DD Report Sections

Every DD report follows a structured format designed to give you a clear investment recommendation with the reasoning to back it up.

Executive Summary

The bottom line up front. Overall assessment (PROCEED / CAUTION / PASS), scores for technical credibility and commercial viability, moat assessment, and the single most important thing to validate before writing a check.

The Bet

What you're actually betting on if you invest. Not the marketing narrative—the core technical and market assumptions that must hold for this to work. We try to be precise about what has to go right.

Claim-by-Claim Validation

Each major technical and commercial claim gets assessed:

• VALIDATED: High confidence—evidence and physics support this
• PLAUSIBLE: Physics allows it, but execution is uncertain; aggressive but not impossible
• QUESTIONABLE: Requires optimistic assumptions to work; possible but wouldn't bet on it
• IMPLAUSIBLE: Doesn't pass the physics check; extraordinary evidence required

We show our reasoning for each assessment, including the math where relevant.

Solution Landscape

The full spectrum of approaches to this problem—not just what this startup is doing, but what alternatives exist and who else is working on them. This helps you understand whether you're backing the right approach, not just evaluating the team in isolation.

Commercialization Reality

• Unit economics bridge: Their claimed costs vs. our realistic projections, with the assumptions that explain the gap
• Customer and market evidence (or lack thereof)
• Path to revenue with realistic timeline
• Policy dependencies — Is this a real business or a policy arbitrage play?

Investment Synthesis

• Scenario analysis with probability-weighted expected returns
• Pre-mortem: A narrative of how this company fails, written from the future—helps identify early warning signs
• Comparable company outcomes from similar stage/sector
• Final recommendation with reasoning

Founder Questions

Specific technical questions to ask in your diligence meetings, with examples of what good answers sound like vs. answers that should concern you.

Diligence Roadmap

Prioritized list of validation steps you can take before committing, with cost and timeline estimates for each.

What's Next

• Assessment Criteria — How we score startups
• Creating a DD Report — Run your own analysis