How do I make a prior track record portable?

What portability actually means

Portability is not whether you can remember the deals. It is whether you may present them, whether you can prove your part in them, and whether the presentation is honest about the difference between a firm's results and a person's contribution to them.

The distinction that governs everything else is firm-level versus partner-level performance. A fund's net return belongs to the fund, which belongs to the firm and its limited partners. What may belong to you is your role in specific decisions inside it, evidenced and consented to. Those are different claims, they are underwritten differently, and conflating them is the single most damaging thing a spinout can do in a first meeting.

The four gates, in the order they actually bind

Work them in sequence. Later gates are wasted effort if an earlier one is closed.

• Permission. Written consent from the former employer covering what may be used, in what form, and to whom it may be shown. Employment agreements, partnership agreements, confidentiality obligations, and non-solicitation terms all speak to this, and counsel should read them before you rely on any of them.
• Documentation. Deal-level records showing date, entry stage, ownership, your role, the decision made, and the outcome, held in a form a diligence team can check rather than in a summary you wrote afterwards.
• Attribution. A defensible statement of your part in each decision, ideally corroborated by somebody who was in the room. Attribution is the item allocators test hardest, because it is the one most often overstated in good faith.
• Disclosure. A presentation that says what the record is, what it excludes, what is realised and what is marked, and that the results were achieved at another firm. Disclosure is what converts a contested claim into a verifiable one.

The United States conditions, quoted as they are written

For advisers subject to United States adviser marketing rules, predecessor performance is permitted in an advertisement only where four conditions are met. They are worth reading as written, because each one removes a common shortcut.

• The person or persons who were primarily responsible for achieving the prior performance results must manage accounts at the advertising adviser. Responsibility has to travel with the people, not with the story.
• The accounts managed at the predecessor adviser must be sufficiently similar to those the adviser now manages, so that the prior performance is relevant to what is being offered.
• All accounts that were managed in a substantially similar manner must be included, unless the exclusion does not result in materially higher performance. This is the condition that forbids showing only the deals that worked.
• The advertisement must clearly and prominently include the relevant disclosures, including that the performance results were achieved at a prior entity.

Two related provisions in the same rule bind alongside these. Extracted performance, meaning results pulled from a larger portfolio, requires that the advertisement provide, or offer to provide promptly, the performance of the total portfolio the extract came from. Hypothetical performance is permitted only with policies making it relevant to the intended audience and with the criteria, assumptions, and limitations supplied.

This is United States adviser law. Managers marketing in the United Kingdom, the European Union, or elsewhere face their own regulators' requirements on performance presentation, and a presentation that satisfies one jurisdiction does not automatically satisfy another.

The portability matrix, by the role you actually held

This matrix is Blueprint's own judgment about what each role can credibly support in a diligence conversation, not a legal test and not a rule any regulator publishes. Use it to decide what to claim, and use counsel to decide what you may claim.

• Lead investor. Strongest claim. You sourced or led the decision, negotiated the terms, and typically held the board or observer seat. With permission and documentation this supports a stated role in the outcome, including the follow-on decisions you made.
• Co-lead or co-decision maker. Strong claim, stated as shared. Name the other decision maker rather than leaving the reader to assume you acted alone, since a co-investor reference will settle it anyway.
• Investment committee member without deal ownership. Real but partial. You can credibly describe participating in the decision and cannot credibly describe having made it. Where your vote is recorded, the record is worth more than the description.
• Sourcer without decision rights. Evidence of access rather than of selection. This supports a sourcing claim, which is genuinely valuable, and it does not support a performance claim.
• Operating or value-add role after investment. Evidence of contribution rather than of judgment. Portfolio company references are usually the strongest form of it, and the claim should be about what you did rather than about what the investment returned.
• Adviser, scout, or observer. Weakest claim, and still worth documenting where the reasoning is recorded. State the relationship precisely, because an allocator who discovers you were an adviser after reading you as an investor will discount everything else you said.

Employer restrictions, confidentiality, and the conversation to have early

The permission conversation is usually easier before you leave than after, and it is almost always easier before you have shown anything to a limited partner. What to settle, in writing, is what you may name, whether performance figures may be stated or only roles described, whether portfolio companies may be listed, whether the former firm will confirm your role if asked by a prospective investor, and what happens to confidential information you still hold.

Confidentiality survives employment in most arrangements, and it usually covers exactly the material that makes a track record verifiable: valuations, cap tables, board materials, and fund-level performance. A manager who cannot use those can often still use the deal names, the dates, the roles, and a reference, which is a weaker but honest presentation.

Where the former firm declines, the honest response is to present what remains rather than to present the record anyway with a disclaimer attached. A disclaimer does not cure an unpermitted use, and allocators talk to former employers as part of ordinary reference work.

Team continuity, and why allocators keep returning to it

A track record predicts something only if the conditions that produced it travel with it. Allocators therefore ask which parts of the prior firm are actually in the new one: the people who made the decisions, the sourcing channels, the sector access, the co-investor relationships, and the process.

A team that moves together carries more of the record than an individual does, and it also carries a harder permission problem, since several employment agreements are now in scope. A single partner leaving a large platform carries the least of the prior conditions, which is why the sourcing and access questions land hardest on a solo spinout.

What portability does not prove

A portable record proves what you did at another firm under that firm's brand, capital, and deal flow. It does not prove that the same results are reproducible with your own capital base, your own cheque size, and your own sourcing, and an allocator will say so.

Permission is not verification either. Consent to use a record does not make the record accurate, and the documentation and attribution gates exist precisely because a permitted claim can still be an unsupported one.

This page is educational and general. It is not legal, securities, or investment advice. Whether specific results may be used, in what form, and with what disclosure is a question for counsel qualified in the jurisdictions where you market, and for the firm that holds the record.