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Comic cover for issue 010: The Due Diligence Week
Issue #010
Project Rescue 8 min read· 14 Mar 2026

The Due Diligence Week

Five days to tell a fund whether a codebase was an asset or a liability. What I actually look at, in order.

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The strip
Panel 1 · Day 1
Not the code. The commit history.
Panel 2 · Day 3
Who can deploy? How long does it take?
Panel 3 · Day 5
The risk isn't the stack. It's the bus factor.

Technical due diligence is not a code review. Nobody funds or kills a deal because of naming conventions. The question is narrower: can this team keep shipping at the pace the model assumes?

I start with the commit history, not the code. Frequency, distribution across people, and how often work gets reverted tell you more about organisational health in twenty minutes than a week of reading source.

Nobody kills a deal over naming conventions. They kill it over a bus factor of two.

Then deployment: who can do it, how long it takes, and what happens when it goes wrong. A team that deploys daily can fix almost any code problem. A team that deploys quarterly cannot fix anything quickly, however clean the code.

Deployment frequency predicts everything else.

The report that week said the stack was unfashionable and entirely fine, and that the actual risk was two engineers holding all the deployment knowledge. The fund invested with a hiring condition attached.

CTO takeaway

The lesson, minus the scar tissue.

  • Commit history and deploy cadence reveal more than source code does.
  • Concentration of knowledge is the highest-severity finding in most diligence reports.
  • An unfashionable stack that ships beats a modern one that doesn't.
Comments

War Stories.

Survived something similar? Add it to the record — the best lessons in this archive came from other people's outages.

  • Priya · CTO, logistics startup

    We had the exact same Friday. Except ours was a DNS TTL of 86400 and we spent the weekend explaining caching to the board.

  • Marcus · Founder

    Read this on a Monday morning and immediately cancelled a rewrite. Three seams, not a clean slate. Thank you.

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