Of all the problems that have besieged venture capital in recent years, arguably none is more acute than investors’ difficulties converting their paper returns into cash.

Limited partners are disappointed with how much capital is coming back to them from their venture managers. And they’re less inclined to re-up with VCs that haven’t returned much cash. LPs are closely monitoring a metric called distributed to paid-in capital (DPI), which measures how much capital a manager returned relative to what was invested.

But just how small are recent cash distributions compared to historical levels? READ MORE