VC due diligence on founders and exec teams, in under an hour.

The scenario

Wednesday morning. A Series A deck lands in your inbox from a partner. Pitch is Friday. You have two days. The deck names three founders, a recently-hired CTO, and a CPO who joined from a public-company role. The partner wants to know:

• Have any of these founders shipped before? At what scale? With what outcome?
• Did the CTO leave their last public-company role on good terms? Anything in their last employer's 8-Ks during the tenure window?
• Is the team graph genuine, or are these people who barely know each other?
• Any public-reputation flags worth surfacing before the partner falls in love with the founder?
• Who could give a back-channel reference?

The traditional answer is two associate days: LinkedIn-stalking, Crunchbase-clicking, news archive trawling, and panicked Twitter searches the night before the IC. The MentionFox answer is a four-report workflow that returns in under an hour.

Why this matters

Most LP-side post-mortems on bad VC investments trace back to founder issues that were knowable at deal time. Prior shipping outcomes, prior team-blow-up patterns, pre-existing public commitments to a different thesis, executive departures coincident with material 8-K events. None of this is hidden; all of it is in public sources. The constraint is associate time.

The compounding stakes: a $5M Series A check at a $25M post that sleeps for seven years carries an opportunity cost in the millions if the founder pattern was a clean-exit risk. A $50M Series B check on an exec team with a recent departure pattern that the GP did not see is a partner-level reputation event for the firm.

What to verify on the founders

1. Prior shipping evidence. Have they shipped a product to real users at real scale? Or is the resume LinkedIn-pretty but production-thin? Crunchbase prior-company outcomes plus GitHub contribution depth answer this in 90 seconds.
2. Exit pattern. Three prior shutdowns, one sale to friends-and-family acquirer, and now a fourth at-bat is a pattern. Two clean shutdowns and one $200M acquisition is a different pattern. The Founder Vetting Report categorizes every prior outcome.
3. Founder-market fit signal. Does the founder have a pre-existing public commitment to this domain (podcasts, blog posts, prior work) or is the thesis a swerve? Public-record evidence shows up in the founder-market fit section.
4. Co-founder history. Did this team work together before? At what company? For how long? A team graph that shows three people who met at a hackathon six months ago is a different risk profile than a team that has shipped together for four years.
5. Public-reputation flags. Anything in the public record (news, court filings, public-statement controversies) the partner would want to know before pitch. The report flags or honestly tags "no flags found."
6. Network and warm-intro paths. Who in your firm's portfolio overlaps with the founder's network? Who can give a back-channel reference today, before the IC?
7. Pitch readiness. Does the public footprint suggest a founder ready for institutional capital, or a founder still in build-mode who will struggle with the round?

What to verify on the executive team

1. Departure timing pattern. Did the CTO's prior departure coincide with a material 8-K within 30 days? Was the CPO's exit announced as a planned transition or sudden? The Executive Vetting Report contextualizes every prior departure.
2. Compensation signal. Proxy-disclosed compensation history surfaces whether the executive is taking a meaningful pay cut to join an early-stage company (signal of conviction) or arriving at parity (neutral signal).
3. Board interlocks and conflicts. Public board service across competitors or prior co-investors. A CFO who sits on a public board overlapping the target's customer base is a flag worth surfacing.
4. Material events during prior tenure. Restatements, internal investigations, public governance disputes during the executive's prior tenure. Each event sourced from the filing of record.
5. Insider trading pattern. Form 4 read on prior public-company tenure. Sales clustering, 10b5-1 plan adoption history. Treated as one signal among many.

How MentionFox does it

Four reports in parallel. Each one cites every claim to a public URL. The associate reads the executive summary, scans the source citations, and pulls the load-bearing claim into the IC memo with the URL inline.

All four reports run in parallel. While the second pours coffee, three founder reports and one executive report finish populating. Total wall time: roughly 12-15 minutes for all four.

What a customer's hour looks like

Pricing for this use case

Credits are platform-wide. A Pro plan includes a credit grant monthly; pay-as-you-go credit packs are available for higher-volume diligence cycles. See pricing for current plans.

Related

Founder Vetting Reports →   Executive Vetting Reports →   Founder Methodology →   Executive Methodology →   Use case: Hiring a Board Member →