Some of this you can look up on CrunchBase beforehand, which you definitely should do. For me I believe in trying to gauge just how prone to borrowing the founders are; if they have a solid model and are more inclined to seek profit rather than investment (except after proving the model, and primarily to increase growth), then that's a good sign.

If however they seem like they approach is constantly to borrow money, that's a red flag.

* How much runway does the company have? What will the plan be when we start to run out? * How well have you proven the business model? * What type of validation/research did the team do for product-market fit (before building the product)? * What's the management team's approach to profit vs investment?