Peter Singlehurst: Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvalt

Peter Singlehurst of Baillie Gifford explains why he passed on Coinbase, regrets not doubling down on Stripe, and lost hundreds of millions on Northvolt due to execution failures.

• Northvolt was a mistake: Baillie Gifford was too enamored with the thesis of European energy sovereignty and misjudged the team’s ability to execute.
• Passed on Coinbase after building an elaborate model estimating Bitcoin volume needed for 5x returns — model was wildly wrong; calls it over-intellectualizing.
• Regrets not doubling down on Stripe at the ~$50B down round in 2022; thinks Stripe is undervalued versus Adyen on a multiples basis even at current ~$91.5B round.
• Baillie Gifford has not invested in any major LLM company (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) because they cannot define what competitive advantage looks like at the LLM layer.
• ByteDance investment thesis is based entirely on China business (Toutiao + Douyin); base case assumes TikTok US is banned and they still see a path to 5x from their 2019 entry.
• Median entry point for new investments: ~$200M revenue, ~70% YoY growth, ~-14% EBITDA margins; base modeling targets 30–50% probability of 5x return.
• Anduril pattern-matches to Tesla (2013) and SpaceX (2018): hard technical hardware solved, proven demand, large stagnant market, clear lead over private competitors.
• Bending Spoons is Singlehurst’s single-stock 10-year pick — its competitive advantage is a generalizable operating playbook for acquiring broken venture-backed consumer apps, not any specific product.

2025-03-19 · Watch on YouTube