For a VC portfolio operations lead the signal usually arrives in a board deck or an operations review: an on-premises ticketing server going dark, an old ERP replaced after an add-on, a product line's support stack switched off. That signal belongs to the company. It is a reason to ask the CEO one question, never a plan to run on the company's behalf.
Custody, control and the introduction are three different tracks
Retirement projects blur these, and each blur produces a predictable mistake.
| Track | The question it answers | Who answers it | What mixing it up looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custody | Where are the records now, and where will they be after each step? | The system owner or IT lead | Treating "the vendor still has a copy" as "the company can still decide anything" |
| Control | Who may decide what happens to the records, and within which duties? | The CEO, with counsel on holds, retention minimums and disposal duties | Treating the fund's board seat, or the IT lead who runs the project, as the decider |
| Introduction | Whether, when and through whom SourceX is mentioned | The relationship owner first, then the CEO | Letting the referral set the pace of the retirement |
Custody moves several times in a retirement: from the live system to an export, to an archive store, then the vendor's copy is deleted and the old disks are wiped. Control does not move with it. The company keeps the decision throughout, but the limits on that decision were set by law, by contracts and by any dispute long before a referral came up. SourceX's screening profile asks for rights to license without breaching client confidentiality, employee privacy or third-party contracts, and a retirement is exactly when those limits get applied record family by record family.
Find the archive, then the person who decides
Three facts locate the archive: which record families the old system holds and since when, what the retirement plan says will survive (everything, a filtered export, reports only or nothing), and where the surviving copy will live. The system owner can answer all three without opening a record.
The decision belongs to the CEO. The system owner prepares the plan, counsel rules on holds and disposal, and the board approves budgets. None of them replaces the CEO's yes to a licensing discussion. The fund's board seat gives it a voice, and what the platform team knows about the retirement came through board materials. SourceX's own screening guidance treats that knowledge as a prompt to ask the CEO, never as material to pass along, so nothing from the board pack appears in any introduction.
The ask itself can be one sentence, sent by whoever owns the CEO relationship: "Before the archive scope for the old ticketing system is final, would you want to hear about licensing the company's own historical records? If not, nothing changes." For the wording of a longer note, the annotated monitoring tool retirement email is a useful pattern.
The system-retirement introduction timeline
Seven milestones, in the order a retirement usually runs. The offsets from switch-off are Illustrative; the company's own plan sets the real dates.
| Milestone | Custody | Control | Introduction decision |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Retirement approved and dated (about six months before switch-off) | Live system with full history | The CEO approves the plan; counsel checks for holds | The relationship owner may put the one question to the CEO |
| 2. Vendor notice or non-renewal sent (about four months before) | The vendor still hosts everything | The contract's exit terms fix export and deletion steps | The CEO answers yes, later or no; nothing goes to SourceX without a yes |
| 3. Archive scope drafted (about three months before) | Export design: fields, comment threads, attachments, audit trails, format | The retention owner and counsel sort what must, may and must not be kept | The last useful point: a CEO who wants a conversation has it now |
| 4. Archive scope signed off (about two months before) | The scope fixes what will survive | Unchanged | The window closes for anything outside the scope |
| 5. Cutover; old system read-only | Archive store plus a read-only system | Unchanged | No asks tied to cutover week |
| 6. Contract ends; the vendor deletes its copy under the contract | Archive store only | Unchanged | Conversations about the archive only |
| 7. Retired disks and backups sanitized | Gone from that media | Nothing left to decide for it | Closed for anything that was not archived |
Milestone 7 is final by design. NIST's glossary, drawing on SP 800-88r2, defines sanitization as rendering "access to target data on the media infeasible for a given level of effort." A company that sanitizes old media properly cannot get the data back, and should not want to.
Why does the window close at milestone 4 rather than at switch-off? Because the archive scope is where a company chooses between keeping a full history, with internal notes, threads and attachments, and keeping a slim extract that satisfies its retention minimums. Once that choice is signed, cutover and deletion run on schedule. A conversation after milestone 4 can still be worthwhile, but only about what the scope kept. The portfolio review archive checklist dates the same events from the review side; this timeline adds who decides at each one.
Preservation and disposal duties are settled before any referral
Two kinds of duty can fix the outcome for a record family regardless of anyone's interest in licensing it.
Duties to keep. In U.S. federal litigation, Rule 37(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure lets a court act when "electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery." The advisory notes say the rule does not create a new duty to preserve: the duty already exists under the common law, and the notes tie it to whether a party was on notice that litigation was likely. A retirement with a dispute in view therefore goes through counsel before any deletion step, and a hold preserves records for the dispute. Whether a held set can be discussed for licensing at all is counsel's question, not the referral's.
Duties to dispose. Some companies must delete. The FTC's Safeguards Rule, which applies to certain financial institutions, requires procedures "for the secure disposal of customer information in any format no later than two years after the last date the information is used," with exceptions for business need, legal retention requirements and cases where targeted disposal is not feasible. The same rule asks institutions to "periodically review your data retention policy to minimize the unnecessary retention of data." A retirement is often when such a policy is applied, and a family of records it covers is out of any conversation.
Customer contracts add a third layer: clauses that require client data to be returned or deleted when a service ends. That material usually belonged to the client in the first place, which the screening guidance already treats as a poor fit.
The rule for the introducer is short. Never suggest keeping something the company must delete, deleting something it must keep, extending a subscription for the referral's sake or moving the date. The retention review after an acquisition goes deeper on which retention rules can move and which cannot.
Choosing an authorized window, or stopping
| Situation at the company | What the introducer does |
|---|---|
| The CEO says yes before milestone 4; no hold, no disposal conflict | Introduce now, carrying the dated retirement plan as a fact for the first call |
| The CEO says "after cutover" | Record the date and accept that only archived records remain in play |
| A dispute or hold is in view | Stop until counsel clears it |
| A disposal duty covers one record family | That family is out; others can still be discussed |
| The archive scope is already signed | Introduce only on what the archive keeps, if the CEO wants to |
| The CEO is not interested | Stop, and do not raise it again at the next milestone |
Timing also matters for credit. Section 2 of the program terms gives credit to the first valid introduction of a company SourceX did not already know, inside a 90-day attribution window, once the company submits a verified application, and the terms say that window does not stretch. Cutover weeks are when a company has least time to apply. Introduce when the CEO is ready for the company to apply, not on the day the plan is approved, and sign the SourceX Channel Partner Agreement before submitting anything.
One retirement on the timeline (Illustrative)
Illustrative. A generic company, invented dates, no outcome implied.
A 170-person Series C field-services software company is replacing the on-premises ticketing server it has run since 2013 with a cloud help desk. The plan is dated 2 Sep 2026 and switch-off is set for 31 Mar 2027.
| Date | Milestone | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Sep 2026 | 1 | The CEO approves the plan; counsel confirms no hold applies |
| 6 Oct 2026 | 1 | The partner who holds the board seat asks the CEO the one question; she says yes |
| 1 Nov 2026 | 2 | Non-renewal notice goes to the hardware support vendor |
| 14 Dec 2026 | 3 | Archive scope drafted: full ticket history with internal notes and attachments, or closed tickets as PDFs for seven years |
| 15 Jan 2027 | 4 | The CEO signs the scope after a first conversation with SourceX |
| 31 Mar 2027 | 5 | Cutover; old server read-only |
| 30 Jun 2027 | 7 | Old disks sanitized under the IT lead's procedure |
The CEO chose to hear from SourceX before signing the scope; she could equally have signed it first. Which archive option she picked, and whether SourceX's review finds the records relevant to a current program, are hers and SourceX's to decide, and this example implies neither.
Where the timeline can mislead
- Unpublished process times. SourceX has not published how long review, agreement and preparation take. Nothing here promises that a conversation finishes before switch-off, and records deleted before handoff can never be part of a payout.
- Rights. Ticket and project systems mix the company's own work with customer content. The rights review decides what, if anything, is licensable.
- Regulation. Disposal and privacy duties can remove whole record families, and the rules that impose them change over time; counsel's reading on the day of the retirement is the one that counts.
- Demand. Relevance to current programs is assessed only in review, and a slim compliance extract may keep too little context to be worth discussing.
- Board information. The temptation to tell SourceX "we know from the board pack that the archive holds X" is the fastest way to break the CEO's trust. Every fact comes from the company.
Methods note. The timeline orders milestones common to system retirements and maps each to SourceX's program terms (version 2026-10-22.2, since replaced by version 2026-11-04) and screening profile, Rule 37(e), the Safeguards Rule at 16 CFR 314.4 and NIST's sanitization definition, all checked on 2026-10-27. Offsets and the worked example are Illustrative. It does not measure demand for any record family, record quality or how often companies choose full archives over extracts; no such figures have been published. A platform team can start measuring by logging, for each retirement it sees, the date of the CEO's answer relative to milestone 4.
Next step
Refer a company. No cap on rewards. Default reward on a company's first qualifying transaction: the greater of $50,000 plus 5% and 15% of Actual Supplier Payout, with no cap; further qualifying transactions first agreed within 12 months of the first Closing pay 15%. Eligibility and payment conditions apply, including the USD 100,000 Minimum Transaction, and a signed Schedule A or addendum can differ. A lead, meeting or signature alone does not trigger payment.
If a portfolio CEO wants the conversation before the archive scope is signed, create your partner account through registration, check what the company has confirmed against who qualifies and read the program terms first. The venture platform team overview, the timing case for licensing now and the vendor windows in canceled SaaS seats and disappearing archives cover the wider portfolio picture, and more guides sit in the guides hub.
Watching a retirement timeline is referral work; deciding whether SourceX is worth investing in is a separate question with its own materials, which can be requested through the SourceX investor overview.
This article is for information only and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. Any offering by SourceX is made only to verified accredited investors through its offering documents.