Glossary
A plain-language guide to the research.
Venture research comes with its own vocabulary. Here is what the key terms mean in our papers, with examples to make the measures easier to read.
Data and Methods / Glossary
Performance metrics
- Internal rate of return (IRR)
- The annualized return on a fund's cash flows. Sensitive to timing and to interim marks, which is why we never report it alone.
- Total value to paid-in (TVPI)
- Everything a fund has returned plus everything it still holds, divided by the capital called. Reported as a multiple with an x.
- Distributions to paid-in (DPI)
- Cash actually returned to limited partners, divided by paid-in capital. This is the realized component of TVPI.
- Residual value to paid-in (RVPI)
- The reported value of investments still held, divided by paid-in capital. This is the unrealized component of TVPI.
- Percentage point (pp)
- The unit for a difference between two rates. A gap between 17.15% and 9.94% is 7.2 percentage points, not 7.2%.
Efficiency measures
- Return per unit of risk
- In White Paper II, a fund’s IRR divided by the standard deviation of IRRs among funds in its vintage cohort. It compares annualized return with how widely returns varied that year. The average score is 0.65 among 1,773 funds with the required data. It does not measure a particular fund’s probability of loss.
- Upside capture
- A fund’s TVPI divided by the median TVPI of its vintage cohort. A score of 1.40 means its total-value multiple was 40% above that cohort’s median; it does not mean 40% more dollars were created.
- Combined score
- Both measures placed on a common scale and averaged, so a single figure reads across both dimensions.
- Efficiently risky
- The paper’s shorthand for stronger performance on its constructed risk-efficiency measures. It should not be read as proof of lower risk or a causal explanation for returns.
The Institute's terms
- Emerging manager
- Under the papers’ main definition, a fund qualifies through any one of four criteria: firm assets under management below $100 million; Fund I, II or III; a management firm less than five years old; or a founding team that includes women or otherwise underrepresented general partners. The papers also test alternative definitions.
- Configuration
- The set of portfolio choices a manager makes: check size, breadth, stage, pacing, and sector. Our word for strategy, because strategy is what the choices add up to.
- Configuration coherence
- Whether those choices form a plan the fund's resources can execute. Assessable before a track record exists.
- Constraint
- A limit on the resources or choices available to a manager, such as capital or team capacity. Constraints can shape a portfolio plan; observing them does not establish their causal effect on returns.
- Capability-based screening
- Screening on what a manager can execute, set against size-based screening, which screens on how large the organization behind the manager is.
- Dispersion
- How widely outcomes vary within a specified group. In the return-to-risk measure, dispersion refers to IRRs across funds in the same vintage. It is one way to describe variation, not a complete account of risk.
Sample and sources
- The sample descriptor
- White Paper I studies performance across 2,471 U.S. venture funds; White Paper II studies risk efficiency across 2,142. Both cover vintages from 2000–2024. Always identify the paper behind a figure. Available observations vary by metric and model.
- Vintage year
- The year a fund was raised. White Paper II compares funds within their vintage cohorts. This helps account for differences in fund age, but does not remove uncertainty in unrealized values or cash-flow timing.
- Data source
- Fund-level performance data sourced from PitchBook and analyzed as part of doctoral research (Moncada, 2026). This is the source for the white papers only; the Institute’s database uses no licensed vendor data.
The database
- Form D
- The notice a fund or company files with the SEC when it sells securities privately. The Institute’s database reads every Form D filed since 2009 for fund sizes, investor counts, financing rounds and the people named on each filing.
- Form ADV
- The registration an investment adviser files with the SEC, including the shorter filing made by exempt reporting advisers. It is the database’s source for assets under management and a firm’s own website.
- Firm family
- All the fund vehicles one manager has filed, grouped under one firm. Vehicles are grouped by consistent rules, never merged because two names look alike.
- Special purpose vehicle (SPV)
- A vehicle that raises money for a single investment rather than a pooled fund. SPVs are left out of every fund figure in the database.
- Filed evidence
- A fact read from a document filed with a regulator, or published by a limited partner because the law requires it.
- Stated evidence
- What a firm or an allocator says about itself on its own website, quoted with the page it came from. It is always labelled and never added to filed counts.
- Board seat
- A person who signs a manager’s fund filing and is also named as a director on a company’s Form D. The database’s filed deals are built from these seats.
- Allocator
- A limited partner that commits capital to funds, such as a pension, endowment, foundation or fund of funds. Placement agents and accelerators connect managers to capital but do not commit it.
- Floor
- A count built so that it does not overstate, even if it misses some real items. Portfolio and allocator counts in the database are floors.