That doesn't even make any sense. The average actual life of a VC fund is, according to numbers I got from NVCA a couple years back, over 16 years (despite being originally targeted at 8-10 years). If you wait until a fund is "closed," you are going to be waiting a long, long time.
The industry already has standard measures for talking about performance of a fund from different perspectives. I fear that HN is reinventing several wheels here.
For example, TVPI, Total Value to Paid-In, includes "marks" (which the VCs strongly influence, but ultimately have to be signed off on by auditors). But every savvy industry person would also look at DPI, Distributed to Paid-In, which includes only actual cash (and marketable securities) distributed to investors, and as such is much less susceptible to gaming.
It would be the scalar fallacy to believe that you can reliably compare any two funds' mid-life performance with a single metric. A high DPI fund is much more certainly a performer, but might have less residual value in the portfolio; likewise, a very high TVPI fund (but with low DPI) might have a ton of realizable value or it might just have unrealistic marks. (Finally, neither of those measures accounts for time value of money.)
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The return the LPs got on their money in the last fund you closed out is a hard number.
That doesn't even make any sense. The average actual life of a VC fund is, according to numbers I got from NVCA a couple years back, over 16 years (despite being originally targeted at 8-10 years). If you wait until a fund is "closed," you are going to be waiting a long, long time.
The industry already has standard measures for talking about performance of a fund from different perspectives. I fear that HN is reinventing several wheels here.
For example, TVPI, Total Value to Paid-In, includes "marks" (which the VCs strongly influence, but ultimately have to be signed off on by auditors). But every savvy industry person would also look at DPI, Distributed to Paid-In, which includes only actual cash (and marketable securities) distributed to investors, and as such is much less susceptible to gaming.
It would be the scalar fallacy to believe that you can reliably compare any two funds' mid-life performance with a single metric. A high DPI fund is much more certainly a performer, but might have less residual value in the portfolio; likewise, a very high TVPI fund (but with low DPI) might have a ton of realizable value or it might just have unrealistic marks. (Finally, neither of those measures accounts for time value of money.)