Private companies

Shan Shan

Investment manager

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Shan Shan
Investing is a beautiful dance of art and science. We intend to be long-term, patient thought-partners to founders as they overturn the status quo and scale the most transformative businesses of the next decades.

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.

Location

San Francisco, California and Edinburgh, Scotland

Favourite books

Liu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem

Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years

Get in touch

Send a message to Shan, or email the Private Companies Team directly.

Important information

Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited provides investment management and advisory services to non-UK clients and is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited is not licensed under the Regulation of Investment Advising, Investment Marketing and Portfolio Management Law, 5755-1995 (the “Advice Law”) and does not carry insurance pursuant to the Advice Law.

Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited markets and distributes Baillie Gifford’s range of collective investment schemes to Qualified Clients and Qualified Investors in Israel, as listed in the First Addendum to the Regulation of Investment Advising, Investment Marketing and Portfolio Management Law, 5755-1995 (the “Advice Law”) and in the First Addendum to the Israel Securities Law, 5728-1968 (the “Securities Law”). Detailed disclosure of the collective investment schemes can be found within this website and in the relevant scheme prospectus.

Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited does not provide investment advice. If you are in any doubt about whether an investment is suitable, you should seek independent advice.

No action has been or will be taken in Israel that would permit a public offering or distribution of the Funds mentioned in this website to the public in Israel. This website and the Funds mentioned herein have not been approved by the Israeli Securities Authority (the “ISA”). In addition, the Funds mentioned in this website are not regulated under the provisions of Israel’s Joint Investment Trusts law, 5754-1994 (the “Joint Investment Trusts Law”). This website and the Funds mentioned herein will only be distributed to Israeli residents in reliance on an exemption from any advice or marketing restrictions [in a manner that will not constitute “an offer to the public” under sections 15 and 15a of]/[in reliance on an exemption from the prospectus requirements under] the Israel Securities Law, 5728-1968 (the “Securities Law”) or the Joint Investment Trusts Law, and any guidelines, pronouncements or rulings issued from time to time by the ISA as applicable.