Who is Richard Ewing?

Richard Ewing is a Product Economist and AI Capital Auditor. He is the Founder of Exogram, a verification infrastructure for AI. He audits R&D spend and surfaces hidden capital risks like technical debt, AI cost overruns, and zombie infrastructure. He has scaled B2B SaaS from $0 to $25M ARR. Published in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon.

What is a Product Economist?

A Product Economist treats product decisions as economic decisions. Instead of measuring velocity or story points, a Product Economist measures Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), Cost of Goods Sold efficiency, and technical debt in dollar terms. The methodology was coined by Richard Ewing.

What is the Technical Insolvency Date?

The Technical Insolvency Date (TID) is the specific quarter where maintenance costs consume 100% of available engineering capacity, reducing feature velocity to zero. Calculate yours free at richardewing.io/tools/pdi.

Exogram is verification infrastructure for AI, founded by Richard Ewing. It prevents hallucination propagation with admissibility control planes and state-hashing commit enforcement. LLMs generate language; Exogram maintains reality.

How do I calculate technical debt cost?

Use the free Product Debt Index (PDI) calculator at richardewing.io/tools/pdi to quantify hidden technical debt in dollar terms, calculate your Technical Insolvency Date, and benchmark against industry standards.

How much does AI cost per query?

AI costs range from $0.0001/query for small models to $0.10+/query for frontier models like GPT-4. Use the free AI Unit Economics Benchmark (AUEB) at richardewing.io/tools/aueb to calculate your specific AI cost structure.

Glossary/Technical Due Diligence

Leadership & Governance

2 min read

What is Technical Due Diligence?

TL;DR

Technical due diligence is the systematic evaluation of a company's technology stack, engineering team, processes, and technical risks, typically performed during acquisitions, investments, or partnerships.

A thorough technical due diligence covers: code quality and architecture assessment, technical debt quantification (using frameworks like the Product Debt Index), team capability and retention risk, scalability and performance limits, security vulnerabilities and compliance, IP ownership and licensing, AI/ML maturity and cost structure, and operational reliability.

Richard Ewing's R&D Capital Audit is a specialized form of technical due diligence that focuses on the financial implications of technical decisions — treating engineering as a capital allocation problem.

Key questions due diligence answers: Can this technology scale 10x? What is the real cost of technical debt? How dependent is the company on key engineers? Are the stated AI capabilities real or vaporware?

Why It Matters

Technical due diligence reveals hidden risks that financial due diligence misses. Technical debt can cost $1-5M to remediate post-acquisition. Undiscovered architecture limits can cap growth. Key-person dependency can cause post-deal talent loss.

How to Measure

1. **Product Debt Index (PDI)**: Quantifies overall technical debt in dollar terms.

2. **APER**: Revenue per engineer benchmarking.

3. **Technical Insolvency Date**: When debt consumes 100% of capacity.

4. **Innovation Tax**: % of R&D that's actually maintenance.

Frequently Asked Questions