Fundraising Fundamentals — Lesson 5: The Sixty Days After Yes

This is The Build Log, the weekly fundraising series from The AI-Native Founder. New here? Start with Lesson 1.

You signed on Thursday. On Monday their associate sent a document request list, and you have spent since then looking for a contractor agreement from 2024 that you are now fairly sure was never signed. Your co-founder has stopped writing code. The investor has gone quiet in a way you are choosing to read as normal. Nobody told you that the part after yes has its own failure mode.

Here is what this lesson gives you: what diligence is actually testing, which is not what the request list says it is; a data room you assemble in an evening instead of a month; and a diligence log that turns sixty days of somebody else’s questions into the most honest document you own. The terms.md file you started last week is the first thing that goes into it.