38 Comments
 

Nice, what's your total YoE and how much of it do you expect to see next year?

 
Most Helpful

Sure man.

Conceptually, it boils down to one thing. Funds take 10 years to invest, create value, and divest. Here is how American carry works often:

Say you have a $1B fund. The firm makes 2% as management fees to keep the lights on (pay base+bonus). Then you get 20% of all returns assuming the capital you have invested stays above the 8% gIRR hurdle rate. This 20% is the carry. So a $1B fund, assume you 2x it, then you have $2B. Pay back your LPs, now you have $1B. These are your returns. 80% goes to your LPs and the firm gets 20%. So $200m. If you have 100bps of carry in that fund you get your $2m.

But when do you get it?

In the beginning of the fund you have to buy companies and invest the fund. So you buy a company and invest $250m. You sell it 5y later and make a 2x. You now do the above carry calc I did on that specific investment’s cash flows and the carry generated from it. ($250m * 2 - $250m return of LP capital) * 20% * 100bps. So you get $500K. Makes sense, since this is a fourth of the fund you have invested and you have now made 25% of the $2m we talked about above. As you can see, you get paid when there are realizations, because that’s when there is money to split up.

Supplemental considerations:

Some firms do not pay carry out to you on investments made before you got your grant

Some firms have vesting schedules for carry, so you only get paid on your vested bps which chase your total granted bps

There are other considerations too - this stuff can be very firm by firm so that’s why a said it depends on a lot of things

Hope that’s helpful

 

I think the issue people are having is that when firms quote carry grants, the industry standard assumes a 2x gross MOIC. So for comparability purposes, if you’re going to quote $ values, 2x is the best way to do so (whether you think that’s actually achievable or not is a different question). The other option is to quote bps but that’s harder to compare across fund sizes. 

 

When did PE went from this rainmaker/making millions of $ in foreseeable future/ultra prestigious career path to "potentially maybe will receive 4 million but the payout is only set in 10 FREAKING years". 

Jeeez. In 10 years I'd potentially aleready be close to senior partner level making low 7 figures with much less risk + insanely better lifestyle over the next 10 years. 

Wth happened to PE?!?!

 

Been doing this for a while. People take different paths. At one point in my career I received offers to join much bigger firms which certainly would have made me very very wealthy but I opted to focus on my family and work/life balance. I'm in a T2 city so potentially earning a couple mill in the next decade isn't too bad of a trade for me :)

 

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