Data Standards
Numbers you can check.
A firm whose product is process should expect its numbers to be verified — by investors, by counsel, by anyone diligencing us the way we diligence managers. This page states the standards every published figure must meet, and keeps a public register of figures we've retired.
The standards
Seven rules for every published figure.
01
Named sources, or no claim
Every statistic in Esinli materials traces to a named source — Carta, PitchBook, StepStone, Preqin/Unigestion, Capitaly, or the academic literature. A figure we cannot trace is a figure we do not publish, however useful it would be.
02
Stated definitions
"Emerging manager" means different things across data providers, and statistics are not comparable across definitions. We use StepStone's — a GP raising their first, second, or third institutional fund within a flagship series — and we say so wherever the term carries a number.
03
Baselines belong to the category, not to us
Emerging manager Fund I/II vehicles beat the broad market median roughly 60% of the time (StepStone). That figure describes the asset class, and we present it as the baseline our framework must beat — never as an outcome of our selection process.
04
Derived values are labeled derived
Where a source publishes percentiles but not a median, and we derive one, the derivation is stated next to the number — as with the ~11.3% median IRR derived from Carta's 2017-vintage percentiles.
05
Illustrative models are labeled illustrative
Some of our interactive tools visualize directional relationships rather than sourced study results — and say so on the tool itself, in the disclaimer beneath it, and anywhere the output appears.
06
Multiple benchmark conventions, reported together
The same cohort clears "the median" ~60% of the time under StepStone's broad-market convention and ~20% under Preqin's own-vintage convention. Both are true; they answer different questions. Any selection result we report is stated against the relevant conventions simultaneously, naming which one a headline figure uses.
07
Survivorship bias is acknowledged, not hidden
Over half the funds in major databases lack cash-flow data, and the missing funds skew small and poor-performing. Reported emerging manager medians likely overstate true medians by 1–3 percentage points — a caveat we attach rather than omit.
Why publish this
The dispersion data is the argument. It has to hold.
Our entire positioning rests on published research: that venture returns disperse widely, that the downside tail is real, and that a documented framework is the rational response. An argument built on data collapses if the data doesn't survive checking — so we hold our marketing to the standard we hold manager track records.
Most firms quietly fix numbers and move on. We think the correction is worth as much as the figure: it shows the process running.
The same discipline, applied to managers
These standards are one instance of the wider method: evidence-ranked criteria, stated definitions, honest baselines, and a written record. The selection framework shows how the same discipline chooses the managers in every Esinli fund.