Resource · Technical due diligence
The Portfolio Tech-Risk scorecard.
The technology is usually the risk nobody priced. Twelve questions, about ten minutes, and an honest read of whether the platform can carry the thesis, from the engineers who run technical due diligence for a living.
At the end, you walk away with
- A tier score out of 36, red, amber, or green, with what it means for the deal
- A dimension-by-dimension breakdown showing exactly where the risk lives
- The blocking answers, the zeros and ones an acquirer will find in diligence
- The option of a board-ready written read from us, free, within two working days
- A one-click way to send the whole result to a colleague
Scored on this page. Your answers go nowhere unless you ask for the written read.
Frequently asked
Questions we get
Who should fill this in?
Whoever is closest to the honest answer. Operating partners and deal teams use it pre-deal or post-close with the target’s CTO in the room; portfolio company engineering leaders use it on their own stack. Twelve questions, about ten minutes, and it only works if the answers are what is true rather than what the deck says.
How is this different from proper technical due diligence?
It is the ten-minute version of the first day of it. The scorecard finds the shape of the risk; it cannot read the code, interview the team, or test the claims. That is the Technical Read: ten days, $15,000-$25,000 fixed, ending in a board-ready report you keep whether or not we do the remediation. If we do end up doing the build, the Read fee is credited in full against it.
How do you measure key-person risk, or bus factor?
Key-person dependency is the first of the six dimensions the scorecard scores, and it is the one most often under-counted in a deal. The self-score asks the questions a data-room memo skips: what only lives in one person's head, which systems have no second owner, and what happens to delivery the week they are on leave. In the full Technical Read we corroborate it against the real signals, commit history and code ownership (the git bus factor), the on-call rota, and who the incident timeline keeps naming, because self-reported answers here are the ones most worth verifying.
What does a low score actually mean for the deal?
Not necessarily walk away. It means the technology should be priced as a workstream, not assumed as a given. Most red scores we see are one to two quarters of focused remediation, and knowing that before close moves it from surprise to plan.
Do you see my answers?
Only if you ask for the written read. The score itself is computed on this page and goes nowhere until you submit the form.
What does this deliberately leave out?
IP assignment and open-source licensing, the classic lawyer-facing red flags. They cannot be honestly self-scored in ten minutes, so they belong in the written read and the full Technical Read, not here. The scorecard sticks to what an engineering-literate person can answer truthfully about their own platform.
Ten minutes found the shape of the risk. Ten days prices it.
The Technical Read: a senior engineering read of the platform, team, and failure modes. Pre-deal or post-close, $15,000-$25,000 fixed, board-ready in ten days. You keep the analysis either way.