About
Carry arguments are won with arithmetic.
CarryBeast covers how a fund's money gets divided — the tiers, the fee base, the vesting terms, and the tax treatment — with the arithmetic visible rather than asserted.
The split between a manager and its investors is decided by a handful of clauses and a spreadsheet, and almost every published account of it is either a marketing summary or a definition with no numbers attached. CarryBeast publishes the mechanic and the worked example together, because a carry term you cannot compute is a carry term you cannot negotiate.
Where a number would require an assumption we cannot source, the page states the mechanic and says so. That is a deliberate trade: a stated mechanic with no number is useful, and a number with an invented assumption is worse than nothing.
What this covers
Five areas, each covered to the level where a reader can reproduce the result rather than take it on trust.
- Carry mechanics: What carried interest is owed, on what base, and how a preferred return and a catch-up interact before anyone is paid.
- Distribution waterfalls: Deal-by-deal against whole-fund, tier by tier, with the worked example that shows where the two diverge.
- Vesting and clawback: Vesting schedules, good-leaver and bad-leaver treatment, escrow, and what a clawback actually claws back.
- Fee structures: Management fee bases, step-downs, offsets, and the expenses that quietly sit outside the fee.
- The tax treatment: How carried interest is taxed, what the holding period requires, and which planning points are settled versus contested.
Who this is written for
GPs, LPs, CFOs and fund counsel modelling or negotiating the money split. That is the chair this property is written from, and it is the test every page has to pass before it ships.
Not written for someone running a distribution, drafting the LP notice, or managing the calendar around a payment. This property covers what the number should be and how it was negotiated; a sibling property covers the day it goes out.
How it gets made
The production system behind every page here — where the sources come from, where automation is used, where editorial judgment is not delegated, and what the software refuses to publish — is written out in full at /methodology.
When we get something wrong, the fix is dated and public at /corrections, not a silent edit. That log is the cheapest way to check whether any of this is real.
Who publishes this
Michael Kaufman — Editor-in-Chief
Michael Kaufman edits CarryBeast. He builds Archstone, fund administration software for private-market managers, which is where the modelling detail on this property comes from — and is disclosed wherever the category is discussed.
One editor is the accurate description of this masthead, and saying so is the point: there is a named person accountable for every page, and a single address to argue with when one of them is wrong.
Part of the Beast Network
CarryBeast is part of the Beast Network — a set of properties that split private capital by who is holding the pen at that stage, so the economics get a property of their own instead of a chapter in someone else's.
The properties share a method and a correction policy. They do not share an audience, and nothing published here is written to serve another one.
Get in touch
Corrections, sourcing questions, licensing requests, and placement enquiries all go through one form, so a message becomes a record rather than something someone remembers receiving. Corrections can also be sent straight to corrections@carrybeast.com.
Contact CarryBeast