Venture technology due diligence
What technical due diligence should actually tell an investor
Most technical due diligence reports describe the codebase. Few of them answer the question the investment committee actually needs answered: is this technically investable, and what happens to the plan if it isn't?
Diligence is not a code review
A list of frameworks, test coverage percentages, and cloud spend tells you very little about whether a company can execute its plan. The useful diligence question is whether the architecture, the team, and the roadmap can support the growth the investment case assumes.
The three questions that matter
- Can it scale the way the model needs it to? Not in theory — against the specific growth curve in the deck.
- Can the team execute without the founder in every decision? Diligence on the CTO and the engineering org matters as much as diligence on the code.
- What is the real cost of the debt? Every system has debt. The question is whether it is priced into the plan or hidden from it.
What a good report contains
A grounded view of risk, written so a non-technical partner can use it in an investment committee meeting — not a document written to prove the diligence happened. Findings should be tied to specific, testable claims in the investment case, with a clear view of what would need to be true for the risk to be acceptable.
The point is a decision, not a document
Good diligence changes a term sheet, a valuation, or a set of conditions — or it gives the committee genuine confidence to proceed. Anything else is theatre.