Advisory for investors
Whether the outcome claim survives contact with the buyer.
Education technology companies sell institutional improvement. Diligence usually tests the software, the pipeline and the churn. The harder question is whether the institutional value being claimed is real, attributable and something a buyer will keep paying for.
What I test
Is the outcome claim real?
Whether the measure the company says it improves is one institutions are genuinely accountable for, whether the improvement is attributable to the product rather than to the cohort or the market, and whether it is large enough to defend a renewal in a tight budget year.
Does the buyer recognise the metric?
Companies frequently report metrics that are internally coherent and institutionally meaningless. Engagement, usage, content generated. No institutional budget committee funds those. Identifying the gap between the company's dashboard and the buyer's scorecard is often the single most useful finding in a diligence.
Where does renewal risk actually sit?
Institutional sales have a specific failure mode: a champion moves, a budget line is reallocated, a new Director arrives with different priorities. Understanding which accounts are held by a process and which by a person is a materially different read on revenue quality.
Can it scale in this market?
For targets with India or APAC in the plan: whether the regulatory frame, the buyer committee and the promoter economics support the growth case, or whether the plan assumes a market that does not work that way.
Is the technology what they say it is?
Thirteen years building software products, including as a CTO. Where a claimed capability is doing less work than the deck suggests, and where an AI feature is a wrapper rather than a moat.
Format
Commercial due diligence as a defined, time-boxed project, typically two to four weeks and sized to the deal. Portfolio-company advisory where an existing holding needs its outcome story tested or rebuilt. Single expert calls through the usual networks where the question is narrow.
Why me rather than a generalist
A generalist diligence provider can test the financials, the churn cohorts and the competitive set. What they cannot usually do is sit across from the customer archetype and know, from having held that job, whether the thing being sold would have survived their own procurement process.
I ran the institutions these companies sell to. I bought this category of product. And I sat on accreditation committees judging whether institutional evidence held up, which is closely related to judging whether a vendor's outcome claim does.