How we run our 11-day diligence sprints.

The standard PE diligence cycle is built around fund cycles, not company cycles. Sixteen weeks of legal review, financial review, commercial review, technical review, sequenced through committees that meet every other Tuesday. By the time the deal closes, the founder has run the company for an additional four months without the capital they're trying to raise.

We do it in eleven days. Not because we move fast for sport, but because most of what a sixteen-week diligence finds is what an eleven-day diligence already saw.

Why eleven days

Eleven days is roughly the time it takes for two senior partners to fully load context on a single company. Not enough time for unlimited number-crunching, just enough time for the only diligence questions that actually predict outcomes:

Does the team know what's broken?
Does the team know what to do about it?
Will the team take help, or do they need to hold the wheel alone?
Are the unit economics real, or constructed?

Everything else — IP audits, customer churn projections, NPS deep-dives, intellectual-property scans — is either confirmable in a focused week, or it's the kind of work that should happen after the term sheet, not before. Most diligence findings that derail a deal at month four were visible in week one.

We're not trying to know everything before we sign. We're trying to know whether we'd want to help.

The eleven days

A typical sprint, day by day:

Days 1–2 — Setup

Two partners assigned. One operating partner (Henrik / Henna / Geir) and one functional partner (Stian on finance, Vilde on legal, Roger on tech-and-M&A). NDAs signed by end of day 1. Data room shared by end of day 2. Initial 90-minute working session with the founder.

Days 3–5 — Going deep

Operating partner sits inside the company. Two days on-site, one day async. Talks to the management team — not just the CEO. Sits in on the standup. Reads the last six months of board materials. Functional partner runs financial / legal review in parallel.

Days 6–7 — Customer + commercial

Three to five customer references, three to five lost-deal interviews. The lost-deal interviews matter more than the wins — how a customer chose against you tells you what you're actually selling.

Days 8–9 — The hard meeting

Half-day session: founder, both partners, no slides. The agenda is the questions diligence has surfaced that don't have clean answers yet. Pricing-experiment ambiguity, key-hire concerns, unit-economics structure. Founders who can't run this conversation rarely run the company well at the next stage.

Day 10 — Investment committee

Both partners present to the rest of the bench. Decision day. Not "vote to proceed to legal review" — actual term-sheet-or-no.

Day 11 — Term sheet or honest no

If yes, term sheet on the founder's desk by end of day 11. If no, an honest call by end of day 11 — with the substance of why, and (where useful) the names of two or three other investors who might be a better fit.

Why it works

Three reasons:

Founders run faster. The four-month diligence calendar is the single largest tax on growth-stage founders' time. Eleven days frees up most of a quarter.
We see what matters. The diligence questions that actually predict outcomes are visible in days, not months. The rest is process theater.
It forces our partner bench to make real calls. Eleven-day cycles don't allow consensus-by-attrition. Either we want the deal or we don't, and we say so.

The catches

This works because of three structural choices that aren't easily copied:

Small portfolio. Six active companies. We can spare two senior people for eleven days because we're not running 30 deals in parallel.
Operator partners. Most of the real diligence happens in the founder's office, not in the data room. That requires partners who can credibly sit in a startup standup and contribute.
No fund-cycle lock-in. We're owned 50/50 by partners and Verdane. We don't have a fund-vintage clock telling us to deploy by quarter-end. We can say no in eleven days as easily as yes.

The four-month diligence calendar exists because the fund cycle exists. Different structure, different speed.

What we get wrong

In the spirit of learned the hard way: eleven days is sometimes too long. Some deals we should have walked from in week one, and we used the second week to construct a justification for the yes we wanted. That's a failure mode — pressure to convert a sprint into a deal.

We've added a hard rule: if either partner is unsure on day 7, default is "no, with an open invitation to come back in six months." It costs us deals. The deals it costs us are the ones we'd regret a year in.

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Tag pill: Static Share row: LinkedIn / X / Copy link Author bio strip: > Henrik Lie-Nielsen is Managing Partner at Amp Eleven. He's been building Nordic tech companies since 1995. Read his bio →

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