What makes it "Better" Diligence?

Diligence begins with discussing the needs and strategic considerations of the acquisition: why is the firm a target, what's the bigger picture, and what's the best and worst case outcomes from this investment?

Next, we'll gain access to the data room and begin our evaluation of the provided materials. We pore over the details and build a mental understanding, not just of the company's tech and product, but of their overall health and approach. We find this helps us contextualize our later discussions.

We perform competitive research to better understand the marketplace as a whole, and the positioning of the target.

We'll perform a self-guided demo of the product if one is available, to familiarize ourselves with the offering and get a true understanding of what's on offer.

Then we start the interview process. We always begin with a short meet and greet, to soften the ground, explain our approach to the target, and identify who should be on the subsequent calls.

Next, we get to the core of the process: the long-form interview. We'll meet with executive, technical, and product leadership, and have them walk through their product, their engineering and product organizations, their roadmap, and talk about their philosophy towards product development in general.

Our years of experience make this process feel effortless and collaborative, rather than combative. We find targets are open and honest with us, and enjoy showing off their work, while we identify what threads to pull on to gain a better understanding of the technology and the company behind it.

Next, we'll schedule any follow up meetings needed and complete a more thorough demo.

We'll also perform a code review at this point. Typically this is fairly cursory, but we have the capability to perform a much deeper technical analysis if it's called for or specifically requested.

We explore the target's product management and technical tool stack as well: we'll evaluate their roadmap, look at the way they file and manage new features and bugs, and get a feel for the way the team functions.

We present our findings, both with a long-form report, and a deck that helps cut to the most vital parts of our findings.

This is a collaborative and interactive process: we're here to strategize alongside your team, answer bigger questions about how to think about the target opportunity, and how things might work from a post-close/integration process.

Beyond that, we're able to drive value with a suite of services that help support companies post-acquisition, including product and engineering consulting as well as integration, architectural, and strategic consulting.