Fund managers judge performance on IRR, which gets dragged down by uninvested cash. The solution: call capital only when a deal is closing or about to close. Many funds use a credit line throughout the quarter, then call capital at the start of the next quarter to repay it, keeping cash deployed and IRR protected.
Chapters
Do you mind spending some time describing what calling capital on an as-needed basis consists of?
Yeah, so I think when you understand the math of how a fund works, your IRR is something that some LPs look at. Ultimately, DPI is the most important, the distributions you provide, right? That's what matters. But you are going to be judged on your IRR. And if you call capital and you're sitting on cash, then that's definitely going to hurt your IRR. So the best way to do it is only call the capital that you need. So you've only taken the cash that is out the door and invested. And so we think the best way to do this is call it when you have a deal closing or line of sight to the deal closing. For most of our funds, they do have a capital call line of credit. And so what they do is they use the capital call line of credit over the course of a quarter, and then they call capital at the beginning of the next quarter and pay down the capital call line of credit.