You sent investors three references. They thanked you, called all three, and then called two engineers who used to work for you, one of whom left on bad terms. That second set of calls is called a backchannel, and it is now a routine part of diligence, at seed as well as later rounds. What will your former engineers say, and is there anything you can do about it?
The honest answer: you cannot control those calls and you should not try. What you can control is the pattern they will describe, and that pattern is set long before the raise, in how you hired, ran and parted ways with your technical team.
Why investors call your engineers
References you choose are, by definition, the people most likely to speak well of you. Investors know this, so they discount them. Off-list calls to people who worked with you are where they expect to hear the unvarnished version.
For a non-technical founder, the engineers who worked for you are an especially useful source, because the investor is trying to answer a question the pitch cannot: can this founder build and run a technical team? A slide shows the product. Former engineers describe what it was like to build it.
What investors are listening for is rarely a single dramatic story. One unhappy former employee is expected, and most experienced investors treat a lone negative voice with caution because they know people leave with grudges or see only part of the picture. What moves them is a pattern across several calls.
What former engineers get asked
From the calls I have been on, as the person being asked and as the founder being asked about, the questions cluster into a few themes:
- Decision-making. Did the founder make technical calls they were not equipped to make, or did they defer to the right people?
- Changing direction. How often did priorities flip, and did anyone explain why?
- Honesty about the product. Did the founder describe the product to customers and investors in a way that matched what was actually built?
- How people left. Was departure handled fairly? Were people paid what they were owed? Did the founder blame individuals for systemic problems?
- Would you work for them again? The simplest question and usually the one that decides it.
Notice that none of these is about code quality. Your former engineers are not being asked to audit the system. They are being asked to describe you as a leader of technical work.
The patterns that hurt
The founder who overrode the engineers on technical calls
This is the most common one. A founder with no technical background repeatedly picks the vendor, the framework or the deadline against the advice of the people building it, and the engineers watched the consequences land on them. When an investor hears this from two people independently, it becomes a concern about whether the next engineering hire will stay.
The product described differently inside and outside
If engineers heard you tell customers or investors that something worked when they knew it did not, they will say so when asked. This is the one that turns a soft concern into a hard one, because it goes to trust. I wrote about how diligence tests claims like this in the deck number diligence will make you prove.
The revolving door
Three engineers in eighteen months, each leaving after a few months, reads as a management problem even if each departure had a good reason. Investors will ask each former engineer why the others left.
Messy exits
Unpaid final invoices, disputed equity, an engineer locked out of accounts the same morning they were let go without a conversation. These details travel. They also sometimes surface as legal questions about who owns the code they wrote.
What actually helps
You cannot script backchannel calls, and asking former employees what they plan to say, or nudging them, is a bad idea. It tends to get back to the investor, and it looks worse than whatever they would have said.
What works is earlier and less dramatic:
Part ways well
When an engineer leaves, pay them promptly and fully, settle equity in writing, give them a clean handover period where possible, and do not trash them to the rest of the team. If you are in the middle of a hard exit right now, your first engineer isn't working out covers how to handle it without leaving a mess behind.
Write down why you made big technical calls
When you overrule your engineers, and sometimes you should, record the reason and the trade-off you accepted. A founder who can say "we chose speed over the cleaner design because we had eight weeks of runway, and here is the cleanup plan" is in a very different place from one who simply insisted.
Name the hard departures yourself
If someone left badly, tell the investor before they find out. A short, non-defensive account works: what happened, what you would do differently, what changed. Founders who raise it first are almost always judged more kindly than founders whose story is heard secondhand.
Fix the leadership gap, not the story
If the pattern is that technical decisions were made by someone who should not have been making them, the fix is to put technical judgment in the room now. That might be a senior hire, an advisor, or fractional leadership. Investors care about the next eighteen months more than the last eighteen, and a credible structure for technical decisions changes how they read past mistakes. See how we compare with the other options if you are weighing what that structure should be.
What investors ask your current engineers
Backchannels on former staff are different from the formal interviews diligence runs with your current team. Those are covered in diligence wants to interview your engineers. The two are often compared: if current engineers describe a calm, well-run team and former engineers describe chaos, investors will want to know what changed and when.
That is not a bad story if it is true. "We had a rough first year, three people left, we brought in senior technical leadership, and here is what is different now" is a story many funded companies have told.
FAQ
Can I ask investors not to contact former employees?
You can, but it usually signals something to hide. Most investors will make the calls anyway. A better move is to tell them about any difficult departures up front.
What if a former engineer is actively hostile?
Tell the investor, briefly and factually, before they call. Experienced investors weigh a single hostile voice against everything else they hear. It is the pattern across several calls that matters.
Should I reach out to former engineers before the raise?
Reconnecting genuinely, settling anything left unresolved, or thanking someone is fine. Asking them what they will say, or what they should say, is not.
Does any of this matter at pre-seed?
Less, because there may be no former engineers yet. But the habits that make backchannels go well, fair exits and documented decisions, are cheapest to build early.
If you are heading into a raise and want an outside read on how your technical team and decisions will look under scrutiny, book a call.