A round stalls and the founder can't figure out why. Often it's this: somewhere in diligence a technical partner asked a question about the product, and the founder changed the subject. That's a tell, and investors are trained to notice it.
The good news is the questions are predictable. There are about six of them, and you can have honest answers ready.
The six that come up
- Where does it break at 10x? They don't expect "nowhere" — they expect you to know.
- What's your biggest piece of technical debt, and what's the plan? Naming it builds more trust than hiding it.
- Bus factor: if one person left tomorrow, what stops?
- Security & data: what would a breach expose, and what's in place?
- Build vs buy: why did you build the things you built?
- What would you do, technically, with the money?
Investors aren't testing whether your tech is perfect. They're testing whether you know where the bodies are buried.
A founder who answers these calmly — risks named, plan attached — reads as someone in control. The one who deflects reads as someone hiding a mess. The architecture rarely kills the round. The deflection does.
This is a three-page document, written once and updated before each raise. It's the cheapest insurance you'll buy.