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Application deadline: April 8th, 2026

What is the Founding Cohort

Colibrí Strategies is the advisory side of the Colibrí platform. Colibrí Institute produces the empirical research on how venture funds actually generate returns, and Colibrí Strategies works directly with institutional LPs and emerging GPs to translate that research into defensible decisions.

The Founding Cohort is our inaugural client group, and we are keeping it intentionally small, selecting founding clients whose work aligns closely with our research agenda and where the engagement can deliver the highest-impact outcome.

The programs: For GPs and LPs

The cohort spans two tracks and four programs. The LP Track serves institutional allocators designing or recalibrating their venture capital approach, with programs covering Emerging Manager Program Design and Evaluation and VC Risk and Diversification Optimization. The GP Track serves Fund I through Fund III managers, with programs covering Fund Formation and LP Readiness and Portfolio Construction and Allocation Strategy. Selection is based on fit, readiness to engage, and the degree to which the engagement contributes to how we build and refine these programs over time.

What founding clients receive: Founding clients work directly with both co-founders, receive preferred engagement terms, get early access to Institute research and practitioner tools before public release, and have real input into how we shape these programs going forward.

The application

We review every application personally and respond to all of them, and if budget or timing is a concern, we encourage you to apply and have that conversation with us directly.

Apply Now

Application deadline: April 8th, 2026

If this is relevant to someone in your network, whether that is a GP building toward an institutional raise or an LP rethinking their venture strategy, we would be grateful if you passed it along.

— Mariela and Itzel

About Colibrí Strategies

Colibrí Strategies is an independent, VC-first strategic advisory firm that helps institutions and venture managers make defensible venture capital decisions grounded in empirical research and institutional-grade analysis. Advisory programs span emerging manager program design and evaluation, VC risk-return and diversification diagnostics, institutional fund formation and LP readiness, and GP portfolio construction and allocation strategy. If you’d like to learn more about our work, get in touch here.

Follow along:
→ Mariela on LinkedIn
→ Itzel on LinkedIn
→ Colibrí Strategies on LinkedIn

— Mariela & Itzel

Apply Now

Application deadline: April 8th, 2026

What is the Founding Cohort

Colibrí operates as a dual platform: Colibrí Institute produces open-access empirical research on VC fund performance and capital allocation, including the finding that emerging managers outperform established funds by 7.2% IRR, with that outperformance concentrated in fund configuration discipline rather than AUM or brand. Colibrí Strategies is our strategic advisory firm, built to help institutions and managers actually act on that research.

The Founding Cohort is our inaugural client group: a small number of founding clients working directly with us across four advisory programs spanning two tracks. The cohort is intentionally small, and we are selecting founding clients whose work aligns closely with our research agenda and where we can deliver the highest-impact outcome.

The programs: For GPs and LPs

The LP Track is built for institutional allocators, including foundations, endowments, public pension plans, family offices, and universities, that are building or recalibrating their approach to venture capital, with programs covering Emerging Manager Program Design and Evaluation and VC Risk and Diversification Optimization.

The GP Track is built for emerging managers, Fund I through Fund III, preparing for institutional fundraising or actively deploying capital, with programs covering Fund Formation and LP Readiness and Portfolio Construction and Allocation Strategy.

Apply Now

Founding clients receive preferred engagement terms, direct co-founder access on every engagement, early access to practitioner tools from the Institute before public release, priority on future programs and research partnerships, and a genuine seat at the table in shaping how these programs are built and delivered.

The application

We review every application personally and respond to all of them, and if budget or timing is a question, we encourage you to apply and discuss it with us directly as part of that conversation.

Apply Now

Application deadline: April 8th, 2026

If this is relevant to someone in your network, whether that is a GP building toward an institutional raise or an LP rethinking their venture strategy, we would be grateful if you passed it along.

— Mariela and Itzel

About Colibrí Strategies

Colibrí Strategies is an independent, VC-first strategic advisory firm that helps institutions and venture managers make defensible venture capital decisions grounded in empirical research and institutional-grade analysis. Advisory programs span emerging manager program design and evaluation, VC risk-return and diversification diagnostics, institutional fund formation and LP readiness, and GP portfolio construction and allocation strategy. If you’d like to learn more about our work, get in touch here.

Follow along:
→ Mariela on LinkedIn
→ Itzel on LinkedIn
→ Colibrí Strategies on LinkedIn

— Mariela & Itzel

Colibrí Strategies was built to close that gap, and we are now accepting applications for our Founding Cohort.

Apply Now

Application deadline: April 8th, 2026

Introducing the Strategies side of the platform

Colibrí operates as a dual platform: Colibrí Institute produces open-access empirical research on VC fund performance and capital allocation, and Colibrí Strategies is our strategic advisory firm, working with institutional LPs and emerging GPs to make defensible venture capital decisions grounded in how funds actually generate returns.

We work with institutional LPs, including foundations, endowments, public pension plans, family offices, and universities, that are building or recalibrating their venture capital approach, particularly their emerging manager allocations. Our LP programs are built around governance-ready frameworks designed to hold up under institutional scrutiny, from IC presentations to board-level documentation.

We also work with emerging GPs and Fund I through Fund III managers preparing for institutional fundraising or actively deploying capital, who need their construction logic to hold up under LP scrutiny. Our research is unambiguous that portfolio configuration discipline drives returns more than AUM or brand, and our GP programs translate that insight into architecture.

We are opening applications for our Founding Cohort

To mark the launch of Colibrí Strategies, we are accepting a small cohort of founding clients to work directly with us across four advisory programs. The cohort is intentionally limited, and we are selecting founding clients whose work aligns closely with our research agenda and where we can deliver the highest-impact outcome. Selection is based on fit, readiness to engage, and the degree to which the engagement contributes to how we build and refine these programs over time.

Apply Now

Founding clients receive:

• Preferred engagement terms that reflect the partnership model at the core of this program, with the full scope of the selected program always delivered.

• A genuine thought partnership and direct access to the team behind the research, with every engagement led by Mariela and Itzel directly.

• First access to practitioner tools translated from Colibrí Institute research before public release, including diagnostic frameworks, scoring rubrics, and portfolio assessment guides.

• Right of first engagement for new programs, research partnerships, and advisory work as Colibrí Strategies grows.

• A real seat at the table in shaping how these programs are built and delivered for the clients who come after them.

The programs

There are four programs across two tracks.

• The LP Track includes Program 1 (Emerging Manager Program Design and Evaluation) and Program 2 (VC Risk and Diversification Optimization), both built for institutions navigating the structural exclusion problem that the Institute’s research documents.

• The GP Track includes Program 3 (Fund Formation and LP Readiness) and Program 4 (Portfolio Construction and Allocation Strategy), both built for managers who need their investment logic to survive institutional due diligence.

Each program has two tiers, and applications help identify which program and tier make the most sense. We then confirm the scope together in a 30-minute conversation with both co-founders.

The application

The application takes about 15 minutes. We ask about your organization, your current challenge, what drew you to the research, and what a successful engagement would look like for you. Every application is reviewed personally and receives a response. If budget or timing is a question, we encourage you to apply anyway — founding cohort terms are confirmed as part of the engagement proposal, and there is always room for a conversation.

Apply Now

Application deadline: April 8th, 2026

If this is relevant to someone in your network, whether that is a GP building toward an institutional raise or an LP rethinking their venture strategy, we would be grateful if you passed it along.

— Mariela and Itzel

About Colibrí Strategies

Colibrí Strategies is an independent, VC-first strategic advisory firm that helps institutions and venture managers make defensible venture capital decisions grounded in empirical research and institutional-grade analysis. Advisory programs span emerging manager program design and evaluation, VC risk-return and diversification diagnostics, institutional fund formation and LP readiness, and GP portfolio construction and allocation strategy. If you’d like to learn more about our work, get in touch here.

Follow along:
→ Mariela on LinkedIn
→ Itzel on LinkedIn
→ Colibrí Strategies on LinkedIn

— Mariela & Itzel

If you’re new here: Colibrí Strategies is an institutional advisory firm working with LPs and GPs on emerging manager allocation, VC risk architecture, and portfolio construction. This Substack is where we share our thinking, research translations, and tools from that work.

Colibrí Strategies is releasing its first Perspectives paper, The $72 Million Question: What Emerging Manager Exclusion Actually Costs Your Portfolio.

The paper takes on something the institutional VC industry has mostly avoided calculating: the cost of doing what everyone else is doing. Not the cost of a bad bet, not the cost of a single manager who underperformed, but the cost of a systematic, structural tilt away from the segment of the market that the data consistently shows outperforms.

On a $100 million allocation over a typical fund lifecycle, that cost is approximately $72 million, and it compounds across vintage years.

Read the Paper: The $72 Million Question

What the Data Actually Says

Colibrí Institute’s analysis of 2,471 U.S. venture capital funds raised between 2000 and 2024 found that emerging managers, defined as funds under $100M AUM, Fund I through III, vintages under five years, or funds led by structurally under-recognized GP teams, outperform established peers by 7.2 percentage points in IRR and 0.34x in TVPI.

These results hold across every definition of “emerging” the Institute tested, and persist across the full 25-year sample period, spanning multiple market cycles from 2000 to 2024.

And yet, according to PitchBook, in the first half of 2025 just 12 firms raised more than half of all US venture capital, while 44 first-time fund managers collectively raised less than a single established firm raised on its own.

The concentration of capital does not reflect a concentration of performance; it reflects a concentration of access.

The More Interesting Question

When findings are this consistent across two decades, the interesting question is not whether the outperformance is real. The interesting question is why it has been so difficult to act on.

The people making allocation decisions are navigating real constraints: committee governance, accountability frameworks, and the asymmetric consequences of non-consensus bets. An allocator who backs a well-known manager that underperforms has institutional cover. An allocator who backs an emerging manager that underperforms carries that decision differently, regardless of how sound the diligence was. Over time, these incentives quietly shape where capital flows and where it does not.

What is individually rational becomes collectively return-dilutive. Colibrí Strategies calls this the career-risk asymmetry, and it explains institutional VC capital flows better than any market condition or performance analysis.

What Colibrí Strategies Built

Today, we’re releasing The $72 Million Question: What Emerging Manager Exclusion Actually Costs Your Portfolio, the first paper in our Perspectives series. Perspectives translates Colibrí Institute’s research directly into institutional practice. We wrote this paper for CIOs, allocation leads, and investment committee members who want to bring a defensible, data-grounded case to their next IC discussion.

Alongside the paper, we built an Opportunity Cost Calculator, where you enter your institution’s parameters: allocation size, current emerging manager weight, target emerging manager weight, and it generates a customized estimate using the empirical performance spreads from the Institute’s research. The output is formatted for an IC slide and takes about 90 seconds to generate. Both the paper and the calculator are openly available and designed to be put to work immediately.

The Question We’re Actually Asking

The paper ends with three questions for investment committee meetings.

1. Have we quantified the opportunity cost of our current EM allocation weight relative to the empirical performance spread?

2. Do our screening criteria predict performance, or do they predict institutional embeddedness?

3. Is our VC portfolio structured to capture alpha from non-consensus sources, or is it optimized for consensus?

Venture capital is a power-law asset class, and the highest returns come from non-consensus investments in managers that others have not yet recognized. A portfolio built entirely from managers that every institution can access is, by construction, a consensus portfolio.

The data is clear, the cost is calculable, and the only remaining question is whether your institution is positioned to act on it.

Read the Paper: The $72 Million Question

About Colibrí Strategies

Colibrí Strategies is an independent, VC-first strategic advisory firm that helps institutions and venture managers make defensible venture capital decisions grounded in empirical research and institutional-grade analysis. Advisory programs span emerging manager program design and evaluation, VC risk-return and diversification diagnostics, institutional fund formation and LP readiness, and GP portfolio construction and allocation strategy. If you’d like to learn more about our work, get in touch here.

Follow along:
→ Mariela on LinkedIn
→ Itzel on LinkedIn
→ Colibrí Strategies on LinkedIn

— Mariela & Itzel

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