Diagnostics
Two tools with every paper, one for allocators and one for managers.
Each diagnostic turns a published finding into a structured assessment. They are free, they require no account, and the logic behind every question is documented in the paper it comes from.
A finding changes an allocation only when it arrives in the form the allocation is made in.
LP Diagnostic
A structured self-assessment for a venture program. It scores the screens a program actually applies against the criteria White Paper I tested, and shows where a conventional filter would have excluded funds the evidence supports. Built for investment committee preparation, and it does not rank or score managers in public.
About fifteen minutes · No account required
GP Diagnostic
The same framework from the manager's side. It reads a fund's configuration against the characteristics our research associates with returns, and names the questions an allocator will reach first.
About fifteen minutes · No account required
Configuration Coherence Diagnostic, Allocator edition
Takes a small set of inputs knowable from a data room or a first conversation: fund size, firm assets under management, current and planned portfolio company counts, average check size, stated stage focus and any movement from it, sector breadth, and the share of committed capital called to date. It returns a coherence read, identifies the driver behind it, and states the evidence behind that read.
Deliberately not a performance prediction · Works before a track record exists
Configuration Coherence Diagnostic, Manager edition
The same framework for a general partner preparing to raise. It asks whether the breadth, stage focus, check size, and pacing form a plan the fund's resources can execute, and it does that while the answers are still choices rather than history.
How to use them
Five principles for configuration-based diligence.
- Evaluate coherence
- Ask whether the number of companies, the stage focus, the check size, the reserve strategy, and the pace form a plan this manager's resources can execute. A 25-company portfolio is coherent for one fund and overextended for another.
- Weight what carries signal
- Portfolio breadth relative to fund size and stage focus relative to capability carry information. Check size adds nothing once fund size is known, and sector concentration adds nothing because the market has already converged on it.
- Ask early
- The efficiency cost of these decisions concentrates late in deployment, which means the decisions themselves are made much earlier. An allocator evaluating a Fund I is evaluating a plan. An allocator evaluating year six is evaluating a consequence.
- Thesis or drift
- Stage generalism is penalized when it appears late in deployment, not when it is part of a coherent strategy. Ask whether the stage focus has changed since first close, and whether that change was a decision or a response to pressure.
- Read the range directionally
- When a manager's results are more spread out than peers, ask in which direction. Several total losses and one company at twenty times cost is not the same fund as uniformly mediocre outcomes with the same spread.
What the diagnostics weight, and what they discount.
Check size is largely determined by fund size once that is known. Sector focus has become a market-wide baseline, with 93% of funds in the sample already sector-focused, so there is almost no variation left for it to explain.
Colibrí Institute, 2026 • Moncada, 2026
2,142 U.S.-based venture capital funds, 2000–2024.