The Selection Framework
The criteria are public. The blend is not.
Every manager in every Esinli fund is selected through the same documented framework. This page publishes what we evaluate, the evidence behind each criterion, and what we deliberately refuse to score — so the process can be examined, not taken on trust.
What we publish, and what we don't
An auditable process. A proprietary blend.
We publish the selection criteria, the research that ranks them, the factors we exclude, and the gates every manager must clear. What we do not publish are the weightings, thresholds, and scoring mechanics that combine them — those are proprietary, and they are disclosed to investors in offering materials.
The distinction is deliberate. An investor — or their counsel — should be able to verify that a disciplined process exists and understand exactly what it considers. The precise blend of those considerations is the work product of our research, and it is the part that compounds with every fund we evaluate.
Definition
Throughout our materials, an emerging manager is a GP raising their first, second, or third institutional fund within a flagship series — StepStone's definition, adopted so that every statistic we cite is comparable to its source.
The criteria
Ranked by evidence, not by intuition.
The ordering below follows the predictive-power ranking in the published research — strongest evidence first. Within the framework, each criterion carries a defined weight; the weights are proprietary.
Primary factors
The strongest evidence-backed predictors. These carry the most influence in scoring.
Prior track record & persistence
Fund-level performance where it exists; deal-level attribution for first-time GPs — realized and unrealized, decomposed by role.
Fund-to-fund performance correlation ≈ 0.7; top-quartile managers repeat at 45–48%; skilled firms compound +7–8%/yr — Kaplan & Schoar; Korteweg & Sorensen
Sector specialization & domain depth
Genuine operating or investing depth in the fund's stated sector — not a thesis adopted for fundraising.
Specialization worth ≈ +570bps gross IRR; specialist emerging managers deliver 4.2x the median MOIC of generalists — Capitaly 2025
Fund size & check discipline
Fund size matched to strategy, and check sizes consistent with the stated portfolio model across the deployment period.
IRR falls from ~18% to ~7% when a fund doubles in size; sub-$500M Fund Is beat the median 67% of the time vs. 44% for $500M–$1B — StepStone
Supporting factors
Meaningful signals that refine the picture the primary factors draw.
GP operating & investment experience
The combination of company-building and capital-allocation experience across the partnership — not either alone.
Combined operator-investor backgrounds outperform single-background partnerships in emerging cohorts — founding research synthesis
Platform & operational capability
Back-office, reporting, and portfolio-support infrastructure appropriate to the fund's size and LP base.
87% of LPs have rejected a manager on operational grounds alone — operational readiness is a survival variable, not a nicety
GP capital commitment
Personal capital at risk, read as a signal — with the nuance the evidence demands.
Academic optimum 10–13% (UNC IPC) vs. 1.7% industry median (Carta); 5%+ is the practical LP credibility threshold (PitchBook). Evidence on the commitment–performance link is mixed — we treat it as a signal, not a law
Co-investor & syndication quality
Who the GP invests alongside, and whether syndicate composition is consistent with the strategy.
A refining signal in the research ranking — informative, but well below the primary factors in predictive power
Regulatory, compliance & operational readiness
Not scored — passed or failed. A manager either meets our regulatory, compliance, and operational-readiness requirements or is not evaluated further, regardless of how strongly the scored criteria read. Weighting a survival requirement would imply it can be traded off against upside. It can't.
Excluded by design
What we deliberately don't score.
Institutional LP participation
Most evaluation frameworks score whether institutional LPs have already committed to a manager. We track it as context — and give it no score. The research is clear that institutional participation is a selection effect: better GPs attract institutional LPs. It is a consequence of quality, not a cause of it, and scoring it would double-count the factors that actually drive outcomes while penalizing strong managers who simply haven't been found yet.
Any single factor in isolation
The correlation between a manager's Fund I and Fund II performance is just 0.12 — near zero. No single criterion, including track record, reliably predicts outcomes on its own. That finding is the reason this is a multi-factor framework rather than a checklist, and the reason conviction in any one signal — however compelling — is not a substitute for the full evaluation.
The process
Four stages. One audit trail.
01 — Screen
Managers in each fund's ecosystem and sector are screened against the gate and the primary factors. Most stop here.
02 — Diligence
Surviving managers enter full evaluation: track-record decomposition, reference work, operational review, terms analysis — documented against every criterion.
03 — Committee
The Investment Committee decides on the documented record. Every decision — including every pass — is written down with its reasoning.
04 — Monitor
Committed managers are monitored against the same criteria that selected them, with quarterly reporting to LPs.
The audit trail is the point: any allocation in any Esinli fund can be traced back through the committee record to the criteria that justified it.
The bar we measure against
The honest baseline.
Emerging manager Fund I/II vehicles beat the broad market median roughly 60% of the time — 67% for sub-$500M funds (StepStone). That figure is the category baseline, not a selection outcome: it is what indiscriminate emerging-manager exposure has returned. The same cohort, measured against its own vintage under Preqin's stricter convention, clears the median only ~20% of the time — and the failure tail is real: 27% of emerging funds never reach 5% IRR.
Our framework's job is to beat the baseline — to concentrate exposure in the factors that separate the 67% from the 27%. So when we report selection results, we report them against all three conventions at once, and we say which one any headline figure uses.
~60%
StepStone broad-median convention
Fund I/II vehicles above the broad market median
~67%
StepStone sub-$500M convention
The small-fund cohort — the harder, more relevant bar
~20%
Preqin own-vintage convention
First-time funds vs. their own vintage cohort, 2010–2015
Category benchmarks describe historical cohorts, not Esinli funds. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
See the framework applied
Every Esinli fund applies this framework within one ecosystem and one sector. The full methodology — including weightings and scoring mechanics — is available to investors in offering materials.