Just to clarify a little bit, since I didn't make this explicitly clear in the article: there are certainly questions about the technical side that are useful.
One example from the blog post is trying to understand if the tech team's experience lines up with what they're building. If the founders are 2 infrastructure engineers who are trying to build a social app, or if they're mobile devs who are trying to build a streaming database, then that's a yellow or red flag.
Another example: I've gotten a lot of value out of drilling in a tiny bit when people make bold technology claims. If someone says they've developed cutting edge ML, they rarely expect an investor to ask about it. When I ask them what "cutting edge" means, if I hear words like linear regression or decision trees, then my bullshit detector goes off -- but not for technical reasons. It's not bad at all to use simple ML models, what is bad is misrepresenting your tech, because then I start wondering what else you're misrepresenting.
But for most (seed) VCs that I've met, technical diligence means asking an engineer they're friends with to talk to a CTO they're thinking of investing in. The engineer asks about system design, infrastructure decisions, deployment environment, coding practices, etc. and then tells the VC if they think the tech stack is robust. (VC: "Ah, they're using AWS and Redshift? That sounds modern. Thumbs up!") For many, many startups (SaaS, mobile apps, ecommerce, etc.) I think this type of diligence is basically useless for almost all seed stage companies.
As a cofounder of a technical startup (biotech), and a part-time contractor on another technical startup (hardware): I think the main points in your article are right, but maybe retitle it "startup technical due diligence is (usually) a waste of time"?
Just to clarify a little bit, since I didn't make this explicitly clear in the article: there are certainly questions about the technical side that are useful.
One example from the blog post is trying to understand if the tech team's experience lines up with what they're building. If the founders are 2 infrastructure engineers who are trying to build a social app, or if they're mobile devs who are trying to build a streaming database, then that's a yellow or red flag.
Another example: I've gotten a lot of value out of drilling in a tiny bit when people make bold technology claims. If someone says they've developed cutting edge ML, they rarely expect an investor to ask about it. When I ask them what "cutting edge" means, if I hear words like linear regression or decision trees, then my bullshit detector goes off -- but not for technical reasons. It's not bad at all to use simple ML models, what is bad is misrepresenting your tech, because then I start wondering what else you're misrepresenting.
But for most (seed) VCs that I've met, technical diligence means asking an engineer they're friends with to talk to a CTO they're thinking of investing in. The engineer asks about system design, infrastructure decisions, deployment environment, coding practices, etc. and then tells the VC if they think the tech stack is robust. (VC: "Ah, they're using AWS and Redshift? That sounds modern. Thumbs up!") For many, many startups (SaaS, mobile apps, ecommerce, etc.) I think this type of diligence is basically useless for almost all seed stage companies.