I’ve been through a technical due diligence for an acquisition and the process was severely lacking. In total it took ~8 hours (compared to ~80 for financial diligence). It felt like a once-over smoke test to eek out any major red flags.
I almost wish you had done my technical diligence, Jacques. I spent a week preparing for it and was very proud of what I’d built.
We get that a lot actually. We do quite a few 'B' and later rounds (43 deals last year!) and apparently we're the hardest exam to pass for, but the people we work with are generally really happy that they finally get to show off all their hard work to people who really appreciate what they've done.
It's five of us for a week with a super intensive interview on the Wednesday and it is always the highlight of the week for me. What is also neat is that most of these turn into very long term relationships post deal, not necessarily financial ones, just that the interview day makes the whole thing a two-way street where the tech team will occasionally reach out when they are stumped on some problem or need outsider perspective.
Ya, we got very close to closing with a VC in SV. Their technical due diligence consisted of one of their contacts from Google calling and asking me questions about our tech stack. It appeared that the Google dev derailed the deal because we were building our product in PHP. That's how they decided we must not know what we are talking about.
Good to see that that did not reduce your long term chances. I really don't like these out-of-hand dismissals without doing the homework first, PHP is not exactly the worlds most elegant language (to put it mildly) but it is definitely not a disqualifying one either.
I almost wish you had done my technical diligence, Jacques. I spent a week preparing for it and was very proud of what I’d built.