Carry does not work like that. It’s not on a per-deal basis, it’s on a per-fund basis. So even if one deal performs well, it doesn’t matter if the other 9 portfolio companies in the fund do poorly (and vice versa). There are very few PE Partners making $20 million / year (probably just Founder/Co-Founder types and some at the mega-funds). The average compensation across all fund sizes/classes is an order of magnitude lower.

I have a question. Is it possible/common for VC Principals (and VC Partners) to work on more than one deal at the same time? I mean, supposing as in your example that each deal carries an interest of 1m over 10 years and that you work on three of them simultaneously, then you could get 3×100=300k/year from carry (much better than just 100k!).

I have the same doubt about carried interests in PE, so I would be grateful if you could address both. In particular I have read that PE Partners at large funds can earn 20m+ in carried interests over a period of 5 years from one single deal. But then if they could work on 5 deals at the same time their average salary would amount to 20m/year (!). That sounds pretty shocking/hard to believe but I wait for you clarifications.

Yes, this is true. Any finance role is heavily slanted toward the people at the top and the “top” firms, but VC is by far the worst. At least in areas like PE, you can still earn a lot and advance even if you’re at a lesser-known firm. But in VC, the returns are so disproportionately distributed that lower-tier firms aren’t really worth it.