Introducing The Dilligence Stack
Institutional-grade analysis on the companies and technologies shaping the market.
Why traditional analysis isn't enough, and why we built The Diligence Stack.
Covering the technology industry has never required more technical depth than it does today. That’s the premise of the Dilligence Stack.
Most analysis focuses on understanding a company's business model, its market position, and its financial trajectory. The technology itself—the fundamental thing that makes a technology company a technology company—was largely abstracted away. It used to be enough to evaluate a SaaS company or a consumer internet platform without needing to understand the underlying architecture. The business fundamentals were sufficient, or so the thinking went. This is arguably what led so many analysts to misunderstand Apple for the better part of a decade, though that's a topic for its own post. In my experience, having a foundational read on technical differentiation and how it ties to market opportunities is one of the biggest missing pieces of most analyses, and the gap we want to close.
At a fundamental level, the technology is the business model. The defensibility of an AI company is inseparable from its model architecture and infrastructure. The scalability of a cloud platform depends on decisions made at the silicon level. The future of a consumer devices company hinges on its hardware roadmap and the integration between silicon, software, and services. The viability of a robotics or AR platform depends on sensor fusion, compute efficiency, and software architecture that won’t be obvious from a spec sheet. The competitive position of a semiconductor company comes down to architectural decisions, packaging innovations, and design tradeoffs that don’t show up in any financial filing. Across every category—from datacenter infrastructure to devices you hold in your hand—the complexity of the stack has increased to the point where understanding the business requires deeply understanding the technology.
This creates a genuine challenge. Financial metrics remain useful—they’re just no longer sufficient. They tell you what happened. They tell you very little about what’s actually under the hood: whether the technology works, whether it can scale, whether the competitive position is as defensible as management claims, or whether a company’s positioning reflects what they’ve actually built.
The problem is that deep technical insight is genuinely hard to access. Unless you have engineers on staff who can understand software details, evaluate an architecture, and stress-test claims against physical constraints, you’re largely relying on the company’s own narrative about their technology. And in a market where every company positions itself as an “AI company” or a “platform,” evaluating what’s actually been built versus what’s being claimed requires a level of technical fluency that the traditional research process wasn’t designed to provide.
This is why we launched The Diligence Stack. At Creative Strategies, our work has always started with the technology itself—understanding what’s actually being built, assessing how companies are positioning themselves, and then evaluating the market opportunity. The Diligence Stack brings that approach to investors and decision makers who need to connect technical reality to revenue potential.
It’s worth being explicit about what we are and what we’re not.
We’re not financial advisors. We don’t issue price targets, buy ratings, or stock recommendations. We don’t manage money, and we don’t have a portfolio we’re talking our book on.
We’re technical and business analysts. Our role is to function as an independent perspective within your research process. We take the claims companies make about their technology and test them against what’s technically real. Does this actually work the way they say it does? Is this genuinely differentiated, or is it commodity technology with good marketing? Can this be commercialized well? Is there a market for this technology? Can this scale the way the growth projections require?
We do the technical diligence. You integrate it into your broader analysis.
In practice, subscribers receive four to six pieces of research per month (more during earnings season), split between two formats.
Deep dives are comprehensive, multi-page analyses of specific companies, markets, or technology. These are meant to serve as reference documents—permanent additions to your files on the technical reality of an asset. They cover the full stack, identify the key technical risks and opportunities, and give you the foundation for an informed view.
Technical notes are shorter, faster analyses—rapid response to market-moving news, insights, and our unique take on companies’ earnings, analysis of product launch events, assessments of emerging technologies worth watching, stress tests of claims that are making the rounds. These are designed to give you a quick, grounded take when you don’t have time to wait.
Both formats share the same underlying approach: strip away the narrative, examine what’s actually there, and give you a clear-eyed view of the technical reality and market opportunity.
If you want access to that layer of the analysis, The Diligence Stack is where we publish it.