Reputation What diligence finds before a funding round or an acquisition

Every investor, acquirer and corporate development team searches the founders, and most do it before the first real conversation, not during formal diligence. What comes back doesn't usually kill a deal on its own. It changes the questions, the warranties you get asked to sign, and occasionally the price, which is why this is one of the few reputation problems with a deadline, and why the fixes, which run slower than most deals do, need to start first.

The week before is too late

Removals can take weeks and outranking takes months. A term sheet in progress leaves time for neither. Start when a raise is a plan and not yet a process, which in practice means two or three quarters ahead of when you think you need it.

What they are actually looking for

Litigation, regulatory action, prior failed ventures, and anything that contradicts what you told them. That last one matters most. A known problem discussed early is a fact about the company, while the same problem found by a stranger in a search is a disclosure question.

Run the search on yourself first

Diligence isn't exotic. You can reproduce most of it. Check the first two pages for each founder's name, the company name, the data brokers, your own background file under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and PACER for anything federal, then read our self-opposition research checklist. It walks all four layers, and it also tells you who has already pulled you.

Do it for every founder and every board member, not just the chief executive. The search that derails a conversation is rarely the one anybody expected.

Handle the record before you handle the page

If there's a civil or federal filing, work the aggregators, not the search engine. A single case lands on several legal sites at once and each has its own process, so our court records guide covers them site by site, and our court record removal is $199 with twelve months of re-submission. These pages repost.

A prior failed venture is usually not removable, and usually not the problem people assume. Investors have seen failure before, and what they react to is finding it themselves after being told something else.

Build the version you want found

The gap on most founders is that nothing current exists. An old article ranks because there's no competition. And a search that returns almost nothing is its own signal in a room full of people deciding whether you're a known quantity.

A website you own is the anchor, and the profile set fills the rest. If there's a real story to tell, press placements are $499 to $5,999 and you don't pay if we can't place it, which makes it the one route that adds coverage instead of rearranging what exists.

The timeline to plan against

Removals resolve in days to weeks where a clean basis exists, and stall indefinitely where it doesn't. Outranking runs in months. It took three months to clear six page-one results in our bankruptcy work, and six months to clear nine in our federal case work.

Start while the raise is still hypothetical. The whole first two pages as one job is $2,488, one time, and a situation covering several founders gets scoped and quoted on its own.

Clean it up before they look.

We run the diligence search on you first, work whatever can come down, and build the pages you'd rather they found.

Have us do it.

See the scope, price, and next steps for the help this guide describes.

See the service

Your professional reputation is bigger than one page.

Your website, profiles, published work, and search results all shape what people learn about you. We help you promote existing work, address individual results, and keep track of what changes.

Make your search results reflect your work today

Explore your options

Every guide we publish is free and ungated. Browse all of them, see what we do and what it costs, or read why we built this company.

Written by Drew Chapin, who ran all of this on his own name first.