"By asking the right questions, we will help tech founders focus on where they need to spend most of their time."
FredPlais, CEO of Platformsh
Platform.sh, a leading cloud hosting platform for scalable web application and e-commerce businesses, have teamed up one of their investors, VC fund, OpenOcean, to create an online due diligence tool, ReadyFor.VC, making it easier for startups to accurately assess their VC funding readiness from a technical and product perspective.
Fred Plais, co-founder and CEO of Platform.sh, who support thousands of sites and web apps, including sites for Reiss, Ikea, Vivienne Westwood and the Canadian Football League, says that the analysis will provide software startups with much needed insight on where they can improve the quality and velocity of their software delivery.
“During the arduous process of determining whether my own company was ready to apply for VC funding and face tech due diligence, I knew there had to be an easier way of streamlining the initial assessment.
“Readyfor.VC’s results maps a company against other software startups in the same space and plots their VC-readiness and technical maturity on a grid. By asking the right questions, we will help tech founders focus on where they need to spend most of their time.
“Building software at all is hard, but coordinating and getting the very most out of your technical team is even harder. It requires bringing together deep technology skills, keeping an eye on a fast-evolving environment and then on top of that, possessing the managerial skills to get the most out of a team,” says Plais.
OpenOcean, built by the team that between them have scaled six software businesses and started MySQL, the world’s most popular database, contributed to the making of the startup readiness tool. Richard Muirhead, OpenOcean’s General Partner based in London, announced today that they will use Readyfor.vc as part of their initial discussions to evaluate the tech maturity with potential future portfolio companies.
“We’ve been conducting technical due diligence for startups for a long time now, doing it ourselves or even when necessary including experts from our network.
The readyfor.vc test is comprehensive enough to standardise the initial evaluation process. It makes it much easier to start an initial conversation with the founders, and move from there,” says Muirhead.
The assessment tool has been designed as an easy to follow online quiz that the CTO and CEO of a startup complete together. Questions asked include those about the business, the product, the company ambition and progress to date.
Ready for VC is the end result of a consultation with hundreds of startups, including Blackfire.io, Logmatic.io and Dataiku.com from the team that built Platform.sh. The online tool covers key topics that matter to scale a development team, including roadmap management, methodology, team organisation, deployment process, quality insurance, disaster recovery and support strategies.
"At Logmatic.io, we work hard to improve our product based on customer surveys and behaviour analysis. Readyfor.vc survey is a key component of that approach. It works as a check list of all the numerous things on which a technical founder needs to have an eye upon, as well as it provides a benchmark of comparison of what other start-ups do. Any start-up doing software development should take the survey!”, says Amirhossein Malekzadeh, Co-founder and CEO of Logmatic.io.
