When your fund stops looking like the one you raised

What drift is

A fund starts with a plan. During the investment period, check sizes, company count or team responsibilities can change. Configuration drift is the gap between the plan on record and how the fund now operates.

The analysis depends on the information on file. If the declared plan no longer describes the fund, the resulting comparisons may no longer answer the questions the team is facing.

How often it happens

We do not offer an estimate of how often funds drift. The useful task here is to compare your own recorded plan with the portfolio and operating choices it is meant to describe.

Some elements are planning targets; others are binding commitments under the fund’s documents. Keep that distinction clear. Updating a record does not authorize a change to the mandate, and a deliberate revision may need approvals or communication.

Three ways it happens

• Drift by accumulation

  No decision was made. Cheques ran slightly larger than planned, or the portfolio filled up faster, and the fund arrived somewhere it never chose.

• Drift by revision

  A real decision was taken, often a good one, and the declared configuration was never updated to match it.

• Drift by growth

  The firm changed around the fund. A team doubled, a mandate widened, a partner left. The fund's own numbers are untouched and the firm they describe no longer exists.

A deliberate revision deserves particular care. A firm may decide in year three to concentrate more heavily, subject to its terms and required approvals. If the record still describes the earlier plan, analysis and LP conversations based on it will lag behind the decision.

What it costs

The immediate cost is that analysis degrades quietly. A configuration reading does not announce that its inputs are stale; it simply answers the question it was asked, about the fund as declared. Nothing looks broken.

There is also a communication cost. LPs may compare the current portfolio with the plan they were given. Explaining a deliberate change when it happens creates a clearer record for the next diligence conversation.

The gap can carry into the next fund if its plan starts from the last one. Reconcile the record first, so a useful starting point does not become an inherited mistake.

How the platform surfaces it

Two mechanisms, deliberately mild. Every score is recorded as a time-stamped snapshot, captured when an input changes and on a regular schedule, so the record shows the configuration moving rather than only its current state. And a configuration that has not been refreshed while the fund has kept deploying raises a staleness flag, triggered when no fund-level field has changed in 180 days while active investments exist, or when the recorded deployment measure has moved more than 20 percentage points since the last configuration update.

Staleness does not invalidate anything. The scores keep computing against the configuration on file, and the flag simply lets any reader see that the reading may not reflect current operating reality. That is the honest treatment: the model cannot know whether a firm drifted or deliberately changed course, and it does not guess.

The action it asks for is small. Restate the configuration to match what the fund now is. That re-bases every subsequent reading, and it creates a dated record of the change, which gives the team and LPs a clearer history to review later.