Diligence.

Diligence runs on the material the company hands you. Startups are not public companies — the deck, the data room, the metrics dump, the customer list, the architecture diagram, the cap table all live in the founder's Notion, Docsend, Drive, or an email attachment. Nothing a data vendor sells will replace it. The firms that win diligence are the firms that pull that material in fastest, store it cleanly, and make it usable across every future deal.

Ask early, ask directly

The data room request should go out immediately after the first call. Founders read hesitation as low conviction; a confident, specific ask ("send the room, the latest deck, and last month's metrics") gets a faster response than a vague one. For sensitive rounds — health, defense, regulated fintech — wait until trust and verification are established, then move. If the firm signs NDAs, have the template ready to go the same day. The cost of a slow ask is measured in days of diligence time you'll never get back.

What “the data” actually includes

Treat intake as broader than just the data room. The full set:

• First call recording and transcript — the single highest-signal artifact in the entire process.
• PitchBook (or equivalent) profile — funding history, cap table snapshot, prior round terms, comparable companies.
• The data room — deck, financial model, KPI dashboard, customer list, contracts, org chart, technical docs.
• Out-of-room artifacts — Docsend links, product demos, Loom walkthroughs, founder essays, public traction (GitHub, app stores, ad library).
• Email and Slack threads with the founder — context that gets lost if it lives only in a partner's inbox.

Get it into the file drive — cleanly

Speed without structure is debt. Every deal should land in the firm's file drive under a consistent path (one folder per company, predictable subfolders for deck, financials, data room, calls, references). Docsend and similar gated links should be downloaded — manually or with the right tooling — and stored alongside everything else, because a link that expires in 30 days is not a research asset. Decks pulled as images get re-OCR'd. Recordings get transcribed. The standard is simple: if a partner opens the folder six months from now for a comparable deal, they should find everything in the place they expect.

Speed matters twice

The obvious payoff is this deal — the memo writes faster, the competitor map is richer, the reference calls land sharper because the raw material is already indexed. The less obvious payoff is every future deal. A company you pass on today becomes the benchmark, comp, or competitor for a deal you see in eighteen months. The firms that treat intake as a permanent archive — not a per-deal scramble — compound an information advantage that no data vendor sells.

The bar

Data room requested within 24 hours of the first call. Every artifact landed in the file drive within 24 hours of receipt. Recordings transcribed, decks OCR'd, links downloaded. Nothing stuck in an inbox, nothing stuck behind a Docsend expiry. From there, the rest of the diligence stack has something real to work with.