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If there’s such a thing as fighting words in the VC business, that’s it. Hackles
raised by the report, VC Twitter was thick with the din of complaints (and a
bit of self-conscious defensiveness) in its wake. Here’s why.
The Challenge
Measuring the performance of just one fund can be surprisingly difficult
because venture capital is unique among asset classes.
It has the long periods of illiquidity of real estate without the predictable
financial model. It’s easy to understand how rent prices and occupancy rates
affect the financial performance of real estate assets. On the other side,
venture capital also possesses the volatility of a penny stock portfolio
without the luxury of real-time pricing and transparency of publicly traded
securities. As we’ll see, it’s difficult to determine the value of a venture capital
portfolio when its assets aren’t priced on an open market and there isn’t
even a real consensus on how to value the assets.
subject to a lot of variance and are, at worst, just a bunch of hot air.
(See: Theranos and Zenefits.)
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If you’re a little confused about what this means, don’t worry! We’ll dive into
the relevant terminology, discuss the challenge of calculating valuations (and
thus comparing venture fund performance), explain what exactly IRR is and
why it might be a bad performance indicator, and explore where and why
most reporting errors happen.
“Return on Investment” (ROI) and “Internal Rate of Return” (IRR) are the two
most common numbers you’ll come across in reports about venture capital
performance.
Let’s imagine a fund that’s doing pretty well. The manager initially raised
$100 million in capital and has so far returned $65 million to her investors,
after fees, and has $335 million in unrealized gains. Although it’s tempting to
say that her fund has a 4x ROI (arrived at by summing the unrealized and
realized gains and dividing it by the initial fund commitment), it’s important
to distinguish between the two and account for fees.
Investors have received only 65% of their initial capital back, and even if she
realizes all $335 million in outstanding value, after the traditional 20% carried
interest fee (which can be higher or lower depending on the fund), she’ll be
returning roughly $270 million more. Once all is said and done, she’ll have
returned 3.35x ($270 million in newly realized gains + $65 million in extant
di t ib ti / $100 illi i i iti l
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distributions / $100 million in initial capital).
Fees might feel like a nitpicky distinction to make, but there is a big
difference between a 3.35x return and a 4x return when tens or hundreds of
millions of dollars are at stake.
Basically, calculating the IRR is a kind of “hack” to help measure the rate at
which a given investment breaks even if its payouts come in relatively
unpredictable “clumps” over the course of its lifecycle.
This is important for venture capital because returns aren’t realized and
distributed in a tidy, periodic way like interest payments from a bank account
or treasury bond. They come in fits and starts because acquisitions and IPOs
can happen at any time. And as we’ll explain shortly, it’s difficult to predict
the size of these payouts. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely that payouts will
be the same size.
IRR can be a tricky number to report on because the metric rewards quick
exits. An investor optimizing for IRR may seek exit opportunities for her
investments very soon after investing, potentially leaving a lot of money on
the table if the company took the time to grow. It’s entirely possible that a
fund can rank in the top tier by IRR and lag far behind its industry peers
when ranked by realized gains. Academics like Ludovic Phalippou
(http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/community/people/ludovic-phalippou) at Oxford
company equity as a function of risk and time it will take to reach that
exit event.
S d M th d Wh i
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Scorecard Method. Wherein a company’s valuation is derived by
comparing the target company to recently funded companies in the
same region. Its valuation is based on the median valuation of its peers
and will be higher or lower depending on how well (or poorly) the
target company compares across several different parameters. Example:
If the median pre-money valuation for mobile app companies in a certain
region is $10 million, and the target company is determined to be 15%
better than its industry peers, the investor says the target company is
worth $11.5 million. (Learn more… (http://blog.gust.com/valuations-101-
scorecard-valuation-methodology/))
Net Present Value Method. Valuation is derived by determining the
discounted value of a company’s future earnings minus the capital
outflows from the company. NPV is a close cousin of the Discounted
Cash Flow model. (Learn more… (http://www.investopedia.com/exam-
guide/cfa-level-1/alternative-investments/venture-capital-investment-
characteristics-npv-net-present-value.asp))
It’s easy to see from these six different examples how the valuation of VC
funds can get quite complicated very quickly. Each of these different
methods has its own strengths and weaknesses, which is why investors
sometimes use multiple valuation methods and then come up with a final
figure based on an average of each method’s result. There isn’t really a gold
standard for marking valuations to market conditions. Even the Institutional
Limited Partners Association (ILPA) (https://ilpa.org/), an organization
representing family offices, endowments, pension funds and other investors
in VC, doesn’t list a preferred methodology in its quarterly and annual
reporting best practices guide (https://ilpa.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/ILPA-Best-Practices-Quarterly-Reporting-
Standards_Version-1.1.pdf).
differently. Hypothetically, two funds with the exact same portfolio can
report very different valuations of unrealized returns, which is why our focus
h ld i h d t k di t ib ti
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should remain on cash and stock distributions net of fees.
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