This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Logan Fisher
If you’re working at a successful startup, there will come a time when your team will need to prepare for a funding round or M&A. As part of this process, your team may need to engage with a third party due diligence company to research your technology stack to ensure it is worth the investment for their client and your prospective capital partners or acquirers.
In this article I will detail the steps we took to ensure ParkHub was set up for success when it came to technical due diligence and how these steps allowed us to be acquired for $100 million dollars.
It’s important to note that every company is different and thus operates differently. In some companies, only the CTO is involved in the process. In others, your most senior engineers help craft the narrative. It is likely that most companies will be somewhere in between. My hope is to provide others with suggestions they can fit within their own technical framework.
Keep up with your repos
Repo management is very important when it comes to due diligence because they want to understand the companies technology footprint. Being organized about this output allows you to draw a clear picture for them. This brings up a couple things to make sure you do to better prepare yourself for this situation.
- Ensure each repo has a clear description . Don’t decide to skip this step because you were too excited to click “create repo”. This can lead to a lot of extra work in the future.
- Archive old, deprecated pieces of tech and example projects unless they serve a purpose you’re prepared to dive into.
- Use package license validation technology to ensure all packages used within each application are able to be used within the lens of your company’s use case.
Pay extra attention to the most important pieces of your code base
It’s important to articulate through documentation and flow charts to help guide the journey through the most technical parts of your code especially the “money making” parts. Say your business accepts different types of transactions, building out flow charts that define this behavior will allow the third-party due diligence company to understand and dig down into specific questions. We use Office Space” situation.
Document your certifications and ensure they’re up to date.
Make sure you’re prepared to discuss in detail any certifications you’re required to have to run your business (if any). At ParkHub, we’re required to be PCI certified each year.
Articulate outstanding technical debt
Making trade offs during the development process is often done and that likely means adding more technical debt to be paid back later. It’s important to keep track of this debt to inform your future investors of the reality of your software. As a personal preference, I like to default to doing it the right way as much as possible, only wavering when the opportunity cost trade offs make the most sense to scale our business. This decision usually isn’t in a vacuum and typically includes multiple stakeholders. Doing things this way allows for a more manageable backlog of technical debt to pay.
In conclusion
Being prepared heading into due diligence meetings is very important and feeling confident about your technology stack will allow your company to gain the funding they need to move to the next level.
If you have any questions please leave a comment below and I hope this information was helpful.
How to prepare your engineering team for technical due diligence was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Logan Fisher
Logan Fisher | Sciencx (2022-04-01T13:22:06+00:00) How to prepare your engineering team for technical due diligence. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/04/01/how-to-prepare-your-engineering-team-for-technical-due-diligence/
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