CMU Independently Underwrites Top 10 NAVs for Manager Diligence
Miles Dieffenbach · Miles Dieffenbach: Inside Carnegie Mellon’s $4BN Endowment & The Math Behind DPI, TVPI, Illiquidity · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Aug 4, 2025 · at 18:30
Miles Dieffenbach, Managing Director of Investments at Carnegie Mellon University, explains how CMU verifies manager portfolio marks prior to making re-up investment decisions.
0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“20, 21 caused us to create new muscles in regards to underwriting as a group as well. And so for any re-up or any new manager, we diligence, we'll look at the top 10 company navs. Within that general partnership, we'll underwrite those companies ourselves. And we will you know, on a rough approximation, determine are these assets extremely overvalued? Are they undervalued? Are they fairly, fairly valued?”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Miles Dieffenbach
$7B Multi-Stage VC Funds Require $800B in Exit Cap for 4x Net
“You're close to, you know, eight hundred billion of market cap needed to return a Forex net for those multi-stage funds. Now, for reference, twenty-twenty-one, the best exit year of all time, there was 850 billion-ish of market cap exit value from that year. O…”
$100B Venture IPOs Will Remain Rare Generational Outcomes Through 2035
“So, so my guess is that a hundred billion dollar IPO over the next 10 years is still going to be a generational outcome. And so the question I throw back is, you know, do you think there's going to be 10, 20 A hundred billion dollar plus IPOs. I do not think s…”
Venture Capital Fee Structures Must Change for Large Funds
“You know, we really try to understand has the magic bond been broken between GPs and LPs, which, you know, leads us to, you know, like we think the fee structures need to change to accommodate for that.”
Large Venture Funds Charge 2-and-20 Fees for Passive Investing
“You are essentially acting as a long only public equity investor, right? You're not, you know, actively, you know, managing the company. They've got their own HR team. They're doing all their own hiring. You know, they've got a 20 person product team. They've …”
Growth VC Funds Should Charge 1% Management Fees and 10% Carry
“But those growth funds that are really for scaled businesses that are mature assets, like, you should be charging long-only public equity fees, which are one in 10, and if you really love your LPs, it'd be zero in 10, but, or budget-based, right? Based on the …”