I just came across a profile of MA Republican candidate Gabriel Gomez from the Boston Globe where it states:
"Tax data provided by his campaign show that Gomez earned $8.5 million over five years at Advent, from 2007 to 2011."
The Globe did not further analyze his compensation structure nor would one expect such breakdown from them. It serves their narrative purpose to show that the GOP candidate/PE investor made a ton of money ($1.6mm per year, wow look like em wall st fat cats!) prior to entering politics.
I suspect that a majority of the $8.5mm comes from carried interests from deals that Gomez worked on.
Gomez never made partner at Advent and didn't really source many deals. I believe he was a principal during the above listed time period and mostly worked with portfolio companies and sat on their boards so his base should be around a few hundred Ks, well short of the average of $1.6mm/year.
Presumably he worked on some deal(s) that worked out very well for Advent and was given his share of the carries from them.
In particular, we know that Advent invested $93mm in Lululemon in 2005 and made 700% on that after the company went public in 2007 (or so the Globe says, Advent did own 18.2 mm LULU shares at IPO and sold then sold off 14mm shares shortly after) --just in time for Gabe to cash in and to have this reflected in the tax data disclosure.
So from this one portfolio company Advent turned $93mm investment into $558mm profits which means that the firm overall gets $111.6mm in carried interests (from 20 points, is that what Advent charges for this fund?) to split among its ranks.
The partners will get the lions shares.
Gomez, as the principal and Advent's lead representative at Lululemon should be well compensated for this as well. Given the magnitude of this home run I think it is reasonable to expect that he walks away with 5% of total carries or $5.58mm.
This alone would represent over 65% of the $8.5mm Gomez made over those 5 years. So basically even if he got no carries at all from any of the other portfolio companies he worked with (unlikely) it would still mean that the reason candidate Gomez averaged over one and a half million per year was because he was fortunate enough to sit on that one deal (which is not to take away from his contributions to the deal and the portfolio company).
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/21/from-middle-class-beginning…
