In today's episode, I discuss the signs that prospective acquirors should look out for when attempting to uncover how much “technical debt” any given target company may possess within their code base. Though substantially every software company has some amount of technical debt, those that are weighed down by an asymmetric burden of it tend to ship code less frequently, struggle to keep pace with competitors, regularly miss release targets, and are generally much more expensive and capital intensive to operate and grow.

In this way, what start out as technical problems quickly accumulate to become significant business problems.

Thus, prospective acquirors would be well served to thoroughly diligence the amount of technical debt possessed by any given target company, and proceed very carefully (or perhaps not proceed at all) with those companies who seem to possess much more than their fair share of it.

We break our analysis down into high risk, medium risk, and low risk signs.

Enjoy!