Pillar
Lifecycle Stages
The same configuration can be sound at one stage of a firm's life and incoherent at another, which makes lifecycle the variable everything else is read against. What separates the three is not seniority but what the firm is selling to its LPs.
4 pages
The three stages
- ConvictionThe Conviction stage: a firm whose advantage is its judgment, why concentration is the point rather than the risk, and why the transition out is harder than the stage itself.
- CadenceThe Cadence stage: a firm whose advantage is its operating rhythm, why it is the stage most often occupied without being declared, and the fund-size squeeze it sits inside.
- ContinuityThe Continuity stage: a firm whose advantage is durability across partner generations, why the claim needs more than partial evidence, and where succession stops being aspirational.
What changes across the three
The stages are different frontiers rather than a ladder. None is riskier than another, none is a more advanced version of another, and the model does not treat a newer firm as a weaker one. What changes is which configuration choices are coherent, because what the firm is selling to its LPs has changed: judgment, then operating rhythm, then durability across partner generations.
Industry scope
Narrower at Conviction, moderate at Cadence, broader at Continuity. The direction of travel is outward, and it is the dimension that widens most reliably.
Portfolio count and ownership
Smaller counts at higher ownership early; larger counts at moderate ownership late. These move together and in opposite directions, which is why changing one alone produces a mismatch.
Fund size
Typically below $150M at Conviction, $150M to $750M at Cadence, and $400M to $1.5B and above at Continuity. The bands overlap deliberately, because the stages are not defined by size alone.
Concentration
Structurally appropriate at Conviction and progressively less so afterwards. This is the dimension where the same configuration reads most differently by stage.
Succession
Not expected at Conviction, begun at Cadence, formalized at Continuity. The one structural question whose right answer genuinely changes with time.
Read down the list and the shape of the change is consistent: concentration converts into breadth, and judgment converts into process. A Conviction firm wins by being right about a few things. A Continuity firm wins by being reliably competent about many, across more than one generation of partners.
A General Partner declares the firm's stage and confirms it. The platform never transitions a firm on its own, in either direction. What it does is watch for accumulated structural change and surface a suggestion, against published triggers: fund sequence, reaching Fund III for the move from Conviction to Cadence and Fund V for Cadence to Continuity; aggregate firm capital; team size; deployment maturity; and, for the move to Continuity, the presence of a formal succession structure. The Cadence suggestion fires on partial evidence. The Continuity suggestion requires every trigger, because a firm claiming durability across partner generations without the succession structure to support it is claiming something it has not built.
The declaration is worth revisiting, because it changes almost every other reading. The most common error is not misdeclaring at the start; it is declaring accurately in year one and never returning to it. A firm that grew into a new stage and left the declaration alone will read as increasingly incoherent, and the incoherence is in the label rather than in the firm.