Diagnostics
Put the research to work in your own questions.
Our free self-assessments help allocators examine their programs and managers examine their fund platforms. Each draws on the research and gives you a structured place to start. No account is required.
Use the results to prepare a conversation, identify an assumption or decide what deserves a closer look.
LP Diagnostic
Review the screens your venture program uses and the assumptions behind them. The assessment can help prepare an investment committee discussion about how you find and evaluate managers. It does not establish that a particular fund should receive an allocation.
About fifteen minutes · No account required
GP Diagnostic
Review your fund’s strategy, resources and operating readiness. The assessment helps you identify gaps and prepare for the questions an allocator may ask.
About fifteen minutes · No account required
Configuration Coherence Diagnostic, Allocator edition
Examine how a fund’s capital, ownership targets, portfolio scope and team capacity fit together. Use the information the manager has disclosed and leave anything unknown unassessed. The forthcoming tool will review five dimensions and provide a diligence action plan and PDF by email.
Available with White Paper II
Configuration Coherence Diagnostic, Manager edition
Review your fund’s capital plan, entry ownership, stage and sector focus, investment practices and team capacity. The forthcoming tool will show how the choices fit together and provide practical tasks to prepare for your next allocator conversation, with a PDF by email.
How to use them
Five questions to bring into 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.
- Read the measured relationships
- Portfolio breadth and stage focus showed associations with efficiency in White Paper II. Check size and sector focus added limited independent signal in the specified models. That does not make either irrelevant to the operation of a particular fund.
- Ask early
- Ask how the plan will work before most of the capital is deployed. The research finds different associations across deployment groups; it does not follow a fund through time or show the causal cost of a decision.
- Understand changes in focus
- Ask whether stage focus has changed since first close, why it changed, and what the team needs to execute the revised plan. This is a practical diligence question, not a claim that the study measured strategy drift over time.
- 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.
A qualitative guide to the specified models, not numerical diagnostic weights.
About 93% of funds in White Paper II were sector-focused, leaving limited variation on that measure. Interpret these patterns within the study’s models and sample. The bars illustrate relative emphasis; their lengths are not coefficients or scores.
Colibrí Institute, 2026 • Moncada, 2026
2,142 U.S.-based venture capital funds, 2000–2024.