How a fourteen-day due-diligence report gets built.

Twenty-one independent diligence reports later, the process is the same one we wrote down after the first three. Here is what it looks like in practice, day by day.

Days one and two: scope and surface

The first two days are not about findings. They are about scope. We map what the venture claims, what evidence we will need to verify or disprove each claim, and what we will refuse to assess (too early, no signal, outside our expertise). The scope memo goes back to the client by end of day two.

Days three through seven: independent verification

This is the loudest part of the work. We do not interview the team during this stretch — interviews bias the read. We pull the customer list. We pull the financial primary sources. We pull the technical architecture and we sit with it. We talk to two or three customers, on the record, off the founder's hand-picked list.

Days eight through ten: the kill criteria

Every diligence report has a section we call the kill criteria — what would have to be true for this venture to fail at the level it is currently described. We write that section before we write the strengths section. If we cannot write five honest kill criteria, we have not done the diligence.

Days eleven through thirteen: drafting

Drafting happens after everything above. The draft is sober, specific, and short. A diligence report that runs to forty pages is usually padded; the ones that move investors are twenty pages and dense.

Day fourteen: review

The last day is for a second pair of eyes. We have never shipped a diligence report on day thirteen.