Due Diligence Prep Pack

Investors judge the founder partly by how organised the DD process is. A clean, well-structured data room with a cover memo signals competence before anyone reads a single document. A scattered set of half-finished spreadsheets emailed across three days signals the opposite, and that signal travels faster than any pitch deck. This skill builds the checklist, identifies the gaps, and ranks them by what will actually kill a deal versus what's nice-to-have.

The checklist runs across six categories — corporate, financial, team and HR, product and IP, commercial, legal and compliance — and gets scaled to the stage and investor type. Pre-seed angel DD looks nothing like Series A VC DD, and treating them the same wastes the founder's time. Each missing document gets classified as critical, important, or nice-to-have, with a specific fix attached: what to create, who creates it (founder, lawyer, accountant), how long it takes, and roughly what it costs.

IP assignment is called out separately because it's the silent killer. If an early contractor wrote any of the core code without an IP assignment agreement in place, the company doesn't technically own that code, and VCs will not close around that gap. The skill surfaces this on every audit, recommends retroactive assignment, and gives the rough cost and timeline so the fix is in motion before DD opens, not after the question gets asked.

The output isn't just a checklist. It's a readiness score, a critical-gaps list with named owners and timelines, an FAQ for the questions investors always ask (burn, runway, customer concentration, IP strategy, what-if-the-CTO-leaves), and a recommended data room folder structure organised by how investors review it, not by how the founder happens to store it. Over-prepare. Having a document an investor doesn't ask for is a positive signal. Not having one they do ask for is a negative one — and the asymmetry of those signals is the whole reason this skill exists.