Shan Shan

Following intellectual curiosity

As the daughter of a small-town food distributor, I grew up observing how businesses get built in very traditional industries. These local merchants created huge impact on people’s day-to-day lives and sparked my curiosity about how such effects get compounded around the world.

Driven by this interest, I studied politics and commerce in the US and discovered my passion for investing as a student investment club manager there. Investing is a never-ending intellectual pursuit for new puzzles and challenges. When put to effective use, investing can serve as fuel for engines, a catalyst for innovation and a powerful driving force for positive societal progress.

Combining art and science

In my eyes, investing is a beautiful dance of art and science. I started to form the ‘science’ part of investment logic during my years as a public market analyst. Countless hours of reading annual and quarterly financial filings taught me to focus on the root of questions, causation of patterns and origins of thought processes. Founders I meet today often know their industries deeper than I do, but first-principles-driven thinking allows me to resonate with them and get to the bottom of questions together.

Spending the past five years at the heart of Silicon Valley as a private growth investor, I began to appreciate the ‘art‘ part of investing more. Velocity of innovation, talent gravitation, customer love and the feeling of force – the ‘art’ part of building conviction is often unquantifiable and hard to measure. But these category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over a long arc, bringing a higher upside than a model can project.

Strong opinions, loosely held

At Baillie Gifford’s Private Companies Team, we are humbled to be long-term, patient partners to founders during good times and bad. In challenging periods, we align ourselves with company leaders who build up conviction upon the foundation of their clarity of thought. Often, founders have a strong belief about why things need to be built in certain ways to solve specific pain points. The best founders I have met remain flexible and adaptive to making vector changes in preparing their company to seize on opportunities that can drive the next stages of growth. We are proud to be on the journey with them for decades to come.