Why I Wrote a Book on Due Diligence

I have spent most of my career on the inside of technology companies, not looking at them from a distance.

I started as a software engineer in Australia in the early 1990s. Not a glamorous origin story. No dorm room, no venture-backed garage. Just a computer science degree, a genuine obsession with how software works, and a job writing C++ code for systems that, frankly, nobody outside the industry had ever heard of.

What followed was 25 years of working across some of the most formative moments in enterprise technology. I was at Dascom when IBM acquired us in 1999. I ran Asia operations at E2open in the early days of SaaS, when we were effectively building our own version of AWS before AWS existed. I led managed services at Mincom before ABB took us out. And I finished my time as an operator as CIO at Blue Coat Systems, where the business grew from $400 million to over $1 billion in revenue before Symantec came calling.

I tell you this not to impress you, but to give you the context for everything that follows. Because when I became a full-time investor in 2019, I did not arrive as a finance person learning about technology. I arrived as a technologist learning about finance. That distinction matters more than most people realise.

The moment I knew I needed a framework

When I made my first angel investments, I did what most new investors do. I leaned on instinct. I backed founders I liked. I got excited about markets I found interesting. I applied the pattern recognition I had built up over decades and trusted that it would be enough.

It was not enough.

Early-stage investing is the riskiest asset class there is. You are betting on companies that have not yet proven their model, in markets that have not yet fully formed, run by founders whose best years may still be ahead of them. Instinct is a starting point, not a process.

I read everything I could find. The Power Law. Zero to One. The Innovator's Dilemma. Angel. 7 Powers. These are extraordinary books and I recommend all of them. But I kept running into the same problem. None of them were built for the way I invest.

My focus is on the platform and infrastructure layers of the enterprise software stack. The companies I look for are not the household names that end up on the cover of Wired. They are the picks-and-shovels businesses — the Twilios and Stripes of the world — that sit quietly in the middle of the technology stack and make everything above them possible. Finding and evaluating those companies requires a specific lens. None of the existing frameworks gave me that lens in the way I needed.

So I built my own.

From SUPER to SUPERIOR

In 2022, I wrote a blog post called APIs Have SUPER Powers. It was an attempt to articulate what I was looking for in the API-first companies I was backing. Five attributes. A simple acronym. A way to quickly explain my thesis to founders and co-investors.

Over the next two years, as I ran more deals, took more meetings, made more investments, and yes, made more mistakes, the framework evolved. I added three more lenses. I added a second dimension of five aspects for each lens, creating a grid of 40 data points that I now work through for every potential investment.

I called it SUPERIOR. Partly because the acronym worked. Partly because I am genuinely looking for superior companies, superior founders, and superior returns. And partly because, after 25 years in this industry, I believe the bar for what constitutes a truly fundable early-stage business should be high.

Why write it down?

The honest answer is that I was tired of explaining the framework verbally.

Every time I met a founder who was trying to understand what investors actually look for, I would spend 45 minutes walking through my thinking. Every time I spoke to a fellow investor who was refining their process, I would share bits and pieces of how I approached due diligence. Every time a student of entrepreneurship asked me how to evaluate a startup, I would find myself covering the same ground.

A book forces you to be precise in a way that conversation does not. It forces you to test whether your thinking actually holds together, or whether it only makes sense inside your own head. Writing this book taught me as much about my own process as I hope it teaches anyone who reads it.

Who this is for

I wrote this book for founders who want to understand how a serious investor evaluates their company. For investors who are building or refining their own due diligence process. For limited partners who want to understand what a disciplined framework looks like in practice. And for students of entrepreneurship who are thinking carefully about what makes a company worth building.

The SUPERIOR framework reflects my specific thesis — early-stage enterprise software in the Asia Pacific region. But the underlying logic is designed to be adapted. Your thesis will be different from mine. Your domain expertise, your geography, your sector focus — all of these should shape how you apply the framework. I have built in what I call Reader Framework Notes throughout the book specifically to help you do that.

This series of articles is my attempt to bring the key ideas to life, one lens at a time. Over the coming weeks I will walk through each letter of SUPERIOR, share the real companies I have used to test each lens, and explore what it actually means to invest with discipline in a market that rewards conviction.

I hope you find it useful. Let's start with the most fundamental question in venture capital: what does it mean to select well?

Chris Birrell is the author of "Investing in SUPERIOR Companies" and the Founder and Managing Partner of Func Ventures.

Link to book--> https://a.co/d/02aLV8sx