How to audit startup · Manfred Touron

§Pre-audit checklist

Hire a freelance to perform general screening (company, staff, external image, etc…)
Send set of questions to the founders

What will break first with growth?
Did you suffer outages? How did that happen?
What happen if you have a security breach exploited by a hacker?
What happen if one of your employee steal and
What are you biggest fears about what could go wrong?
Who are your current biggest competitors?
Who could become your biggest competitors?
What competitive advantage could you take to take advance and discourage any new competitor to enter in the game?
You find the genius lamp, what are your 3 wishes?
What are your biggest regrets?
What are you most proud of?
How do you monitor your services?
What services/third-parties are you depending on?
What is your plan for the next 6 months, 6 years?
How developers develop on the product? Do you anonymize dev data? How dev is different from production?
What is the typical lifecycle of a feature/an idea?
What is the typical lifecycle of a new development?
What is the typical lifecycle of a bug fix?

Culture
Competitive advantages
Most “dangerous” competitors
Existing team’s position (will the current helt positions be still appropriate when the organization with scale up?)
Team scalability
Management
Recruitment
Privacy
Security
Monitoring / Alerting
Technical Debt / Development comfort
Vision
Infrastructure scalability
Global strategy: aggressiveness, defensive, etc
Market size / niche
Roadmap quality & realisticness
Exit strategy
Money raising goal
Existing processes and workflows
Documentation
Technical image/“Sexyness”
Feature Development Lifecycle
Collaboration between tech/non-tech
Management
Dev tools / Developer Experience