Portfolio Construction Intelligence
Architecture Intelligence
Architecture Intelligence is a working reference on portfolio construction for General Partners with capital already deployed. It covers the decisions that get made once and then live inside a fund for a decade: how many companies, at what ownership, at what stage, how much held back for follow-on, and whether the firm around the fund can carry what the strategy commits it to. Where a page makes a claim about how funds actually behave, it names the source. Nothing here scores your firm.
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Free interactive checkBoard seats and team capacityEnter your board seat practice, target portfolio count, and team size, and run the real congruence check against your own fund. No account, no sign-up, and the same reading the platform returns.Colibrí Institute researchThe Architecture of ReturnsThe Colibrí Institute research the model is built on, covering how configuration relates to fund outcomes across 2,471 funds and twenty-five vintage years.
Nine pillars
01Portfolio Construction DisciplineThe commitments that decide what a fund can do are all made before any of them can be tested. What each one binds a fund to, what checking them afterwards can honestly tell a General Partner, and what happens when the fund stops matching what was declared.4 pages02Portfolio EfficiencyThe unit here is a single fund rather than the firm around it. Whether the money can actually be deployed the way the fund says it will be, from the cheque it can write through to what is left for follow-on.6 pages03Firm Design CongruenceNothing on this list is controversial by itself: how the investment committee votes, how many partners there are, who takes board seats, what founders are promised, how wide the geography runs. Eleven questions ask whether they hold together.11 pages04Cross-Fund ConcentrationDiversification inside a single fund says nothing about the firm's total exposure. What accumulates across funds when nobody is watching that total: one sector, one company, one bet nobody chose.5 pages05The Architecture ScoreMost readers start with the number and work down. What it combines, why strength in one place cannot offset weakness in another, and what a band actually means.2 pages06The Temporal LayerA score with no history behind it is a snapshot. What direction adds, when a firm has grown into a different stage, and when a declared setup has stopped describing the fund.3 pages07Scenario Engine and Follow-On StrategyFirm design is a question you revisit between funds. A follow-on decision arrives with a term sheet and someone else's deadline, and these pages are about the second kind.8 pages08Lifecycle StagesConviction, Cadence and Continuity are three different things to be selling an LP, not three rungs of a ladder. What changes structurally between them, and why the same configuration reads differently at each.4 pages09ResearchThe Colibrí Institute research is what the rest of the library leans on: 2,471 United States venture funds across twenty-five vintage years, and the open questions the evidence does not settle.2 pages