Data sourced from Dakota Private Markets, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
The first meeting with a GP sets the tone for everything that follows. LPs who walk in prepared ask sharper questions, spot inconsistencies faster, and cut through the deck faster.
The ones who wing it end up in 45-minute sessions they could have screened out in five.
Before you take the call, pull these five data points.
Know the fund size before you get on the phone. A manager running $200M and targeting a $2B close is a different conversation than one sitting at $1.5B on the same target. AUM relative to target tells you where they are in the raise and, often, how much social proof they have already collected. It also tells you whether the strategy is sized to match the mandate. A fund that is too small for the stated strategy or too large for the team running it is worth flagging before you sit down.
Vintage year tells you what market conditions shaped the fund's early portfolio. A 2019 vintage had a different entry environment than a 2021 or 2023 fund. If you are comparing multiple managers in the same strategy, vintage is a prerequisite for any meaningful performance comparison. It also tells you where the fund is in its lifecycle, whether you are looking at a manager still deploying capital, one managing through a portfolio, or one in the middle of a new raise.
Net IRR and TVPI matter, but only in context. Pull the benchmark for the relevant vintage and strategy before the meeting. A 14% net IRR reads differently against a 10% benchmark than it does against an 18% one. Ask for performance through the most recent quarter in advance so you are not receiving the numbers for the first time across the table. How a manager responds to that request also tells you something.
The benchmark is the data point you cannot get from the GP. The other four come from the manager. The peer comparison has to come from somewhere else, matched to the same vintage and strategy, or the number in the deck means nothing. Dakota Private Markets holds Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI on 18,000+ funds, request access.
Is the fund open, closed, or still in formation? Is this a flagship strategy or a newer vertical for the firm? Status tells you whether you are being asked to lead a round, follow existing LPs, or fill out a final close. Each carries a different level of diligence intensity and timeline pressure. A manager at 40% of target is a different conversation than one at 90%.
Strategy description, sector focus, geographic concentration, control vs. minority, check size range. If the GP's mandate overlaps significantly with existing portfolio exposure, that is a conversation-shaping fact to have before the meeting rather than during it. Style drift from prior funds is also worth surfacing early. Managers do not always volunteer it.
Dakota Private Markets tracks 18,000+ private funds and 159,000+ performance records across seven asset classes, covering private equity, venture capital, private credit, private real estate, real assets and infrastructure, and hedge funds and liquid alternatives. Every record carries Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI, filterable by vintage year, asset class, sub-strategy, geography, and fund size, and reviewed by Dakota's research team before publication rather than auto-populated from filings.
For LPs, that means you can pull all five data points on any manager in the database before the first call. For GPs, it means the LPs sitting across from you already have the baseline.
Four of these five data points come from the GP. The fifth, the peer benchmark, is the one you have to bring yourself, and it is the one that turns a reported number into a judgment.
Dakota Private Markets gives you the vintage-matched peer set behind every figure in the deck, with results exporting to Excel or CSV for the diligence file. Request access.