What is Due Dilly?
Due Dilly is a research practice and platform focused on understanding how money actually moves.
Every headline, every acquisition, every collapse, every “overnight success” is preceded by a paper trail: contracts, cap tables, side letters, incentive structures, governance decisions, and quiet negotiations. Those documents exist long before the narrative does. We study that layer.
You use it when you compare options, test assumptions, verify claims, and decide who or what to trust. You use it socially, professionally, culturally, and economically—whether you name it or not.
Due Dilly examines the mechanisms behind transactions, institutions, and power. Not what happened, but how it happened. Not just the signal, but the system producing it.
The money is always talking. We help you listen.
Who are you guys?
Carl is an New York State licensed attorney for venture funds, startups, and creators.
Jonathan is an operator and strategist, who co-founded Blavity Inc.
What to expect
Public narratives flatten complexity. They foreground individuals while obscuring structures. They describe outcomes without tracing inputs. They celebrate wins without mapping the conditions that made them possible—or inevitable.
If you care about how things actually work—and why outcomes look inevitable only in hindsight—you are in the right place.
We're what you read to get smarter before a meeting, and to take a longview after one.
The Due Dilly Ecosystem
We have two newsletters and a podcast.
Free Agency is a weekly exploration of media and everything around it, every other Monday.
The Dime is a weekly newsletter, focused on finance and markets, and comes out every Thursday.
Our work connects deals to their underlying mechanics, cultural moments to their financial architecture, and individual decisions to the systems constraining or enabling them. We surface the hidden participants, the quiet leverage, and the tradeoffs that rarely make the headline.
Why This Matters
Good diligence creates optionality. It reveals overlooked opportunities and prevents avoidable damage.
Most stories that resonate do so because they contain more than what was said publicly. We see ourselves in them precisely because something meaningful was omitted.
Due Dilly exists to make that omission visible, so you can see behind what was said, and act accordingly.
Our Commitments
- We treat attention as a finite resource, not an entitlement.
- We write to clarify thinking, not to perform certainty. If the facts change, our conclusions change.
- We listen aggressively and revise openly. When we are wrong, we say so. When we make errors, we correct them.
- We cite everything. Claims without sources are opinions. Opinions without disclosure are noise.
- We take the work seriously and the work itself lightly. Precision and enjoyment are not opposites.
The best of Due Dilly
True to our name, we look to cover a variety of things from the lens of analysis and paperwork, to tell the best stories we can with data that is useful and impactful.