Due Diligence Checklist Tool

What

What Is a Due Diligence Checklist Template?

Tl;dr: this is an Excel sheet with a list of information you need to have on hand to raise money from investors. 

The VC’s job is to give you money, but they have bosses too. They’re called limited partners. These LPs expect VCs not to do silly things, like invest in vaporware. To ensure they aren’t investing in a company with crappy tech, has a tonne of debt and liabilities, or the founders are dodgy crooks, they need to do something called ‘due diligence.’

Due diligence means checking you have dotted all your ‘i’s’ and crossed all your ‘t’s.’ For larger investments, the VCs may hire lawyers, accountants, and special advisors to check up on their respective areas. For an angel stage company, there really isn’t much to check as you haven’t had the time (hopefully) to make too much of a mess. But even then, there are things they need to know have happened, such as paying up your share capital (This happened in a fundraising I advised on) before they chuck you a couple of hundred K.

The goal of DD is, therefore, to ensure the company you have created is investible from a hygiene point of view. It is also used to back up each and every statement you made in your pitch such as your revenue and number of customers.

Your goal is to not get caught with your pants down.