Diligence before we are welcome
2026-04-08 — The most useful questions are the ones asked before a founder has a reason to shape the answer.
By the time a company is raising, everyone it talks to has been taught what the answers should sound like. That is not dishonesty; it is what happens to any organisation that is asked the same six questions for a year.
The questions worth asking are the ones that were never rehearsed. What did the product do before it did this? Which customer was hardest to convince, and why? What did the last version of the roadmap get wrong? These are cheap to ask and hard to answer from a script, which is exactly what makes them useful.
We try to do most of this work before there is a term sheet in the room. It is the only window in which a founder has no reason to tell us anything other than what happened.