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Founder's VC diligence question bank
The founder walks into the meeting with a complete, categorized interview script for vetting this specific investor: every question names the signal it is fishing for and the red-flag answer that should give pause.
You receive: A JSON object { targetInvestor, questions[] } where targetInvestor names the investor you entered and questions[] is an array of { questionId, category, question, signalSought, redFlagAnswer }, all non-empty, with category exactly one of: fund_profile, investment_style, deal_flow, process, organization, value_added
Part of Pitch Investors
Example
A sample of what this play produces. Your result is generated for your inputs.
Target Investor
Bluewater Ventures
Questions
| Question Id | Category | Question | Signal Sought | Red Flag Answer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP-1 | fund_profile | What is the current fund's size, vintage year, and how much is left to deploy for new investments versus reserved for follow-ons? | Whether the fund is early in deployment (patient, active) or at end of life (pressure for fast exits, little follow-on money for a pre-seed company like STUD). | The fund is past year four of deployment or the partner cannot say how much dry powder remains for new checks. |
| FP-2 | fund_profile | Who are your limited partners, and are any of them strategic investors who could later constrain who acquires or partners with a portfolio company? | LP composition reveals stability of capital and hidden conflicts, which matters because STUD's likely acquirers overlap with large AI platform vendors. | Evasiveness about LPs, a single dominant LP, or a strategic LP with veto-like information rights. |
| FP-3 | fund_profile | What is your typical check size and target ownership at pre-seed, and how does that fit a $1M target raise? | Whether STUD's illustrative $1M target raise sits squarely in the fund's sweet spot or is an awkward outlier they would neglect. | The check implies ownership demands far above their stated norm, or they say the round is really too small for them but they will do it anyway. |
| IS-1 | investment_style | When was the last time you backed a pre-revenue, solo-founder company, and what did your support look like in its first year? | Whether they genuinely invest at STUD's stage (pre-seed, pre-revenue soft launch, single founder) or drift later-stage and would treat this as an exception. | No concrete example, or the example shows they went quiet until the company had traction metrics. |
| IS-2 | investment_style | How do you think about AI agent and workflow companies specifically: what would make you double down, and what would make you write one off? | A formed thesis on STUD's category versus tourist interest in a hot market; their kill criteria show how they will judge the company in 18 months. | A thesis that reduces to chasing whatever the model vendors ship, or kill criteria based purely on short-term revenue at pre-seed. |
| DF-1 | deal_flow | How did companies like ours typically reach you, and how many pre-seed deals in this space did you evaluate in the last year? | Whether the firm sees enough comparable deal flow to price and judge STUD fairly, and whether this conversation is standard pipeline or an outlier. | They evaluated almost nothing comparable, meaning their term expectations and pattern matching come from a different market. |
| DF-2 | deal_flow | What proportion of your investments come from cold inbound versus referrals from your existing portfolio founders? | A high founder-referral share is indirect evidence portfolio founders recommend them, the strongest available proxy for how they treat companies. | They cannot name a recent deal that came from a portfolio founder's referral. |
| PR-1 | process | Walk me through your decision process from this meeting to a signed term sheet: who must say yes, how many meetings, and the typical calendar time? | Whether the process is defined and the partner in the room has real authority, so STUD can plan a raise timeline instead of an open-ended courtship. | No defined process, an unbounded timeline, or the partner needs a full-partnership vote they cannot predict. |
| PR-2 | process | Under what circumstances have you issued a term sheet and then not closed, and what changed? | Re-trading and withdrawal history: how firm their yes actually is once diligence friction appears. | Multiple pulled term sheets explained as the company's fault every time, or visible discomfort with the question. |
| OR-1 | organization | Who from the firm would sit on or observe our board, how many boards do they hold today, and what happens if that partner leaves the firm? | Real attention capacity and key-person risk: a partner on twelve boards cannot help a solo founder, and partner-departure terms decide who STUD actually works with. | The board member is undecided, overloaded, or the firm has no answer for partner-departure continuity. |
| OR-2 | organization | How are decisions about follow-on investments made inside the partnership, and has the team that makes them changed in the last two years? | Partnership stability and whether the champion in this room controls the follow-on decision that matters most to a pre-seed company. | Recent partner turnover they downplay, or follow-ons decided by people the founder will never meet. |
| VA-1 | value_added | Name two portfolio companies at our stage from the last three years: what specific help did you give in their first six months, and may I call those founders? | Verifiable, specific help versus generic value-add claims; willingness to open the reference channel is itself the signal. | Only vague help stories (introductions, support) with no specifics, or reluctance to share founder references. |
| VA-2 | value_added | Our next constraint is distribution: content-led acquisition to solo founders and small product teams. What concretely could you contribute to that motion? | Whether their promised help maps to STUD's actual bottleneck (demand generation for a self-serve subscription product) rather than a standard playbook of exec intros. | An answer that ignores the stated constraint and pivots to hiring help or enterprise sales intros. |
| VA-3 | value_added | When a portfolio company misses its plan, what does your involvement look like in the following two quarters? Give a real example. | Behavior in bad times, the part of value-add that only shows under stress and that references rarely volunteer unprompted. | No example, or an example where the firm's response to a miss was silence or an immediate push to sell the company. |
Opens soon
STUD opens runs for everyone soon, on every play at once.
Scope of the check
What's verified: STUD verifies the deliverable is a JSON question bank naming your target investor (the targetInvestor value must be non-empty and, ignoring case and punctuation, match the investor name you enter), with at least the minimum total questions (default 12, capped to the 1 to 200 range), every question tagged with exactly one of these six categories: fund_profile, investment_style, deal_flow, process, organization, value_added, every required category covered with at least the per-category minimum (default 2, capped to the 1 to 20 range; if you leave the category list empty or invalid, all six categories are required), every question carrying a non-empty questionId, question, signalSought, and redFlagAnswer, no duplicate questionIds, and no duplicate question wording (compared case- and punctuation-insensitively). Submissions over 200000 characters are rejected. These checks are presence, count, and uniqueness checks only: STUD does NOT judge whether the questions are insightful, whether the signals or red flags are correct, or anything about the investor itself. Your company description, stage, and focus notes are context for the operator, not enforced criteria.
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