47 Comments
 

TS here. Principal (or whatever rung it's called above VP) starts at ~$700k or so based on what I understand. Thereafter it's pretty much unclear to me as it can vary so much. 

What's the approx DAW you see at VP1? Was shown ~$3m based on a 2x fund return. No good datapoints on how much it scales at the post-VP rung.  

That carry is a bit light id push for 3.5-4. We have a funky structure but are the equivalent of 4m per fund for vps with some high variability.

 
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Both top bucket numbers, range is maybe ~$50-75k from top to bottom. WLB is pretty middle of the pack -- at the VP / principal level you aren't doing too much of the heavy lifting day-to-day but there's always sprints when in deal crunch mode where you're pulling late hours take make sure everything gets done. To put actual numbers to it, I'm out of the office by 7 most days and usually spend 30-60 minutes before bed responding to emails, checking work, etc. and maybe a few hours on Sundays just to make sure I'm ready for the week.

The quality of your associate makes a huge difference -- there are some juniors where I'm going to need to check / rebuild the entire model in detail, rewrite major portions of slides, manage all the third party workstreams, do ad hoc analyses, etc. all of which are bad for my WLB while others are much more on top of their stuff and want to take on additional tasks which makes it way better. 

 

My wife is in PE, we normally think about it (and get the breakdowns this way) as the expected value over a time period (typically 3-5 years) then annualize that. Her payouts are generally volatile (in timing and amount) since the investments are across several funds (so easier to think about what you expect to get, at standard performance, over a few years).

As for what fund the carry is in, when she joined she was given carry across several active funds. Her ongoing carry awards are similarly across several funds (including getting carry in new funds when they launch). 

 

Does your carry award (bps) adjust either i) annually or ii) upon promotion, or is title most relevant for carry allocations at start of a new fund? 

 

Yea in a non record year EB VP1 comp is probably in the 800 range vs 550ish for UMM PE. Then you get 3-4m DAW carry at UMM PE so if you spread that over 5-6 years and discount at 15% and assume all distributions come at the end of 5 years (i.e. divide by 2) then it's 4m / 5-6 / 2 = 330-400k annualized + the 550k. I'll ignore the tax treatment given uncertainty around future tax rates and for conservatism in general. 

 

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