Data sourced from Dakota Private Markets, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
A manager pitches a 28% net IRR. An allocator asks which fund. The answer is "across our platform." That single exchange ends more first meetings than any bad quarter of performance does.
Fund-level performance and firm-level performance answer different questions, and pitch decks routinely blur the two. Fund-level performance is the return of one specific vehicle: Fund III, vintage 2019, net to its investors. Firm-level performance is an aggregate, a blended or composite number built by combining results across multiple funds, sometimes multiple strategies, sometimes multiple vintages. Both numbers are legitimate. Presented without labeling which is which, they are not.
A firm-level composite can look meaningfully better or worse than any single fund an investor is actually being asked to commit to, for a few structural reasons:
Standardization gaps compound the problem: TVPI, DPI, and RVPI are handled differently enough across managers that a mismatched denominator or reporting date is often the actual explanation when a firm-level number and a fund-level number don't reconcile, not a data error and not misconduct.
|
Presentation |
What it actually shows |
What it can obscure |
|---|---|---|
|
"Firm-level net IRR since inception" |
Blended return across all funds and vintages |
Which specific vintages are driving the number |
|
"Fund III net IRR" |
Return of the exact vehicle being raised |
Nothing, if Fund III is a mature, realized fund |
|
"Fund III net IRR (interim)" |
Return of an active, unrealized fund |
How much of the value is unrealized NAV versus actual distributions |
|
"Platform gross IRR" |
Pre-fee, pre-carry return across the firm |
The gross-to-net spread. Dakota's own fee schedule filings show average disclosed carry closer to 10% than the "20" in 2-and-20, and base fee closer to 1% than 2%, so the real gross-to-net gap on a given fund is often smaller, or structured differently, than a textbook 2-and-20 assumption would suggest |
Interim, unrealized performance deserves its own caution. A fund still in its investment period is being marked, not proven. Presenting an interim IRR next to a firm-level composite without flagging which funds are realized and which are still marked is one of the more common ways this conflation shows up in early-stage decks.
Fund-by-fund breakdown, not a blended number. Vintage year, fund size, net IRR, net TVPI, DPI, and realized versus unrealized value, for every fund in the track record, not just the composite.
A clearly labeled methodology. Capital-weighted or equal-weighted, gross or net, since inception or trailing period. State it once, up front, and use it consistently across the deck.
Attribution, not just a headline number. Allocators want the realized-versus-unrealized split, how much of a stated TVPI is actual cash back (DPI) versus value still sitting in unrealized NAV, and how the number compares to peer funds of the same vintage year and strategy rather than standing alone. A 30% IRR backed by only a 1.1x DPI after eight years tells a very different story than a 20% IRR backed by a 2.5x DPI over the same stretch, so a manager should be ready to walk through both figures, plus the peer comparison, rather than wait for an allocator to ask. (Dakota September 2026: IRR in Private Equity: What It Is, How It's Calculated, and Why Allocators Are Skeptical)
Consistency with the data room. A number in the pitch deck that doesn't tie back to the audited fund financials or the administrator's report is a diligence flag, not a footnote.
Allocators aren't confused about the difference between a fund and a firm. They're testing whether a manager understands it too, and whether the numbers in the deck will still hold up when they're checked against the data room three weeks into diligence.
Dakota Private Markets holds 159,600+ performance records across 18,000+ private funds and 20,000+ investment firms, with net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI standardized so a fund-level number and a firm-level composite can actually be checked against each other, not just placed side by side. Build a peer group by vintage year, strategy, geography, or fund size, and see exactly which named fund produced a given number rather than an anonymized cohort average.
Request access to see fund-level performance for a specific manager.