A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "What An Acquisition Target Claims And What The Score Says," Kin Lane, November 12, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/12/what-an-acquisition-target-claims-and-what-the-score-says/
Priya works in corporate development at a mid-sized software firm, and she read the post on a Thursday afternoon with a target's pitch deck open in the next window. Page three of the deck said "API-first platform." She had read that line so many times that it no longer registered as a claim.
The post made her read it as one. It suggested comparing what is on the package with what a public reading says, before any data room opens. She had never thought of the public surface as something the acquiring team could look at first. Her habit was to wait for the documents and then discover what was missing.
She went through the post's questions slowly. Do they have the APIs they claim? Is there a contract, or only a page describing one? Is it a platform or a website? The last one stung a little, because she could not say which the target was. She had only the deck's word for it.
Then she reached the section on estates, and her reaction cooled. The post says Microsoft has 197 profiles and a spread of 81.8 points, with GitHub, bought in 2018, still sitting at 78.8. She thought that was striking. But the blended estate rating was 31.3, and the post itself admits the average is the least useful number because it includes many old and small profiles. She wondered whether a spread would mean anything for the small company she was looking at, which had nothing like 197 profiles. The post seemed to expect that objection. It said it did not yet have good answers about what a surface looks like three months or six months after a deal.
The line that stayed with her was the one about spread: the experience an agent gets depends on "which door it walked through." She thought about the integration her firm had inherited two years ago. Two systems had behaved like strangers for a long time afterward, and nobody had put a number on that gap beforehand. She did not know whether a score would have caught it. She suspected it would have caught something.
She was also uncomfortable about how much weight a number could carry in a room full of people who liked numbers. The post is plain on this point: "A public score is not due diligence." It cannot see the code, the customers or the contracts, and a target with strong private APIs could read lower than it deserves. Priya could picture a colleague quoting a low score as a verdict, and she did not want to be the one who handed it over.
So she kept her plan small. She did not put a score in the deal memo. She opened a blank note and wrote three questions for the call with the target's engineers: whether a contract existed for the APIs the deck described, which auth and conventions they used, and what they meant by agent-ready. After each question she left space to record what they said. Then she added one line at the bottom, to look up the target's public reading before the call and treat it as a list of things to ask, not as an answer.