The ten-factor process behind Potentia, and why it exists.
Every investor runs some version of the same check before writing a check into a team they don't already know: reference calls. Former colleagues, former co-founders, former investors — a round of calls that, done properly, takes two to three weeks and still only covers whoever the founder decided to list. It's slow, it's biased toward flattering references, and it happens at exactly the point in a deal where speed matters most.
Growth Readiness Diligence is a consent-based, structured alternative. The founder and core team go through a ten-factor assessment — covering things like founder track record, team completeness relative to what the business actually needs, prior execution under pressure, and the kind of red flags a normal reference call would eventually surface if you asked the right ten people the right questions. The output is a single report an investor can read in fifteen minutes instead of a diligence process that stretches across weeks.
The founder opts in and sees what's being assessed. That's a deliberate design choice: a diligence process a founder doesn't trust produces worse information, because people route around processes they think are unfair. Because the ten factors are disclosed upfront, founders can (and do) address gaps before an investor ever sees the report — which is closer to how due diligence should work than the traditional model, where founders often never learn what was actually said about them.
We run Growth Readiness Diligence through Potentia, and it's built into how we advise every founder we work with — not just an add-on for the fundraising process. It's also the same underlying process we adapt for founders in our defense-tech track, where the factors around export control, IP ownership and compliance carry extra weight.
A strong report doesn't mean a perfect one — investors read Growth Readiness Diligence reports expecting to see some gaps; what they're actually checking for is whether the founder has an accurate, honest picture of their own team's weaknesses. A report with no flagged gaps at all is, in practice, a bigger warning sign to an experienced investor than one with two or three clearly named ones. For a broader sense of how the fundraising process fits together end to end, see our investor-readiness checklist, or try the 2-minute investor readiness check.