Background
I’ve done TDD on plenty of small-cap companies, and over the years I’ve developed many ways to “read between the lines” and ascertain a company’s health from short interviews and evidence. I’ve evaluated hundreds of prospective early-stage investments for the family office of the founder of Gartner, and also as an independent consultant for VC and PE investors.
My own background has been as a software engineer writing data compression and graphics software, then later as Founder and Chief Scientist for an operations research company founded in the late 90s, for which I wrote the core algorithms.
Process
My process can generally be “Express” or “Full”, which take around 2-3 days or 2-3 weeks, respectively. The difference is that the very fast examination will be based entirely on interviews with several of the most senior individuals, examining both the particulars of their responses and the implications. A longer examination includes more rounds of Q&A for deeper inquiry, probing the pricing and structure of third-party implementations, as well as running code analysis tools, and a deeper examination of the relationships between dependencies in stack, pipeline, and deployment.
My report will be a 2-3 page summary for “Express”, or 20-40 pages for “Full”. In either case, it will include commentary addressing these topics (with more or less detail as appropriate for the business):
- Testing
- Security
- Dependencies
- Accessibility
- Documentation
- Cloud Readiness
- Fault Isolation
- Scale/Availability
- Process Management
- Monitoring/Logging
- Privacy/Compliance
- Code/Comment Quality
- Organizational Knowledge
- Disaster Recovery
Turnaround time naturally assumes the target company is responsive, but I can normally deliver a final report 24-48 hours after the last interview is completed. Happy to discuss in greater detail and answer any further questions the client may have.