There’s a version of the diligence question that almost everyone asks. “Is the IP properly assigned?” “Do you have contributor license agreements in place?” “Has disaster recovery been tested recently?”
The answer is almost always yes.
What distinguishes pre-LOI intelligence from a management presentation is that the question is just the beginning.
The 24-hour window is the instrument. When a principal makes a claim, any claim, they have 24 hours to produce the artifact that backs it. Not a month. Not a week. Twenty-four hours. Long enough for any organized company to retrieve documentation that already exists. Short enough to prevent fabrication.
What happens in that window is the finding.
Three outcomes are possible. The artifact arrives with appropriate recency and the claim holds. That is posture. The artifact arrives but does not match what was said: a policy last updated three years ago, an IP assignment signed by some contributors but not the ones who wrote the relevant code. That is also a finding. Or nothing arrives. No artifact. No explanation. Just silence.
The third outcome answers a question more important than the one asked. Not “is this documented?” but “does this company know where its documentation is?”
A company that cannot produce a timestamped IP assignment in response to a simple request is not a company that happens to be disorganized at this particular moment. It is a company that has been operating without these things in place and had not needed to confront that gap until now. You are watching it confront that gap in real time.
This distinction matters because founders are practiced at answering the question. What they are not practiced at is producing the evidence in a time window calibrated to reveal whether the answer and the artifact are the same thing.
The 24-hour deadline separates two different kinds of “yes.” There is the yes that means: “We have this, here it is.” And there is the yes that means: “We believe this to be true.” Those are not equivalent. The delta between them is the memo.
Evasion is also information. When a founder hedges on contributor rights, when the response shifts from confident to qualified, when a follow-up arrives that answers a slightly different question than the one asked, none of these require interpretation. They are observations. Each one is logged alongside the artifact evidence.
The protocol does not need to prove intent. It prices the gap between what was said and what was produced. A principal who states that IP is clean and then cannot produce a single signed assignment in 24 hours has told you exactly what you needed to know. The memo makes the financial consequence explicit. What you do with it is your call.
Non-submission is not a neutral event. It is evidence about the state of the company before you arrived. What arrives, what does not, and the delta between claims and artifacts: that is the finding.