Something I’ve noticed about remote selling watching Joey Wright lead our sales team: The most important work actually happens between calls. Not the demo. Not the close. The parts in between where they’re texting champions, co-creating business cases, and prepping buyers to sell internally. Joey calls it “calls between the calls.” It’s how you earn trust, uncover new stakeholders, and stay top of mind. If your reps only show up for the big meetings, you’re missing the real deal momentum.

When I was in college, I fell in love with startups and wanted to be a founder. But it took me 10 years to realize my dream and start Dock. I’m not an engineer so as a business person it was a windy road to starting a startup. Looking back on my journey, here’s my takeaways on how to put yourself in a position to start a company: 1) Pursue random entrepreneurial side projects I always played around with startup ideas from a dog treat delivery company to a review site for agencies to a group travel planning app. None of these projects went anywhere, but I gained important skills like designing in Figma, building websites, running paid ads, etc. 2) Find your niche and build valuable skills Startups need people who can do actual work in a specific discipline; for me, this was marketing. I worked at an agency that gave me an important marketing education. I worked with all sorts of clients from labor unions to NFL teams to tech giants across different marketing disciplines from paid media to websites to events. 3) Put yourself in a position to get lucky I was lucky to join Lattice as the third employee, but I also put myself in a position to be there by specializing in marketing, moving to SF, deferring business school, and jumping on the Lattice opportunity when I saw it. 4) Go work at an early stage startup The best thing I ever did was go work at an early stage company. Lattice was a whirlwind education in SaaS, b2b marketing, venture capital, team management, and more. My time at Lattice gave me the confidence that I knew how to handle the phases of company building. Working at Lattice also led me to meeting my co-founders. 5) Navigating the idea maze I spent a lot of time thinking about startup ideas, but ultimately noticed a problem at Lattice that inspired Dock. At Lattice, our sale relied on supporting the HR buyer during the evaluation. I built a hacky product using Webflow that helped to organize everything in the sales process in a personalized microsite for buyers. This experiment helped me validate an idea before pursuing it full time. 6) Convincing co-founders to join you As a business person, it’s impossible to start a software company by yourself. But you can put in the work to convince technical co-founders to join you. This means validating your idea with prototype designs, talking to customers, and more. Victor joined Luc & I because he saw how we had already validated the idea at Lattice and we had full designs that were just waiting to be coded. 7) Take the leap Startups only work when it’s a full-time commitment. You should do the prep work, but then at some point you need to make the company your life’s work. Only then will you feel the existential commitment that propels the company forward.

Dock is the first time I've ever really been a product manager. Here’s some things I’ve learned along the way: 1) Devil is in the details Creating an initial design is the easy part. The real work comes in designing all the different edge cases for engineering teams. 2) Text editors suck Building a product around a text editor is a huge challenge. Dock is the last time I'll ever try to do something like this. It took a whole summer to get Dock’s text editor experience working and we’re still making improvements years later. 3) Loom is my savior Every project, feature, or bug I'm using Loom to communicate with engineers. Can’t imagine having to write out everything. It would take forever and so much gets lost in translation. 4) Linear keeps me sane All of our product work is managed in Linear. It’s my go-to-dashboard to manage everything related to the project. 5) Re-building is okay Building software products is an iterative process. We’ve rebuilt many components within Dock based on user feedback. At first, I was frustrated we didn’t nail it right the first time. But i’ve realized that’s part of the game. 6) Design is different than code Sometimes you have what you think is the perfect design. But once you feel the UX in real code, then it starts to fall apart. The faster you can build a prototype the better. 7) Bugs are hard to reproduce It’s crazy how many edge cases exist when building software products. So many things are related to local environments or moment in time situations. You would think everyone experiences the same software the same way, but that’s not the case. 8) Admin vs. end user features Constantly balancing which type of user to build for the admin - who is usually the buyer - or the end user - who is using the thing everyday. It’s a puzzle to build functionality that makes both personas happy without muddling the entire experience. 9) Avoid migrations at all costs Migrations slow down development. When thinking through what features to build, you want to try to avoid migrations at all cost. 10) Scope designs with engineers to understand level of difficulty Anytime we have a new feature or project. I ask Victor about the level of difficulty. Will it take Day? Week? Month? Quarter? Sometimes the things I think are easy are actually hard and vice versa 11) Use your own product to make it intuitive I’m a daily Dock user and it’s helped us to craft the right experience within the product. It’s hard to build a product you don’t actually use. 12) Putting yourself in the shoes of the user is hard cause you built the thing I’m also a really biased Dock user. I know where every button or workflow lives because I'm the one who made it. This means I have some blindspots that I need to be self aware of when thinking through our user experience.

I helped build Lattice into a leading HR brand. Here's how I thought about brand building: 1/ Brand building in B2B SaaS isn't just fluff. It's a critical driver of growth as buying shifts to self-education and self-service. 2/ The foundation: Deeply understand your Product, Audience, and Market. Talk to customers relentlessly. They're your best source of insights. 3/ Brand = Touchpoints + Audience Feelings. Every interaction matters. Optimize for consistency and differentiation. 4/ Create value-add programs before the sale. Our "Resources for Humans" community, events, and podcast at Lattice was a game-changer for brand building. Let your community do the talking for you. 5/ Design matters more than you think. Great aesthetics can elevate an unremarkable brand to remarkable status. Invest early. 6/ Content is king, but the quality of content matters. Real insights perform better than SEO AI garbage. A speaker like Obama vs. an unknown can dramatically alter brand perception. 7/ Appear bigger than you are. We ran a $50k billboard campaign as a Series A startup. Instant credibility boost. 8/ Social proof is your secret weapon. Customer logos, case studies, review sites - use them all. Make it easy for customers to tell your story. 9/ Your employees are your brand ambassadors. Arm them with the right tools and knowledge to spread your message. 10/ Brand building is a flywheel. Start small, be consistent, and watch it compound over time.

Building a startup is hard. Raising a toddler and newborn is hard. Doing both at the same time is a special kind of chaos. I often joke that I have three babies. My sons and my startup. For most of Dock’s journey, I’ve also been learning how to be a dad. The hardest part has been time. My workday has narrowed into tight time windows before the house wakes up, during nanny share hours, or after bedtime. It took a lot of adjustment to stop working around 4pm. But It’s important that I’m home for dinner and bedtime. The schedule leaves very little time for myself, wife, friends, or hobbies. I have a constant feeling that I’m not working hard enough as a founder—or not being present enough as a dad or husband. But here’s the upside: parenthood forces focus. I can’t waste hours tinkering with things that don’t matter. I need to be home for dinner and bedtime. I need to prioritize ruthlessly. Time gets compressed, priorities get sharper, and distractions fall away. My life is surprisingly simple. All I do is focus on building the business and my family. I don’t have much time for anything else and I’ve made peace with that. This feels like what I’m supposed to be doing in my 30s: building a business and building a family. It’s messy and exhausting and rewarding all at once.

One of the biggest sales lessons we’ve learned at Dock: Don’t do a POC just because someone asks for one. More and more buyers are asking for POCs — not because they don’t trust you, but because they’ve been burned before. But you need clear expectations going in: - Why are we doing this? - What does success look like? - Who’s involved? Otherwise, you’re signing up for a two-week project with a six-month sales cycle and no accountability. We’ve built our own deal room template for running POCs, with: - Goals and success criteria - Key setup steps - Technical handoff docs - Weekly check-ins baked in It’s flexible, and we can hide or show it depending on the deal. But the biggest unlock? Our reps treat a POC like a mini onboarding. If you’re going to trial the product, we want you to feel what it’s actually like to be a customer.

Dock helps revenue teams consolidate their software stack: Sales deal rooms Customer onboarding Client portals Content management Sales training courses Sales wiki CPQ (i.e. sales order forms) Enablement agents ....all in Dock.

I’ve spent the past decade building marketing programs — from launching brand campaigns at Google, to running marketing at Lattice, to scaling Dock from scratch. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way: 1) Focus beats breadth. Dock started too horizontal and spread thin. Growth accelerated once we narrowed to revenue teams. 2) Content takes time. SEO is slow to start, but once it compounds, it becomes a growth machine. 3) Events build trust. From small dinners to big conferences, Lattice events created community and credibility. 4) Design is leverage. Great design makes you look bigger than you are—and perception matters more than founders realize. 5) Keep pricing simple. Complex models slow deals; simplicity wins. 6) Every touchpoint is brand. Sales calls, help docs, and support chats matter just as much as marketing campaigns. 7) Billboards work. Out-of-home was surprisingly effective at Google and Lattice. 8) Hire better than yourself. My proudest achievement at Lattice wasn’t a campaign—it was the team. 9) Start with the customer. The best campaigns come from deeply understanding customer problems and language. 10) Brand and demand are inseparable. Companies that invest early in brand compound faster later. 11) Ignore vanity metrics. Clicks, impressions, and MQLs are meaningless without revenue impact. Pipeline is the metric that matters. 12) Clarity wins categories. If it takes a deck to explain your product, you’re already losing. 13) Marketing is cross-functional. The best CMOs build tight partnerships with product and sales. 14) Distribution > brilliance. A good idea with reach beats a great idea no one sees. 15) Play the long game. Trust and brand compound slowly, then suddenly. 16) Message-market fit matters. If positioning doesn’t resonate, growth stalls—no matter how strong the product. 17) Constraints spark creativity. The best campaigns often come from limited budgets and resources. 18) Alignment is everything. Even great campaigns fail if sales and CS aren’t on the same page. 19) Educate the market. Teaching people a new way of working often outperforms feature marketing. 20) Find the emotion. Even “boring” industries have human stories worth telling. 21) Early hires define DNA. Your first marketer sets the tone for brand and culture. Hope these lessons are helpful for other marketers!

I started at Lattice as the third employee back in 2016 and ran marketing for five years. During this time, we grew revenue from $0 to $50m+ and built a marketing foundation that led to the creation of a business worth $3.5b. 75% of new business came from Inbound. Here’s the cliff notes on how we did it: 1. Re-invented an existing category 2. Built a founder brand around Jack 3. Invested into design and programs that made us feel like a bigger company 4. Celebrated our key buyer persona (HR Leaders) with content & events 5. Community-led growth with Resource for Humans (Slack community, event series, ambassador programs, etc.) 6. Drove tons of G2 reviews to become the category leader 7. Retargeting ads that made Lattice feel like we were everywhere 8. Partnered with other HR software companies to do co-branded webinars (lead sharing + brand elevation) 9. Invested in SEO to rank for important keywords and drive traffic (long slog but worth it) 10. Fancy dinners with prospects and customers 11. Setup booths at all the major HR conferences 12. Ran multiple billboard campaigns that made Lattice feel like a big trusted brand 13. Sent 20,000 coffee mugs to HR leaders as part of a big outbound campaign 14. Only emailed our list when we had something important to say (no drip campaigns) 15. Created momentum with marketing moments around product & company updates 16. Virtual conference with sponsors that drove leads (not money) and fancy celebrity speakers (Trevor Noah). Ended up having 40,000 HR leaders tune into this event 17. Spent hundred of thousands of dollars on LinkedIn ads to reach our target audience All of these programs started small and scaled over time. For example - our first webinar only had 20 people sign up, but five years later we were running a virtual event with 40,000 people. It’s amazing how much marketing programs compound if you invest in the right things and commit to channels. The scaling part is only possible because we were able to build an amazing marketing team. We also significantly invested in marketing’s relationship with sales. Marketing generated the pipeline, but Dini and team closed it. We thought of our GTM motion as an alley oop. There was no drama between sales and marketing. We were all on the same team working together to build pipeline and close deals. Marketing was constantly working to build sales collateral - competitor battlecards, new pitch decks, product explainers, etc. - that helped answer key moments in the sales cycle. It’s only with this close sales-marketing partnership were we able to build a GTM machine that eventually grew Lattice to a $100m+ revenue business.

Enablement teams are inheriting a job they never signed up for: building AI infrastructure. Nobody put this in the job description. But here we are. Because someone needs to: - Define what content AI should have access to - Decide which workflows should be automated - Figure out how AI fits into the sales process - Train the AI on company-specific messaging - Train reps on how to use AI in their roles This isn't traditional enablement work. But it's becoming the most important enablement work. The challenge? Most enablement teams weren't resourced for this. They were built to run training sessions and manage content libraries. Now they're being asked to architect AI-powered systems that touch every part of the revenue org. At Dock, we're watching enablement leaders navigate this in real time. The most successful ones are: - Partnering closely with RevOps and IT to understand what's possible - Starting with one high-impact use case (like AI-generated business cases) - Building feedback loops so AI outputs actually improve over time - Creating governance around what AI can and can't do This isn't about becoming a machine learning expert. It's about being the strategic owner of how AI shows up in your revenue team's workflow. The enablement teams that lean into this? They're becoming more central to the business than ever before. The ones who don't? They risk being left behind while other functions own AI enablement.

The Dock MCP has me rethinking what our product even is. For years, it was a UX people logged into. Now it's just as much a data source your other tools can pull from. Now that our MCP links your Dock account to Claude, ChatGPT, etc., you can wire Dock into just about any workflow you can dream up. A running list of the ideas that have me excited: 1. Champion-risk alerts. Watch a deal room for the moment your main champion goes quiet while a new contact starts poking around. Flag the committee shift back to HubSpot and ping the rep in Slack. 2. Monday pipeline review. Pull every open deal in late stage, check which deal rooms have gone cold despite the forecast, and send managers a "deals the room says are stalling" digest before the call. 3. Calls vs. the room. Cross-reference what reps committed to on Gong or Fathom calls against what's actually in the deal room. "You promised Acme a security review last week, but it's not in their room yet." 4. Pre-meeting brief. Before each meeting on your calendar, Claude pulls that account's room engagement and last call notes into a quick brief in your inbox. 5. Onboarding health check. Combine onboarding workspace engagement, product usage, and open support tickets to flag accounts going sideways well before renewal. 6. Find sales content gaps. Mine recent call transcripts for the objections that keep coming up, then cross-reference against what's actually getting used in your Dock content library. Generate a report on what's missing, needs updating, or needs more visibility with reps. 7. Library hygiene sweep. Surface the assets nobody's touched in 90 days, have Claude draft archive-or-refresh picks, and drop the list on Slack. Yes, Dock has a lot of native integrations and an API, but the world is really your oyster now for connecting Dock to any tool in your workflow via ChatGPT/Claude.

We’ve been building Dock through some pretty wild times in the software industry. I left my job in April 2021 to start Dock. While everyone else was riding the ZIRP rocketship, we were heads down getting our first version out the door. Then the music stopped. In 2022 and 2023, companies cut budgets and headcount. Sales teams (our core buyers) were hit especially hard. Not a great time to be selling new sales software. Revenue was flat. And it was hard to tell if the problem was Dock or just the market. So we focused on what we could control: sharpening the product, narrowing our ICP, and building a more sales-led GTM. Meanwhile, AI was heating up. Dock didn’t start as an AI company, but it was obvious the tech could help our customers. Instead of slapping “AI” on the site, we started experimenting with real use cases like helping teams write business cases. By 2024, things started to work. The market came back to life. Our GTM motion clicked. We closed more revenue in that year than in the company’s history up to that point. Now, in 2025, we’re leaning hard into AI. The playing field feels reset. Incumbents are still figuring it out, while our lean team has been living and breathing this for the past year. I’m also learning a ton personally, which is always my main signal that I’m working on the right thing. Looking back, Dock’s journey has gone from the ZIRP boom, through the GTM layoffs, and now into the AI wave. It’s been messy, challenging, and exciting. We’ve just kept iterating through each phase. And it’s nice to finally see the compounding effect of that work.

I love competition. 1) Competitors help grow your market Competitors are spending marketing/sales resources spreading the same message as your company. They are convincing more buyers that they should invest in your category of software. 2) Competitors help you win deals Competitive sales cycles are the best. Buyers who are comparing your solution vs. another solution are serious buyers. They will tell you what they care most about and you just need to be better than the competition to win the deal. 3) Competitors teach you what to build When you're in a competitive deal, it becomes super obvious where your have feature gaps compared to your competition. By understanding why you're losing deals, then you're able to shift your product roadmap to fix these product gaps.

Creating a new category is one of the most romanticized ideas in startups. It's also one of the most expensive. You're fighting two battles at once: You have to educate people on what the category is and why they need it. Then you have to convince CFOs and execs to create budget for something that didn't exist before. We tried this at Dock. Early on, we positioned ourselves as something totally new — a workspace for any B2B relationship. It sounded big and exciting. But the sales conversations were all over the place, and getting budget was a constant fight. Things clicked when we stopped trying to invent and started reinventing. The enablement category already existed. There was real budget behind it. We just had to say: "Hey, you already have that line item. We're better. Just replace us." That was the Lattice playbook too. We didn't invent performance management, but we combined it with employee engagement, which nobody had done before. Suddenly you could answer: "Are my top performers happy?" and Lattice took off. The trick is in the reinvention, you can combine things that are uniquely valuable together. At Dock, that's deal rooms, content management, and AI in one revenue enablement platform — a better version of an existing category. The lesson for founders: Sometimes you just need to build a better mousetrap. It's less sexy on a pitch deck, but way more likely to work.

Reminder: Dock is a revenue enablement platform Sales rooms Content management Sales training All in one place

Your customer doesn’t care where sales ends and onboarding begins. And they shouldn’t have to. Internally, most companies treat sales and onboarding as separate functions. Different teams. Different tools. Different priorities. But from the customer's perspective, the journey doesn't end at signature. It begins at signature. They just see one journey. Not two. That’s the mindset shift more revenue teams need to make. Dock was built around this idea: one client-facing workspace that carries a customer from sales follow-up to onboarding to renewal. One place. One link. One experience. Because in reality, your ability to retain revenue starts the moment someone buys, not the moment you celebrate a closed-won. If your customers feel like they’re being passed off to a new team, that’s a problem.

Every SaaS company is fighting the same tension between product and positioning right now. Product moves 10x faster than it used to because of AI coding tools. And the landscape around you shifts just as fast (new models, capabilities, competitors, etc.). So customers are buying more into your vision vs. what your product actually does today. It's a tough balance: sell the world you're building without *overselling* what the product can do right now. Oversell the vision and buyers will feel burned the moment they get in the product. Undersell it, and you look stuck while the market moves on without you. Your website, sales pitch, and product demos all have to sell both worlds. This used to be true only for early startups (sell the vision, not the product). But now it applies at every stage, no matter your revenue or maturity.

Dock is an official Claude connector 🎉

Man it’s hard and tedious to build a fully agentic editor like Loveable or Notion. QA is no joke. Feels like possibilities are endless. It's really hard to nail down every permutation of the product experience.

Here's something I've learned building Dock: Product velocity is a marketing strategy. We ship new features every week. And every time we ship, it creates marketing opportunities: • Send an email showing what's new • Post about it on LinkedIn • Update the website and sales decks • Give reps fresh talking points It's a content flywheel powered by shipping. Compare that to legacy competitors who ship monthly or quarterly. They have 4 marketing moments per year from product. We have 52. This matters more than founders realize. In B2B, buyers are skeptical. They've been burned by products that went stale after purchase. Constant shipping proves you're investing in the product. It shows momentum. It demonstrates commitment. And it gives you endless content. We never run out of things to post about because the product team is always shipping. The faster you ship, the easier marketing becomes. You always have something new to share. Something concrete to point to. Proof that you're building. Speed isn't just a product advantage. It's a marketing and sales advantage too.