Venture Capital’s Due Diligence, or Ethnography’s Adversarial Twin?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Al Lim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/venture-capitals-due-diligence-or-ethnographys-adversarial-twin/. About the post: Anthropologists have long framed studying up as a problem of access: how to get inside institutions that do not want us (Nader 1972; Souleles 2018). My problem was different. Having spent time doing both ethnographic fieldwork and leading several venture investments, my problem was less about access than about processing the continuities and frictions between these two roles.