The diligence is in your email

Most LPs already have the inputs they need to diligence a deal. The problem isn't access — it's that nothing's applied to the deal in front of you in a way you can defend a year from now.

The inputs already exist. The system around them doesn't.

You have the PPM. You have the sponsor's prior-deal letters in an email thread. You have a ChatGPT prompt from last Sunday that asked exactly the right question about refinance exposure. You have a spreadsheet someone sent you in 2023 with cap rate comps. The diligence is already there. It's scattered across six tools that don't know about each other.

Serious LPs review roughly 100 deals to commit to one to three. At three-to-five hours per PPM done properly, the math only works for the ten or so that survive a first pass on vibes. The other ninety get waved through or passed on without a real record of why. Decision time arrives with the file half-built and no way to know what's been done.

That's a system gap, not a tooling gap. Gmail is fine. Dropbox is fine. ChatGPT is fine. A spreadsheet is fine. What's missing is the thing that ties them to the deal in front of you, and remembers what you asked, what you got back, and what's still open.

Five hours of work, ninety minutes of diligence.

The actual time math is worse than the three-to-five-hour number suggests. The hour you spend reading the PPM produces real diligence. The hour you spend searching for that email from the sponsor — searching, not reading — doesn't. The hour you spend reconstructing what you asked ChatGPT, in which thread, about which deal — doesn't. Most of the time disappears into navigation.

Which is why deals "feel fine" before they should. Vibes step in to fill the gap between the diligence you meant to do and the diligence you actually did. A deal feeling fine isn't a signal. It's the absence of signal, dressed up as one.

The fix is keeping the diligence work attached to the deal as it happens — questions asked, sponsor answers received, documents reviewed, open items, source citations — in one file that survives from first read to commit decision to year-three portfolio review.

A case file beats a checklist.

A checklist is something you tick through and forget. A case file is something you keep coming back to — when the sponsor sends an update, when the refi window opens, when the next deal from the same sponsor lands. Each interaction with the file makes the next one faster.

It's also what makes the framework defensible. A year from now, when the deal looks different than you expected, you can open the case file and see what you actually knew at commit. What questions were open. What the sponsor answered. What the citations were. The version of "what I knew at the time" the case file preserves is the one you can argue from. The version in your memory isn't.

That's the work — turning the diligence already in your email into a case file you can defend a year from now.