What investors and enterprise buyers actually check
A growing number of funding rounds and enterprise sales now include a short technical questionnaire. None of it is hard to answer well — if it's already true.
Somewhere around a seed round, or the first enterprise customer with a procurement team, a new kind of question starts showing up: not about your product, but about how you run your technology. Is multi-factor authentication switched on? Do you have a written security policy? Who actually owns IT at your company?
These questionnaires vary in depth, but they tend to circle the same handful of basics: access control, backups, a plan for what happens if something goes wrong, and evidence that data is handled with some care. None of it is exotic — it's the same groundwork most established businesses already have in place.
The founders who breeze through these conversations aren't the ones with the most impressive security stack. They're the ones who did the basics early enough that answering honestly is easy, rather than scrambling to retrofit a policy the week before due diligence starts.
If you're not sure where you'd stand today, that's usually a good sign it's worth finding out before someone else asks first.