Jessica Lin co-founded Work-Bench after leading global sales training at Cisco, where she built programs for thousands of enterprise salespeople, giving her a unique operator background that shapes how she helps founders with sales playbooks and enterprise pilots rather than just providing capital. She positions herself as a bridge between Fortune 1000 executives and early-stage startups, spending significant time curating direct interactions so founders can validate problems and navigate procurement much earlier than typical for seed investors.

• Deep focus on NYC-based enterprise software, infrastructure, and developer tools at the pre-seed and seed stages. She actively champions the local ecosystem, frequently organizing community drinks and meetups for founders and operators to share practical advice on building SaaS companies in New York.
• Tactical advice on go-to-market strategies, emphasizing that sales messaging must always tie back to return on investment rather than just listing features. She encourages founders to perform granular reviews of lost deals to understand decision drivers and to use initial calls for discovery rather than immediate demos.
• A realistic approach to the pre-product market fit journey, acknowledging it as a confusing period of experimentation that requires investor patience. She shares specific indicators of true traction, such as securing ten paying customers who have no personal relation to the founder or seeing users get frustrated with bugs because they genuinely rely on the software.
• emphasis on operational efficiency and organizational structure for early-stage startups. She highlights lessons from portfolio companies and meetups, such as the recommendation to avoid hiring product managers too early or the insight that while code is easily reversible, pricing models are much harder to change later.
• Appreciation for post-sales rigor and customer success, noting that support is often an afterthought but is critical for retention. She advises that founders should clearly define what success looks like on their platform to guide customers through the implementation shifts required to adopt new technology.