Cadence

The stage

What the firm is selling

Operating rhythm. A Cadence firm is no longer asking an LP to believe a thesis on the strength of the partners' judgment alone. It is asking them to believe that the firm can do the same thing again, reliably, on a schedule, with more than one person doing it.

That is a different promise and it has different structural requirements. Judgment scales badly and process scales adequately, so the configuration shifts toward measured diversification: moderate scope, moderate portfolio counts, a team large enough to support concurrent deployments rather than one fund at a time.

The stage most often occupied without being declared

Conviction is easy to know you are in, because you have just raised your first fund. Continuity is hard to reach and comes with a succession structure that has to be built deliberately. Cadence has no equivalent moment.

It is defined by the presence of a working rhythm, which arrives gradually and is noticed late. A firm typically operating Fund III, IV, or V, with aggregate capital above $250M and a team supporting multiple concurrent deployments, is at Cadence whether or not anyone has said so. The declaration is the thing that lags.

This matters for every reading the model produces, because a firm still declared at Conviction while operating at Cadence will be read against expectations it has outgrown. Its concentration will be treated as structurally appropriate when its LPs have stopped treating it that way, and its absent succession work will read as aligned when it has become the thing to start.

Succession begins here

Cadence is where the succession expectation arrives, and it arrives as an expectation to have begun rather than to have finished. A firm at this stage with no succession structure at all surfaces a soft tension rather than a hard one.

The reason is that a Cadence firm now has something worth transferring. It has a rhythm, a track record building, and institutional relationships that outlive any single fund. Those are assets that belong to the firm rather than to the partners, and the question of who holds them next has become answerable, which is what makes it worth asking.

The squeeze this stage is under

Cadence sits in the fund-size band, typically $150M to $750M, that several independent 2026 analyses argue is the hardest place in venture to stand: too large to return a multiple from seed-stage outcomes, too small to compete for the growth rounds the largest funds are taking.

That argument is worth engaging with directly rather than acknowledging in passing, and it has its own page. The short version is that the pressure is real and the conclusion that the middle is unviable does not follow as cleanly as the framing suggests.

What the model contributes is narrower and worth separating from the debate. It has no view on whether a firm should be this size. What it reads is whether a firm at this size has the configuration the stage requires, and the characteristic failure is a firm that grew its fund without growing anything else: same team, same portfolio count, same scope, a much larger cheque, and an ownership target inherited from a fund a third the size.

What to watch

Team scale is the input that most often lags at this stage. Fund size moves in one step at a close; hiring moves continuously and slowly. The gap between them is where the practice-capacity and board-capacity readings turn.

The second is the ownership target, for the same reason. A target that made sense when the fund was smaller becomes either unreachable or unnecessary at a larger size, and it is rarely revisited because nothing forces it to be.