Everybody in diligence reads the same stuff. The financials, the pitch, the customer list, the roadmap. All of it curated, all of it pointed at making the company look as good as it can. Fine. Read those. But if you want to know where a software company actually hurts, and where you personally are going to spend your first year after you buy it, there’s one document nobody thinks to ask for. The fix history. Every codebase keeps a running log of every change ever made to it. Buried in there is a list of every single thing the team had to fix. Not the features they were proud of. The bugs, the security holes they closed, the things that broke and had to be patched. It is the least flattering and most honest record that exists about a piece of software, because nobody writes it for an audience. They write it while something is on fire. I know this because I read my own, and it told me the truth about my own company that no summary ever would. The pattern of fixes tells you the shape of the thing. A lot of security patches means security was a recurring problem, not a solved one. A lot of “fixed the billing” means revenue was fragile. The same cleanup done by hand over and over means there’s manual work holding the place together that never got automated. You cannot spin a fix history. It is what actually happened. So here’s the ask I’d make if I were buying: let me see the change log, and let me see it unfiltered. Not a summary someone prepared. The real thing. An hour reading where a system has actually broken will tell you more about your next year than a week of polished diligence materials, because the polished materials are designed to reassure you and the fix history was never designed for you at all. That’s the throughline in everything I’ve been posting this week. The stuff that sinks a buyer is almost never in the demo or the deck. It’s in the parts nobody built to be looked at. If you’re staring down a deal and want someone who’s read a lot of these, including his own, to go through a company’s actual history and tell you what it’s really telling you, reach out. Last question for the room, and then I’ll shut up for a while: for the people who’ve bought a software company, what did you wish you’d read before closing that you didn’t?