The desk
Diligence, sized for an angel cheque
Funds spend six weeks and a legal budget on diligence. You have a few evenings and no budget at all. These 17 guides cover what is worth doing at that scale — what can genuinely be checked at each stage, what only matters in certain sectors, and the handful of questions that consistently earn their time.
Start with these three
If you have never run diligence on a startup, the order that works is: read the stage guide that matches the round, make three reference calls, then read the term sheet from your own position rather than the lead's. Everything else is refinement.
Founder reference calls
The step most often skipped, and the one that most reliably finds what a pitch hides.
Know the signalsRed flags
What experienced angels act on, separated from what merely looks alarming.
Before you wireYour first term sheet
What to read, in what order, and the three things a small cheque can change.
3 guides
By stage
What can actually be diligenced when there is no revenue, some revenue, or a real business — and what it is reasonable to skip at each point.
Pre-seed diligence
How to assess a company with no revenue, no product and nothing to measure — where the diligence is almost entirely about the founders and the problem.
Open the guide →Eight to fifteen hours over three weeksSeed diligence
What to check once there is a product and early revenue — where the data is real but too thin to prove anything, and the risk is over-reading it.
Open the guide →Six to twelve hours, most of it readingSeries A diligence
What an angel should check when joining a round led by an institution — where the data is finally meaningful and your job is different from the lead's.
Open the guide →7 guides
By sector
The questions that only matter in one kind of company, and the metrics that mean something different in each.
SaaS diligence
How to read a subscription software business: retention, expansion, payback and the gap between reported ARR and revenue you can rely on.
Open the guide →Six to twelve hoursMarketplace diligence
How to assess a two-sided business: liquidity, take rate, disintermediation and whether the network effect is real or asserted.
Open the guide →Ten to twenty hoursFintech diligence
Licensing, unit economics that depend on interest rates, credit risk that appears late, and the sponsor-bank dependency that decides whether the company can operate at all.
Open the guide →Twelve to twenty-five hours, including an expert callDeep tech & hardware diligence
Technical risk you cannot assess alone, capital intensity that dwarfs software, and the gap between a working prototype and a manufacturable product.
Open the guide →Five to ten hoursConsumer diligence
Retention curves that flatten or do not, acquisition costs that rise with scale, and the difference between a moment of attention and a habit.
Open the guide →Twelve to twenty hours, including a clinical callHealthtech diligence
Regulatory pathway, clinical evidence, who actually pays, and sales cycles measured in years rather than quarters.
Open the guide →Eight to fifteen hoursAI company diligence
What is proprietary and what is a wrapper, gross margins that depend on someone else's pricing, and evaluation that means something.
Open the guide →7 guides
The craft
Reference calls, data rooms, financial models, red flags and the first term sheet — the parts of diligence that are the same everywhere.
Red flags
The warning signs that experienced angels act on, separated from the ones that merely look alarming — and what each one usually turns out to mean.
Open the guide →Three to five calls, 20-30 minutes eachFounder reference calls
How to run the reference calls that actually surface something — who to call, what to ask, and how to hear the answer that is not being said.
Open the guide →Two to four hoursReviewing a data room
What should be in it, what its absence tells you, and how to review one in two hours rather than twenty.
Open the guide →One to two hoursReading a financial model
How to interrogate a startup financial model in an hour: find the assumptions that drive it, test them, and ignore everything past year two.
Open the guide →Two to four hoursLegal & IP checks
The legal checks a small cheque can do without a lawyer — corporate records, IP assignments, employment status and the contracts that decide what happens at exit.
Open the guide →Two to six hoursRegulatory diligence
How to establish whether a company is permitted to do what it does — checking registers yourself, understanding borrowed permissions, and spotting a model that depends on a gap.
Open the guide →One to two hoursYour first term sheet
What to read, in what order, when a term sheet lands and you are not the lead — and the three things a small cheque can realistically change.
Open the guide →Angel diligence: common questions
How much diligence should an angel actually do?
What is the highest-yield hour in angel diligence?
Can I do useful diligence when a fund is leading the round?
Does diligence actually improve angel returns?
Next
Diligence tells you about one company
It does not tell you how many companies you need to back, how large each cheque should be, or how much to hold back for follow-ons. That is a different kind of arithmetic.