Congratulations to Knock on Its Series A and Welcome Craft Ventures!
How often we all receive unhelpful, batch-style comms / notifications via digital channels…sometimes they hit us generically pre or post-purchase, or perhaps during or after collaboration with a colleague or partner. Sometimes the information we get via notification is just wrong. It may arrive via an unfamiliar channel, bringing question to its legitimacy and our digital security. We interact with digital every single day — but it interacts with us like we’re dumb sheep in a herd.
Marketing has long-led this function but they, and the developers that maintain and execute these delivery systems in response, have been left short-handed. Every organization invests so much to attempt to get this right and it’s been an absolute pleasure to see Knock deliver via API with developers in mind. Knock is the product-first customer engagement platform, providing API primitives and frontend components that customers can leverage to build useful communication experiences. Customers can stand up notification feeds quickly, log and use product events toward smart-routing user messaging cross-channel, and all with the enterprise-grade performance and observability developers require. Some of the best engineering teams in the world including but not limited to Webflow, Vercel, and Amplitude rely on Knock for this critical function.
We met Sam via Preface Unpartner Abram Dawson back in 2021. Abram knew Sam from college and always kept in touch. He mentioned on one of our calls that Sam is one of the most talented people he knew (enough said; feedback like that makes it certainly worth having a conversation and we’re so happy we did. Thank you Abram!). Sam’s founder story immediately resonated and was consistent with the rest of Preface founders. Sam and Chris were both early technical builders at Frame.io who went through the classic buy vs. build case and opted to create proprietary, event-driven customer communication infrastructure which was sorely needed. In addition to strong founder + market fit, their technical approach aligns with one of core investment tenets — enabling real-time computing toward usable, cross-stakeholder data and applications.
Post investment we caught up with the Knock team frequently. Fortune 500 customer introductions from our network to Sam / Chris always landed well. We were excited and honored to speak with several early engineering and product candidates to get them over the line toward joining this incredible team. It’s always easy to help a team that has exceptional product velocity (check their developer documentation), a high bar on people (both customer and HR — Sam once told me to send him my best, no matter where they’re at in their career journeys), and mature communication skills / investor relations reporting which have always been incredibly detailed, transparent, fun and gratitude filled.
We were fortunate to be one of their first commitments and have re-invested twice over. Sam and Chris — we’re so happy for this (preemptive) milestone. I’m excited to see you guys deliver on your exciting product roadmap, continue to win nearly every competitive bake-off, and holistically make digital communications more intelligent and value generative for the enterprise and user alike.
