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0 pointsx0x02y ago0 comments

For the enterprise saas business we built, vc duedil was talking to customers, both directly via our introductions and backchanneled via their network.

For the technical aspects, our vcs didn't / don't care. That's our job to figure out, and if we don't, they fire founders.

I'm honestly not sure how you would seriously audit chat app numbers, and I suspect and hope Abraham Shafi is going to prison. For most businesses, if you have to seriously audit things like that, you probably shouldn't be investing. A company inflating their numbers by 20x will be pretty hard to detect, and our safeguard as an industry is that's fraud, and people go to prison for committing fraud.

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CharlieDigital2y ago

It's not that hard.

    - Look at the application logs
    - Look at the emails and reach out to a sub-sample of them to determine if they are real users
    - Look at the network traffic/volume numbers
    - Look at the architecture to see if it could actually support that volume
    - Look at the pattern of content in a random sampling to see if it's just "Lorem Ipsum" or actual, real content

Just some heuristics I'd use off the top of my head. I've had to do some technical DD in the past and there are always ways of determining legitimacy of claims.

The consequence of not doing even basic DD are outcomes like the $174m fraud that JPMC eventually discovered: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/5/23671000/jpmorgan-frank-fr...

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