PE Funds With the Best Partner Economics

Ur in luck. There is this little tool called google where u can search up a fund’s latest size AND how many partners there are (may need to navigate to the funds website and click on “peoples”).

Norwest is probably up there

Very hard to tell. How much the founder/CEO takes is a significant factor and that is challenging to DD from the outside. If it's a smaller firm, I'd look at (i) number of senior IP's (VP+), (ii) fund size / activity / returns (if available) and (iii) how long the partners have been together. 

People get fixated on huge $bn funds but there are many $500-$750m funds that only need a handful of people to operate. It can be very lucrative to get into one of those seats.  

CVC does deal by deal carry. Heard some associates making millions from it

Like a comment above, there are an incredible amount of factors that go into play:

Public vs Private: Blackstone, KKR, APO - half of their carry effectively gets shot out to shareholders, so definitely more carry potential in terms of $ amount at a private firm

Founder presence: Firms like BX and Clearlake for example - still have their Founder, CEO, and President around, which take a large chunk of the carry until they finally step down or into some carry-less advisor role. Schwarzman’s take home pay last year was nearly 1 billion dollars. And I would imagine Feliciano still takes the lion’s share of carry.

Returns: duh

AUM Growth: Thoma Bravo, Vista Equity, Bain Capital, and Warburg Pincus are all privately held. But it’s clear TB/Vista are growing and deploying much quicker than Bain/WP - likely better economics for the partners at the former two

Those are just some of the 999 factors that play a role and can somewhat be quantified … plenty more to go around, and pretty difficult to tell from the outside for any fund. In all likelihood it’s not like anyone can shop around megafund offers at that level.

Heard at HIG the top brass hogs the carry

Heard at HIG the top brass hogs the carry

This is pretty tightly guarded and no way to really find out.

It’s like asking how to find out at an individual banker-level how much people make and in what years.

I seriously doubt the validity of the info from anyone that pipes up here to offer their take.

Get friendly with an LP. They know the carry breakdowns and can give you guidance.

I am not going to give you specific fund names (although I know the details of many), but here is the general concept. There are 2 views of succession: 1. Founding partners cash out via IPO or GP stakes deal or 2. The firm operates like a law firm and with each new fund junior partners own more and senior partners own less. You want to be in latter. Equally important is fundraising momentum and actual performance. There are some UMM funds where partners make way more than any non-founders in MF because of the trifecta of good partner economics, growing AUM, and strong returns.

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