Market and demand
- Market size given as a percentage of a large industry figure, with no derivation.
- No named competitors, or a competitive slide where every rival scores badly on every axis.
- Demand evidence consisting entirely of conversations the founder had.
Financial
- A hockey-stick projection with no corresponding step change in the hiring or channel plan.
- Blended CAC and lifetime value quoted without cohorts, hiding a deteriorating recent cohort.
- Gross margin that improves dramatically at scale without a stated mechanism.
- A raise amount that does not map to a specific milestone.
Team and governance
- A cap table already crowded before an institutional round, or unvested founder equity left unexplained.
- Key-person dependency where one founder holds all technical and all commercial knowledge.
- Advisors listed prominently while full-time roles remain unfilled.
Product and data room
- "Live" product with no demo environment, usage data, or deployment history.
- Contradictions between the deck, the model and the documents — a customer count that differs by slide.
How to work through them
Convert each flag into a single question with a defined answer: which document, which figure, which date. Then keep the item open on the register until that evidence is attached. Flags that stay unresolved through a whole process are themselves the finding.
Record how each one was closed. A memo that shows a flag was raised and answered is far stronger than one where the flag never appears.