C venture or growth?

Series C is on the borderline, but Series D and Series E are clearly growth.

Sure.

When we think about the pre-seed and seed markets, will we have more capital? I think we're just seeing the precipice now, and we're going to see sovereign-wealth funds like we've never seen before, pension funds like we've never seen before. It's going to get much noisier. Do you agree?

I do still think we're seeing this trend of institutionalization and professionalization of the growth stages. There are some high-profile names in the growth stage, but I think there are fewer participants in the growth stage today than there were in 2020 and 2021.

You could say those were anomalous years, but I still think there has been consolidation within the growth stage of the private markets.

Will people come in and go out? Of course. There will be periods when there are more and periods when there are fewer. But I think we're already at the stage where there are a handful of growth-stage institutions—let's call it 10, maybe 20—that are consistent presences in this part of the market.

You mentioned Stripe as the one where the reinvestment maybe should have been made. Can you take me to a decision where you had it on the first check, could have done it, pulled away for whatever reason, and shouldn't have done so?

Coinbase. We should have invested in Coinbase.

Why did you not?

I created a very elaborate spreadsheet where I was estimating all the volume and liquidity that you would need to have in Bitcoin to get to the kind of 5x returns. It was a very clever model, and I felt like I was being very clever. I was just wildly off.

Do you worry that you can sometimes try to be too studious with all of the models?

I think that can always be a risk. It's not just with models; sometimes you can over-intellectualize things. Sometimes the best investments are quite obvious.

What was the most obvious?

Going back to when I was doing public-market investing, when we invested in Tesla in 2013, it was pretty obvious.

It was obvious in 2013?

They'd sold tens of thousands of Model S cars, or they had preorders where people put down real money for Model S cars. They'd proven that they could make a car that people wanted to buy.

They'd proven that they could make it with the Roadster. The question was execution: were they actually going to be able to make enough of these things?

But you could look at the organization, and there were people in there who had built car factories and scaled the production of cars. It felt kind of obvious at that time. It was a $3 billion market cap.

13. Quick-Fire Round

Listen, I want to do a quick fire. I'll say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts.

What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

That you can be a generalist and a globalist in how you invest, and that you can still add real value for your clients by being a specialist in growth-equity investing.

You can buy and hold 1 stock for the next 10 years. Which one, and why?

Bending Spoons.

Wow. That's the one? Why?

I think they have the most astonishing business model, culture, and opportunity to be like an immune cell that goes around gobbling up all of these slightly broken businesses that have great products, and generating loads of profit and free cash flow from them.

What is it about their business model that you love so much?

It's having a generalizable set of tools that can make any consumer digital application better from a user perspective, grow the revenues, and run far more efficiently.

Their addressable market is basically the broken parts of the venture-capital ecosystem: companies that have good products but really bad businesses. They can take those good products and make them amazing businesses by virtue of being part of Bending Spoons.

So the core risk is acquisition-price sensitivity?

Yes, and whether they can continue to do it at ever greater levels of scale.

I spoke to one of their acquired-company CEOs the other day, and he said the process was fascinating. There was no negotiation. It was, “Here's the deal. If you would like it, great. If you won't, no worries.” It was very black and white.

They were fantastic throughout the process, and it was great. They did it, actually. But I love that there's no negotiation: “Here you go.” I love that.

What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?

If you knew you couldn't fail, it would increase your risk tolerance to infinity, wouldn't it? You'd take the most absurd risks you possibly could because you knew you would get them right.

Maybe you'd be an early-stage biotech investor because you would know that every company you invested in at a super-early stage would go on to become a blockbuster drug, and your returns would just be off the scale.

Maybe that's what you would do if you knew you couldn't fail.

Which public-company CEO do you have the most respect for, and why?

I have an enormous amount of respect for Christo at Wise. He's a brilliant executor. He has this deep care and passion about the very niche thing of moving money cheaply and efficiently.

He cares deeply about his customers and his business. He thinks differently and authoritatively about how you go about creating a business. I've seen that journey as the business has grown, but also as he's grown with the business.

If you could change 1 thing about the Baillie Gifford investment decision-making process, what would you change?

I would like to have more time to invest in every decision I made. Rather than having however much time there is to digest all the work the team has done and come to an investment decision, I would love to have 3, 5, or 10 times the amount of personal time that I could put into thinking about those investment decisions.

But we have to operate within the number of hours there are in the day.

OpenAI at $300 billion, Grok at $50 billion, or Anthropic at $60 billion—which one do you buy, and which do you sell?

Do I have to buy any of them?

You don't. You can buy none of them.

At the moment, I would say I would buy none of them. It's not because I have a particular criticism of those businesses. It's because I don't know what the answer is to enduring competitive advantage at the large-language-model level.

I don't feel I could tell you which one I would want to buy without a strong thesis on that.

You wouldn't say it's productization and brand? Consumer touchpoints and brand?

I would say distribution.

This is why I think Google is one of the most unappreciated companies right now. When you look at the distribution endpoints they have to consumers and what they can do with AI, they are by far one of the most exciting opportunities.

If you went down that route, you'd say Microsoft, wouldn't you?

You would as well.

What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

So many things. We had this discussion about adding value to companies. This is something I was just so wrong about for so many years.

I used to say, “You don't get it. At the growth stage, the concept of value-add doesn't apply. Companies should know everything themselves.” That was true in the narrow sense, largely around operational matters. They should know what they're doing themselves.

But what I misunderstood was all the things specific to being a growth-stage company. We've already talked about them: how do you go public effectively? How do you be a public company? How do you create a great independent board?

I was just dead wrong on that. I've come to realize over the last few years that there are so many things that growth-stage companies do need help with, and we can be well positioned to help them with those things.

Did becoming a father change your investor mindset, the types of businesses you like, or your approach?

I don't think it changed my investment approach. I think it changed my world.

What did it change in your worldview?

When you become a parent, there's this little being that starts off very, very small, and very quickly becomes much, much larger. You care about them more than anything you can possibly imagine caring about, and you're deeply responsible for them in a way that's difficult to comprehend being responsible for anything else.

I have just the one child, and it's amazing. But everything—the good things become way better than the good things before you have a child, and the difficult things become way more difficult and way harder as well.

Everything in life just becomes somewhat accentuated.

Why does no one ever leave Baillie Gifford? You guys don't. You just stay. Everyone in venture is saying, “I'm out. I'm in. I'm tag-teaming.” You guys just stay, and you're in Edinburgh.

Which is a lovely place to live. Why would anyone ever want to leave Edinburgh?

I'm sorry. I did not mean that poorly toward Edinburgh.

No, it's not—

As a firm, we've been around for 115 years. We're a partnership. We're an intergenerational, unlimited-liability partnership.

How does that work from a carry perspective?

Carry goes to the firm. We remunerate people through bonuses, which is a form of synthetic carry, I suppose.

The way the firm operates is that there's this continuous chain of partners who have been responsible for the firm and responsible for our clients, and for doing a good job for our clients.

The job of the partnership is to maximize value for our clients, but also to make sure the firm is in a better place to hand off to the next generation of partners.

I think there's this deep care and responsibility that those of us who have spent our entire careers at Baillie Gifford have for our clients, but also for this organization that we get to be stewards of for parts of our lives. Hopefully, we can hand it on to the next generation of partners better than when we joined it.

It's an amazing institution. I really love the story. For me, as a student of investing, it's one of the most incredible stories. I have so much respect for the team there.

Final one for you. When we look forward to the next 10 years, what are you most optimistic about? I like to end on a note of positivity.

I'm really excited and optimistic about the conditions under which companies are entering this stage of the market, this growth stage.

Going back to the framing we had earlier of companies around the $200 million mark, there have never been so many venture-backed companies entering our part of the market. There's been a lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall, and we get to see which bits stick.

That's a great place to be a growth investor: lots and lots of experiments, and you can see the ones that work. There have never been so many people with experience of trying to grow and scale businesses, so that human capital has never been better.

Can I interrupt you and ask what happens to that generation of companies that is maybe at $200 million in revenue and growing in the mid-teens? It's not good enough for you, it's not good enough for private equity, and it's not good enough to IPO.

What happens to that very large generation of companies that has low growth, isn't profitable, but has quite large revenues?

I think this is the opportunity for Bending Spoons. This is their market. They can take those companies, improve the products, make them profitable, and then they become really, really valuable.

Those companies aren't good enough as standalone businesses, but in the hands of the right kind of capital allocator, they can generate a lot of free cash flow.

Would you be CFO of Bending Spoons?

Would I? No. There's David, the CFO, who does an amazing job. There's no way I'd be able to do a good job.

Go back to the final thing that I think is really important for why now is an amazing time for growth investing.

We're in this period of capital where—and this takes the conversation we had earlier—there are some parts of the market that are still quite exuberant. But across the market, I would argue there is neither an excess nor a deficit.

You're at this golden mean, this Aristotelian mean, of availability of capital. It's providing enough capital to be able to invest, but not so much capital that it detracts from the long-term quality of those businesses.

That amalgamation of lots of venture stuff being tried, lots of experiments, human capital, and the right quantity of financial capital just makes me really excited to be deploying capital in this part of the market.

Peter, I so appreciate the time. You're incredibly humble and incredibly different as a thinker, which is so lovely for me, doing what I do. I really appreciate the relationship and, bluntly, you being so open today.

It's been a pleasure to see you again, Harry. I really enjoyed the conversation, so thank you very much for having me.