How to Actually Get Hired

Frederik spent his career at Blackstone, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, working as a Principal across the San Francisco, New York, and London offices. In that role, he was a buyer of commercial due diligence: he was the person signing the $500,000 cheques to McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, reviewing the 200-page reports those firms produced, and ultimately deciding whether the research was credible enough to support a multi-billion-dollar investment decision. He has described commissioning "dozens" of these reports over the course of his career at Blackstone, which means he has seen every major variation of the format, knows what makes a managing director trust the analysis versus push back on it, and knows precisely where the consulting markup is highest relative to actual value delivered. That specific lived experience is the thing that makes DiligenceSquared's founder-market fit unusually strong. This is not a founder who identified commercial due diligence as an interesting market opportunity from the outside. It is a founder who spent years as the customer and watched the same inefficiencies repeat, project after project. The question he is answering, can AI do the customer interview and synthesis work credibly enough for a global PE fund, is a question he has the domain expertise to answer definitively, because he knows what "credible enough" looks like at Blackstone. His public writing is lean but deliberate. The YC company profile is unusually direct about the founder-market fit argument: "Frederik bought these reports as a Principal at Blackstone. Soren sold them as a Principal at BCG. Harshil is a repeat founder and former Software Engineer at Google. We've seen both sides and know what matters in due diligence, and now we automate it." That framing is a tell about how Frederik thinks: he leads with proof of experience, not with mission language. When you reach out, match that register. Don't tell him you're excited about the space. Tell him what you've done that is relevant. He is based in San Francisco. The confirmed public contact for the founding team is founders@diligencesquared.com, which makes email the clearest entry point. LinkedIn DM is also viable once you've verified his profile.

Where Frederik represents the buyer's perspective on commercial due diligence, Søren represents the seller's. He spent seven years as a Principal in BCG's private equity practice in New York, leading more than 40 commercial due diligence projects for some of the world's largest PE, growth equity, and hedge funds. He has been in the room where those 200-page reports are built from scratch: structuring the interview guides, coordinating the customer calls, synthesising findings across dozens of conversations, and defending the commercial thesis to a managing director at KKR or Apollo who is sceptical of the analysis. He knows what it takes to make a diligence report credible to that audience, because credibility was the professional standard his work was judged against for seven years. The partnership between Søren and Frederik is unusually well-matched because they've seen both sides of a market with almost no transparency. Most PE funds don't talk to the consulting firms about what they actually found useful in the reports, and most consulting firms don't know how the analysis lands on the buy-side. Søren and Frederik closed that gap by simply having worked on opposite sides of the same transaction type. Together they know what the buyer reads and what they skip, which claims require source transcripts to be credible and which don't, and where AI can genuinely compete with a team of BCG consultants versus where human judgment is still required. His outreach preferences mirror Frederik's: he is results-focused and uninterested in enthusiasm. If you have PE, consulting, or finance background, make that explicit immediately, he will recognise it. If you come from a technical background, lead with what you've built that is relevant to the product pipeline.