Data sourced from Joe, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
In 1986, the idea of a fourth television network was considered a joke. ABC, CBS, and NBC had the audience, the affiliates, the advertisers, and decades of infrastructure. The economics of the industry said the market was settled: three networks, full stop. Fox launched anyway. It didn't win by out-spending the incumbents. It won by being willing to serve audiences the big three had stopped paying attention to, at a cost structure the big three couldn't match because their businesses were built for a different era.
Private fund performance data looks a lot like broadcast television in 1985 right now. A small number of established providers have owned the category for years. The assumption, inside and outside those companies, is that the market is settled. We don't think it is.
In this article, we're making the case for why this category has room for a third option, and why we think Joe is it. By the end, you'll see why we don't think the market is as settled as the incumbents assume.
The incumbents in this category built businesses the same way ABC, CBS, and NBC did: enormous fixed infrastructure, enterprise sales motions, and pricing built to extract maximum value from a limited pool of institutional buyers willing to pay it. That model isn't wrong, exactly, it's just built for a different moment than the one the market is in now.
The buyer base for private fund performance data has grown. Family offices, RIAs, smaller allocators, and mid-market GPs all need this information now in a way they didn't a decade ago. The incumbents' pricing wasn't built for that buyer. It was built for the largest institutions in the world, and it still largely serves them almost exclusively, not because smaller firms don't need the data, but because the cost structure was never built to serve them profitably.
That's the opening. Not a technology gap. A structural one.
See the data behind the pricing: request access to Joe.
We're not entering this category with a discount version of what already exists. Joe, Powered by Dakota covers 159,000+ performance records across 18,000+ funds and seven asset classes, GP and sponsor intelligence across 20,000+ firms, and visibility into funds currently raising capital. Every record is reviewed by a research team before it publishes. That's not a stripped-down product. It's built to the same standard the incumbents claim, at $9,500 a year for up to five users, against a market where three seats routinely run $30,000.
That gap exists because our cost structure doesn't look like theirs. Dakota Marketplace, our core LP database, already funds the research infrastructure, the verification standards, and the data operations that make this level of rigor possible. Joe was built on top of a business that already works, not stood up as a standalone product that has to recover its full cost from day one. Fox had the advantage of Rupert Murdoch's existing media assets underwriting the network in its early years, while it built an audience the big three had never bothered to chase. We have the advantage of Marketplace revenue underwriting Joe while it earns its place with a buyer the incumbents left on the table.
A third option isn't a cheaper version of the same thing. It's a different bet about who the market actually is. Fox didn't try to out-CBS CBS. It bet on younger audiences, different programming, different economics. We're not trying to out-enterprise the enterprise providers. We're betting that the real growth in this category is the allocators, GPs, and consultants who've been priced out of institutional-grade fund performance data for years, not the handful of largest accounts the incumbents have spent decades optimizing for.
Fox took over a decade to be taken seriously as a real network. Nobody at the launch thought that was the likely outcome. We're not claiming Joe rewrites the category overnight. We're making the case that the assumption the market is settled (three providers, one price tier, one buyer profile) was never actually true. It was just uncontested.
That changes now.
Joe, Powered by Dakota: performance data, custom benchmarking, GP and sponsor intelligence, and live fundraising visibility, at $9,500 a year for up to five users.
Request access to Joe and judge the data on its own merits.