Reputation What diligence finds before a funding round or an acquisition

Every investor, acquirer, and corporate development team searches the founders, and most of them do it before the first real conversation rather than during formal diligence. What comes back does not usually kill a deal on its own. It changes the questions, the warranties you get asked to sign, and occasionally the price. The useful thing to know is that this is one of the few reputation problems with a deadline, and the fixes run slower than most deals do.

The week before is too late

Removals can take weeks and outranking takes months. A term sheet in progress does not leave time for either. This is work to start when a raise is a plan rather than 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. The last one matters most. A known problem discussed early is a fact about the company. The same problem found by a stranger in a search is a disclosure question.

Run the search on yourself first

Diligence is not exotic and you can reproduce most of it. 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. Our self-opposition research checklist 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 is a civil or federal filing, work the aggregators rather than the search engine. A single case lands on several legal sites at once and each has its own process, which our court records guide covers site by site. Our court record removal is $199 with twelve months of re-submission, because these pages repost.

A prior failed venture is usually not removable and usually not the problem people assume. Investors have seen failure before. 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 not a negative result, it is that nothing current exists. An old article ranks because there is no competition, and a search that returns almost nothing is its own signal in a room full of people assessing whether you are a known quantity.

A website you own is the anchor and the profile set fills the rest. Where there is a genuine story to tell, press placements are $499 to $5,999 and you do not pay if we cannot place it, which is the one route that adds coverage rather than rearranging what exists.

The timeline to plan against

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

Start when 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 would 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

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