On July 15, 2026, Insight Assurance and Treeline hosted a candid session on what SOC 2 means for founders and growth-stage companies navigating compliance for the first time or working through an existing audit cycle. The conversation focused on what the process looks like in practice, where teams tend to get stuck, and what the right conversations to have early look like from both sides of the audit.

Florencia, Director of Audit Services at Insight Assurance, was joined by Casey from Treeline, who leads technology operations and has spent over a decade helping founders scale their businesses and build compliance programs that hold up under scrutiny.

What we covered

The session was designed for founders, CEOs, CFOs, and compliance leads at growth-stage companies thinking ahead about compliance milestones, or already running into security and compliance questions from customers and enterprise buyers. Topics included:

  • Why compliance is a product-market fit conversation and what founders miss when they treat it as a back-office problem
  • The difference between SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 and why starting with Type 1 is often the right move for fast-moving teams
  • Why evidence gathering is the part of the audit most founders underestimate and what that looks like in practice
  • How templated policies that do not reflect the actual environment create findings that could have been avoided
  • The most common gaps that show up in SOC 2 audits, including user access reviews, change management, and vendor management
  • What it means to be ready by design versus treating the audit as a fire drill
  • How having the right conversations early, with your team, your auditor, and your enterprise buyers, changes the outcome

The gap most founders do not see coming

The audit itself is rarely the hardest part. When organizations are well prepared, the process is structured and predictable. The friction shows up earlier, in evidence that was not built with an audit in mind, policies that came from a template and do not match the actual environment, and controls that existed in one team but were never formalized across the organization.

The companies that move through SOC 2 most efficiently are not necessarily the most sophisticated. They are the ones who had the right conversations before the pressure arrived.

About Insight Assurance

Insight Assurance performs independent SOC 2 assessments. If you have questions about what the process looks like for your organization or want to understand what an engagement would involve, get in touch.