“If you’re trying to find the very best growth businesses on the planet – a benchmark isn’t a sensible place to start.” Baillie Gifford’s chief executive Tim Campbell explains the advantages of our style of active investing, the importance of long-termism and how AI fits into our process.

Background:

In April, Tim Campbell became Baillie Gifford’s chief executive and one of its managing partners. Earlier in his career, he was an investment manager before switching to Client Services, where he led our Emerging Markets Clients Team.

In this podcast, he explores how our investment teams adopted a conviction-led approach that centres on each company's merits, regardless of its weighting in benchmark stock indices. He describes what we mean by long-termism and the importance of having the right incentives in place. And he explains why being “out of step” with some market trends helps us serve both society and our clients’ interests.

The second half of the show focuses on changes afoot, ranging from further private company investments – including a recent holding in AI lab Anthropic – to our own adoption of artificial intelligence technologies and an exploration of new ways to access our strategies.

Resources:

Baillie Gifford: Actual investors

Disruption Week

Drayton and Mackenzie

One Useful Thing: Ethan Mollick’s blog

Our history

Private company investments

Short Briefings on Long Term Thinking

The Friction Project

Companies mentioned include:

Anthropic

Amazon

MercadoLibre

NVIDIA

Runway AI

Timecodes

00:00 Introduction

02:10 From music in the Middle East to investing in Edinburgh

03:15 Making the move to Client Services

05:00 Rewriting the investment playbook

06:30 Client hunger for benchmark agnosticism

07:40 Active versus passive investing

10:20 A mutual understanding with clients

11:55 Drawdowns and hold discipline

14:30 Defining long-termism

17:00 Private company investments

19:30 Investing in Anthropic and Runway AI

24:55 ‘The mission doesn’t change’

27:35 Book choice