1. Tech Diligence

2. Why?
It is easy to build an app
• It is not easy to scale that app to a million
people
• Or update it as needs and priorities change
• Or build a team that can handle everything

3. What you want to know…
• Capability
• Stability
• Expandability
• Security
• Cost to operate and support
• Support methods and stability
• Company dependency on partner technology
• Risks
• Planned initiatives
• IP & Defensibility
• Vendors/partners

4. Team assessment
• Management team capabilities & policies
• Staff capabilities
• Team structure
• Depth (& missing depth)
• Conspicuous lack of a certain discipline
• Individual flight risks
• Turnover
• Process

5. Risk
• Scalability
– Do you incur huge costs as you get more users?
– Will the system hold up?
– Does performance degrade?
• Supportability
– Can be a huge cost driver & impede scale
• IP
– If patents exist, are they defensible?
– Are there heavy patent players in this space? (Ex: mobile)
• Partnerships/service providers
– Outsourced development/development partners
– OSS vs. licensed

6. What is technically hard?
• Performance at a level for good user experience
– Rich media – images, video
– Big data
• Anything relying on data cleanliness and/or
completeness
– Data is never clean or complete
• Machine learning
• Language processing
• Supporting lots of devices, cross-device sync
• Globalization/localization
• Marketplaces

7. Who?
• The best person to do diligence has been in a
similar situation
– Deep familiarity with the specific technology (not
just tech in general)
– Understanding of the tradeoffs & costs

8. Do your own diligence
None of this is scary hard. You can
ask, and understand the answer to all
of these questions…

9. Good Tech Diligence Questions –
Product
• Do you have a clear vision for where you want
the product to be in one month, six months?
• How do you capture user feedback about the
product? What is your process for product
iteration?
• How many releases have you had in the last 6
months?
• Do you have patentable IP? What is the
timeframe for filing?

10. Good Tech Diligence Questions - Team
• Do you have people working for you now, who
worked for you elsewhere in the past? (Hint:
talk to these people)
• What does your interview and recruitment
process look like for technical talent?
• What skills do you need in technical talent
that may be difficult to find? (ex: special AI,
networking expertise)

11. Good Tech Diligence Questions - Scale
• What would you have to change to accommodate
10, 100, 1000 times more users?
• What would you have to change to accommodate
a million users?
• What metrics do you use to determine if you are
not scaled appropriately?
• Where are you hosted, and why?
• Do you use any third party services, what
happens if they go down?

12. Good Tech Diligence Questions -
Maintenance
• Do you build on check-in, daily, weekly, whenever?
• Do you create unit tests? Do you have code reviews?
• What development methodology do you use?
• Can you deploy a build to staging or production with
one click?
• Do you have dedicated testers?
• When do you deploy?
• Does the software automatically notify you of errors?
• Do you have a bug tracking/triage system?
• How do you prioritize bugs vs. features?