CMU's Private Investments Were Self-Funding for Three Years
Miles Dieffenbach · Miles Dieffenbach: Inside Carnegie Mellon’s $4BN Endowment & The Math Behind DPI, TVPI, Illiquidity · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Aug 4, 2025 · at 6:00
Miles Dieffenbach, Managing Director of Investments at Carnegie Mellon University, explains how buyout distributions compensated for slow venture liquidity to keep CMU's private investments self-funding.
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“From a liquidity perspective, we've been fortunate compared to most endowments where that private equity book has been self-funding the past three years, so our distributions Have paid for our capital calls over the past three years. Now, the sub asset classes within that have had much different performance. So our buyout portfolio, our private equity portfolio has contributed the most to those distributions. Venture has been the largest detractor of those, but it's been self-funding, right?”
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