Firm Design Congruence
When succession stops being aspirational
Succession is the one structural question whose right answer actually changes as a firm matures. What a first-time fund is reasonably expected to have in place is not what a firm claiming durability across partner generations is expected to have.
What this check compares
This check reads the firm's declared lifecycle stage against the succession structure it has in place, and asks whether the second matches where the firm sits in its arc as an institution.
The expectation genuinely differs by stage, and it is the only place in this engine where that is true. A Conviction-stage firm is not expected to have formal succession structures, because the firm is its founding partners and building the machinery to replace them would be premature. A Cadence-stage firm is expected to have begun the work, because it now has something worth transferring. A Continuity-stage firm is expected to have formalized it, because a firm whose defining advantage is durability across partner generations depends on that transition working.
The one check that reads lifecycle
Ten of the eleven checks in this engine read structural relationships that hold regardless of a firm's age. A team cannot serve board seats it does not have the people for whether the firm is on its first fund or its seventh. This check is the exception, and it is worth being explicit about that, because the natural assumption is that every check is calibrated to lifecycle stage and it is not.
The reason succession is the exception is that it is the one structural question whose right answer actually changes as a firm matures. Everything else the engine reads is a question about internal consistency, which does not care how old the firm is. Succession is a question about time.
What else the check looks at
Alongside the succession structure itself, the check reads two related commitments: whether the firm has a documented promotion path, and whether next-generation stewards have been identified. These can be surfaced as separate tensions in their own right rather than folded into the main outcome, because they are separately actionable. A firm can have a succession document and no identified successors, which is a different problem from having neither.
Both are also the kind of work that is easy to defer indefinitely, since neither has a deadline until the moment it has a very short one. Surfacing them separately is a way of putting them on the page while they are still cheap to address.
What this check does not say
The check does not say a firm should be at a different lifecycle stage. Lifecycle is self-classified: the General Partner declares it, confirms it, and the platform never transitions a firm on its own. A tension here says the succession structure and the declared stage do not match, and a firm that concludes it has classified itself one stage ahead of where it actually operates has resolved the tension just as legitimately as one that starts the succession work.
The check reads declared structure, not the quality or the fairness of it. A documented succession plan that the partnership does not believe in reads the same way here as one everybody has signed up to. That distinction is real and it is not one a configuration can express.