P10, Inc. (NYSE:PX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Amanda Coussens: Yes, there is still a seasonal pattern that we expect in the fourth quarter for the same reason. It’s just not quite as impactful overall due to the additional strategies added.

Christoph Kotowski: Okay. And then just — actually never mind, I’m all set.

Operator: The next question comes from John Campbell of Stephens.

John Campbell: Congrats on a strong close to the year. And at the risk of beating a dead horse here, I wanted to touch one more on the fee rate. The 115 you guys reported, I think in the presentation, you highlighted maybe 110 bps as the pro forma metric. Is the difference there, is that just — the $2.4 million, $2.5 million or so, is that catch-up fees?

Clark Webb: Yes. So we had three different components in our Q4 fee rate. We certainly had catch-up fees, and I think we broke those out in the script, and we can come back to you on that as well. We had the WTI acquisition, which added that Fund VII which was still fee bank that rolls off at the beginning of this year. And so you’ll see that, that’s in that stepdowns and expirations. But that certainly helped us in Q4. Again, that steps down. And then the last is we do have our higher fee products are growing faster. Thankfully, we think all of our products are going to be growing nicely. And so we don’t want to overestimate what the direct strategies will be, but they did have a very — when you look at our Q4 fee-paying AUM growth, we saw a lot of impact from our impact credit, our NAV lending and our GP stakes, and that certainly had some upward pressure. Amanda, do you want to take the stepdown — just reiterate the stepdown?

Amanda Coussens: Sorry, I was actually — I was going to add for catch-up fees, I don’t think we had to step to. $1.5 million for the quarter, John, and $4.8 million for the year.

John Campbell: Okay. That’s helpful. And then back on WTI, you guys — you talked pretty highly in the past around their loss rates and then basically having somewhat a degree of consistency there across various cycles. So maybe if you guys could talk to what you’re seeing today, what you guys may be expecting, there’s — any expectation for a deviation if things get a little bit more dicey.

Clark Webb: Yes, I’m certainly not going to be marketing the fund, although when I talk about it, it may sound like it. It’s really extraordinary that over multiple decades through multiple cycles, including a cycle like 2000, 2001, which was pretty deep in the venture world, that loss rate has been incredibly stable at around 5%. It goes from high 3s to kind of low 6s and 7s. And again, we think that’s comparable to the U.S. high-yield loss index. Meanwhile, the targeted returns here are very different than the targeted returns at high yield. So we think this product can really play an interesting role in institutional credit. Historically, the LP base has been much more venture-focused, but we think institutional credit allocators should really look at this because it does have an extraordinarily low loss profile given the return possibilities of the fund.

And this cycle is no different thus far than any of the others. And again, that includes an awful cycle in 2000 and 2001. So we’re very excited about this fund.

Operator: And the next question comes from Michael Cyprys from Morgan Stanley.

Michael Cyprys: If I could just piggyback on the venture question again. You talked at the time of the WTI acquisition about this being potentially a countercyclical product where you may have some firms that may not want to go back and raise equity right now. Just curious what you’re seeing in the venture space at the moment. Is that thesis playing out? And also, what sort of — what are you seeing on the demand side of this? Is this especially that people are still happy to allocate to you right now given what’s happened to valuation over the past 12 months or so?