Startup due diligence, plain and structured.
Checklists, kill criteria, and the questions a partner will run on you, before they run.
14 ARTICLES
Series A readiness checklist: what investors look for in 2026.
Series A bars have moved. The 2021 numbers no longer apply. Here is what investors actually want to see in 2026, with benchmarks and the metrics that earn a term sheet.
CAC payback period explained: the metric investors care about most.
CAC payback is the number that most often kills a Series A round. Here is how to calculate it correctly, what investors expect, and how to fix it when it is too long.
Cohort retention analysis for early-stage SaaS (the chart investors read first).
Cohort retention is the most honest chart in a SaaS deck. Here is how to build one investors trust, the shapes that signal fit, and the failure modes that kill rounds.
How to build revenue projections that survive diligence.
Most startup revenue projections break the moment an investor builds their own model. Here is the methodology that produces forecasts investors trust.
The eight investor objections that kill deals (and how to address them).
Most rounds die in IC, not in pitch meetings. Here are the eight objections that most often kill a deal at IC, with the responses that work.
How to build a risk register for an early-stage startup (the document investors love).
Most startups do not maintain a risk register. The ones that do close rounds faster, recruit better, and operate more honestly. Here is the format and how to use it.
Why most pitch decks fail diligence (and the seven slides that survive).
Most decks look polished and break in IC. Here are the seven slides that actually survive diligence, and what makes the rest fall apart.
How to write a one-page investor memo (the format that gets forwarded).
Investors read decks but forward memos. Here is the one-page memo format that wins meetings, survives diligence, and tells the story decks cannot.
The startup due diligence checklist founders actually need.
Due diligence is not just for investors. Founders who run structured diligence on their own ideas before building find problems early, when they are still cheap to fix. This checklist covers the five dimensions that matter most.
What a kill criterion actually is, and why most founders skip it.
A kill criterion is not a risk. It is a specific, testable condition that, if true, means the idea cannot work as described. Most decks never name one.
What is startup due diligence, and why should founders do it on themselves?
Startup due diligence is the structured process of testing whether the assumptions behind a startup are true. Investors do it to founders. Founders should do it to their own ideas before investors ever see them.
The five questions every investor asks in the first ten minutes.
Not because they are clever questions, but because the answers reveal whether the founder has done the basic work. Each one is a proxy for something else.
How to present startup research to investors in a way that builds credibility.
The way you present research tells investors more about your judgment than the research itself. Founders who acknowledge uncertainty and cite sources are more credible than founders who present a single confident narrative.
Startup unit economics explained for founders who skipped finance class.
Unit economics are not finance concepts. They are the three numbers that tell you whether your business can survive long enough to scale. Get them wrong and you will run out of cash before you find out if the product works.