Structure the work into five parallel tracks
Commercial, financial, legal, technical and team diligence answer different questions and depend on different documents. Run them in parallel with a named owner each, and hold one weekly session where findings from one track are tested against another.
Contradictions between tracks are the highest-value output of the process. Revenue in the model that does not appear in the bank statements, or a flagship customer that legal cannot find a contract for, tells you more than any single track's conclusion.
| Track | Core question | Evidence that closes it |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial | Do customers buy again, and why? | Cohort retention export plus three reference calls |
| Financial | Is reported revenue real and recurring? | Bank statements reconciled to the revenue ledger |
| Legal | Who owns the company and the IP? | Cap table, contributor agreements, signed contracts |
| Technical | Can the product carry 10x load? | Architecture review, incident log, dependency audit |
| Team | Have they done the hard part before? | Backchannel references outside the provided list |
Ask for exports, not summaries
A founder-prepared metrics deck is an argument. A raw export from the billing system is evidence. Ask for the export, then rebuild the two or three headline numbers yourself. Where your rebuild differs from the deck, ask why before assuming bad faith — definitional differences are common and instructive.
- Billing export at invoice-line level, covering every month since launch
- Bank statements for the last 24 months, unredacted
- Full contract set for the top ten customers by revenue
- Cap table with option pool, vesting schedules and any side letters
- Incident and outage log with root causes
Reference calls are a sampling exercise
Provided references are selected to be positive; treat them as a check on the story's internal consistency rather than as a verdict. The informative calls are with churned customers, losing bidders and former employees who left voluntarily.
Ask each reference the same three questions so answers can be compared: what problem were you solving, what would you use instead tomorrow, and what nearly stopped you buying?
Close every item explicitly
Each checklist line ends in one of four states: verified with a linked document, estimated with a stated basis, outstanding with an owner and date, or waived with a written reason. A checklist with blank lines at signing is a list of risks nobody priced.