Technical Due Diligence: What Investors Check in 48 Hours
When an investor or acquirer runs technical due diligence, they're not checking if your code is elegant. They're checking for landmines. In 48 hours, a good technical reviewer covers eight specific areas — and any one of them can stall or kill a deal.
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Transcript
Technical due diligence isn't a code review. It's a landmine sweep. Nobody cares if your code is elegant. They care whether it can blow up the deal. In 48 hours, a reviewer covers eight areas — and one bad finding in any of them is enough to reshape the terms.
Here's what gets checked. Architecture and scalability — can the system handle 10x growth? Security and data handling — are there obvious vulnerabilities or compliance gaps? IP ownership and open-source licenses — does your company actually own what it built? Test coverage and documentation — can a new engineer maintain this? Infrastructure costs and how they scale. And key-person dependency — is there one engineer holding the whole system in their head?
Here's what the actual audit output looks like. Commands run, findings logged. No test suite — that's an error, not a warning. A GPL dependency in a commercial codebase — flagged immediately. No IP assignment agreements with contractors — another blocker. Good infrastructure documentation? That's a green. The ones in red don't kill deals automatically. But they all require explanation, and they give acquirers leverage on price.