You are an investor - and you have identified the next opportunity. You know exactly which professionals to ask to do a commercial due diligence. And a financial one. And a legal one. And you will ask the CTO of one of your portfolio companies to do the technical DD.
The people who do your financial and legal assessments are professionals who are dedicated to providing professional services that help investors understand and minimise their investment risk.
The CTO of your portfolio company is an experienced programmer and manager, and he understands everything about the platform he is building. He also has a team of thirty people depending on him, a deadline for next month, pressure from the executive and from the board to deliver on the next feature and is wondering if he should move to micro-services.
The accountants and lawyers who do your due diligence has been involved in M&A activity for years and they have well structured methodologies in place.
The CTO of your portfolio company is certainly smart enough to assess the platform you want to invest in. But he hasn't done this before, and is frantically searching for a template to use for the report. He is not sure whether best practise in his business applies to the business he is looking at ? And he really needs to address the issues the last performance tests picked up on his platform.
If you use a dedicated professional to do 75% of your due diligence, we suggest you use dedicated professionals to do the other 25% too. If you invest in businesses that depend on technology the technology must be assessed as thoroughly and as objectively as any other part of the business.
The CTO of your portfolio company would love to help. But he really has other things to do - and that is a risk to your investment.