Scouts
What should a scout ask about eligible carry on a developer infrastructure startup?
a developer infrastructure startup: Eligible carry requires an agreement, a defined base, and the events that can create distributable amounts.
Eligible carry requires an agreement, a defined base, and the events that can create distributable amounts. A headline percentage does not specify deductions, timing, follow-ons, vesting, or termination treatment. A sourced investment can produce no carry.
Start with the decision
Map the actual agreement's conditions and use fictional arithmetic only to explain the mechanism. Include a zero-distribution case. Ask qualified advisers about legal and tax terms and avoid treating future carry as expected income.
The illustrative scenario
This is an educational workbook. The company or fund and all numerical inputs below are fictional. They are not ADIN results, customer claims, market benchmarks, or a forecast.
The fictional company maintains an open-source integration library and offers a hosted service. Downloads are growing, but paying teams are few. A small group of maintainers handles support, releases, and infrastructure incidents.
Community activity and commercial demand overlap imperfectly. Count organizations and actual production use separately from package downloads, forks, and repeat installs.
Carry arithmetic after an explicitly assumed base
For this fictional example only, assume the applicable agreement defines $40,000.00 as distributable net carry and allocates half of that amount to the scout. Multiplication gives $20,000.00. The difficult question precedes the multiplication: whether the deal qualifies and whether the defined distributable base ever exists.
A paper valuation, a completed introduction, or the fund's first investment does not establish that payment is due. Eligibility, attribution, deductions, follow-on treatment, vesting, and payment timing need the actual agreement. The zero-base row is as important as the positive row because an investment may never create distributable carry.
Community activity and commercial demand overlap imperfectly. Count organizations and actual production use separately from package downloads, forks, and repeat installs. Keep company evaluation separate from compensation expectations. ADIN's GPs make the final investment decision, and the public scout page should be read together with the applicable agreement. This example is an explanation of arithmetic and questions, not a projection of income or a legal interpretation.
| Item | Illustration |
|---|---|
| Invented distributable net carry base | $40,000.00 |
| Assumed share for this exercise | 50% |
| Multiplication under those assumptions | $20,000.00 |
| Share if eligible net carry is zero | $0.00 |
Use this worksheet
Answer the questions with a source, date, owner, and next action. Mark an unknown as unknown. Use public or permissioned information and involve a qualified specialist when a question requires expertise beyond the team’s competence.
- What amount is the percentage applied to?
- What deductions come first?
- Which investment qualifies?
- When can payment occur?
- What survives leaving the program?
Questions specific to this scenario
- Which users have buying authority?
- What makes a hosted account renew?
- Who can maintain the critical dependencies?
Review production references, hosted conversion cohorts, support workload, repository ownership, and release history. Check the permission to reuse code and data rather than assuming public availability grants every right.
A concrete next test
Ask one production user of the free library and one hosted customer what would make them switch or stop paying. Keep their roles and deployment needs separate. Compare their answers with the proposed commercial conversion path and actual support workload.
Interpret the result
A multiplication example does not predict an exit or describe every waterfall. ADIN's public program copy and the applicable agreement should be read together, with GPs retaining the final investment decision.
Compare the commercial workflow with the free alternative. Identify who has budget for reliability, support, or managed operations.
Sources and method
These primary resources provide background for the concepts. The fictional scenario, calculations, and worksheet are ADIN educational examples; the sources do not report or validate those invented results. Reviewed October 11, 2026.