Technical Due Diligence With Public GitHub Data: Reading Engineering Health Before the Data Room

Technical due diligence traditionally waits for the data room, but the most important technical facts about a startup are already public. This post explains how to read commit velocity, contributor growth, and repository expansion as a pre-data-room health check, and where the method stops being reliable.

Key stats

14-day: Default commit-velocity observation window (smooths sprint-cycle noise)

28-day: Longer window for enterprise and regulated sectors (avoids misreading a single sprint half)

40 commits / 5 contributors: Transparent acceleration-screen threshold (used in the weekly Acceleration Watch cohort)

References

[1] Engineering Acceleration as a VC Deal Flow Signal: SSRN

[2] GitHub REST API - Repository Statistics: GitHub Docs

[3] VC Deal Flow Signal Methodology: GitDealFlow

[4] DORA - Accelerate State of DevOps Research: Google DORA