Don't SOC-block your best engineer

Loop and Vanta launch bold debut video campaign: Don’t SOC-block Your Best Engineer

The survival of a startup depends on closing customers. But today’s buyers won’t sign without proof they can trust you—meaning compliance is non-negotiable. At the same time, startups need to ship features fast to stand out. Nothing derails momentum like pulling engineers away from building to handle compliance. So what’s a time- and resource-strapped founder to do?
With Vanta’s first-ever video campaign, created in partnership with Loop, we debut “Don’t SOC-block Your Best Engineer,” a cinematic and witty take on the universal startup struggle between building product and meeting compliance demands that have the potential to block critical deals.

Don’t SOC-block Your Best Engineer
The 45-second spot opens on a startup engineer deep in flow, coding a new agent (naturally) with game-changing potential—turning the dreaded “meeting that could have been an email” into an actual email. She’s sealed in a glass cube, locked in focus, when her CEO approaches, ready to “SOC-block” her momentum with compliance tasks.

Just as the disruption looms, a fellow early employee steps in—the voice of reason. Their advice? Don’t break the engineer’s flow. Don’t slow down the build. Instead, choose Vanta: the AI-powered security and compliance platform trusted by thousands of startups. Acting like your first full-time security hire, Vanta helps startups get audit-ready in days, unblock deals, and prove to buyers they take security seriously.

Launching on 9/15 across OOH as well as paid and organic social, the campaign shines a spotlight on the cost of distraction—while positioning Vanta as the indispensable partner that keeps engineers building and startups shipping.

“With Don’t SOC-block Your Best Engineer, we wanted to capture a truth we hear from founders and engineering leaders again and again: nothing kills momentum faster than pulling your cracked engineer off product to wrangle compliance. This campaign is a milestone for us—not just because it’s our first video spot, but because it plants a flag for founders and early teams that Vanta was built for them, and always will be,” says Sarah Scharf, VP of Marketing at Vanta.

“We loved the quick connection people could make with the visual of “in case of emergency, break glass’, but instead of an axe in there, it’s a cracked engineer!” said Nick Gallo, Founder of Loop. “The perfect metaphor for that flow state every engineer knows — and the risk of breaking it. Our goal was to dramatize this in a way that feels fun, relatable, and unmistakably true to start-up life.”