FOUNDER
Who is John DiLoreto?

John grew up in Wilton, Connecticut, went to boarding school at Lawrenceville in New Jersey, then studied finance at Villanova. On paper, his path looked like a classic Wall Street track. Underneath, he always knew he wanted to build companies.

After Villanova, he joined JP Morgan and stayed long enough to make associate. But while his day job was finance, his nights and early mornings were increasingly about tech.

He kept running into the same wall: he wanted to work in startups, but his resume screamed “finance,” not “sales” or “product.”

So he changed the inputs.

He enrolled in a computer science program at NYU designed for people without a CS undergrad. His schedule turned brutal:

• Coding at 5:30am

• Full days at JP Morgan

• Back to code at midnight

It was less about becoming a full-time engineer and more about making a very visible bet on himself: proving he cared enough about tech to re-skill while holding down a demanding job.

It worked. A startup finally took the bet.

From First Sales Hire to Two Very Different Hypergrowth Journeys

That startup was GoParrot, a restaurant-tech company. John joined as the first employee.

He had no formal sales experience.

He learned by doing—cold calls, rough cold emails, hacking together whatever process worked. Over time, he built out a scrappy, aggressive sales team and helped drive the company to a meaningful outcome: GoParrot was acquired by Square for around $50M.

From there, John chose a very different kind of challenge.

He was recruited to Flipdish, another restaurant-tech platform. This time he joined as a commercial leader in a president/GM-type role, responsible for P&L and global growth.

If GoParrot was low-capital, scrappy, and tight-knit, Flipdish was the opposite: a high-capital, hyperscaling machine.

• Grew from ~30 to ~300 employees

• Expanded into ~30 countries

• Raised $150M+

• Hit a billion‑plus valuation

The contrast between the two companies created his core operating lens:

• How to build focused, capital-efficient teams that sell and learn fast

• How to scale when you do have a big balance sheet and global ambitions

• The tradeoffs between “do one thing extremely well” and “build a platform and race the market”

He spent nearly a decade “learning on someone else’s dollar” before jumping into his own venture.

COMPANY
Knock2.ai

After leaving Flipdish and a short stint helping another YC founder get their product off the ground, John turned to a problem he’d been thinking about for years: most revenue teams have no idea who’s actually shopping.

Every day, thousands of high-intent prospects visit your site, dig through your docs, and read your blog posts—and then quietly leave without filling out a form. Your pipeline view doesn’t show them. Your CRM never touches them.

That’s the gap Knock2.ai is built to close.

In John’s words, Knock2.ai focuses on a “really particular job to be done”:

Knock2.ai gives software companies a real-time picture of which accounts are researching them, what they’re engaging with, and who the right contacts are—then routes that to sales so they can act before the buyer has already made up their mind.

Problem & Solution

The problem:

Today’s GTM teams don’t see most of their active demand. Buyers:

• Google around

• Ask ChatGPT

• Read docs, case studies, and pricing pages

• Compare 5–6 vendors

…and only then might submit their info to one or two companies.

Compare that to a physical store. If someone walks in holding a tennis racket, a good salesperson doesn’t wait behind the counter. They walk over and say:

Online, that conversation almost never happens—because sellers don’t know who’s “walked into the store.”

What Knock2.ai does:

• Identifies who is visiting your website

• Surfaces what they’re looking at (docs, blog, pricing, etc.)

• Ties that behavior to real people and accounts

• Puts those signals directly in front of your reps

Instead of waiting for form fills, your team gets proactive, context-rich triggers to reach out at the right moment with the right angle.

ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Knock2.ai already works with close to 200 software companies, including some of the best-known AI-native hyperscalers and modern GTM teams in the world—names like Baseten and Chalk.

They’re very intentional about their ICP. The companies that get the most from Knock2.ai tend to:

• Sell complex software with long consideration cycles

• Have buyers who do heavy research before talking to sales (infra, dev tools, data, CFO tools, etc.)

• Run established outbound/inbound motions with SDRs, AEs, and Growth teams

• Know their ICP and have the ability to act quickly on high-intent signals

These companies already invest heavily in demand generation. What they don’t have is an accurate, timely view of who is actually in-market before a form fill.

Knock2.ai fills that gap.

GTM: Account-Based, Outbound-Heavy, AI-Enabled

Despite being a small team—just five full-time employees—Knock2.ai runs a highly targeted, outbound-led motion.

A few key pillars:

• Named account focus: They run an account-based strategy on a defined set of companies where Knoxk2.ai’s value is highest.

• Dedicated coverage: SDRs and reps are assigned to specific accounts, not broad, random territories.

• Deep prep before outreach: They do heavy research and account mapping before ever reaching out to a VP of Sales or Head of Demand Gen. The goal is to show up already understanding the current stack, GTM model, and likely pain points.

• Short cycles and fast onboarding: Once a buyer “gets it,” the sales cycle is tight and implementation is fast—customers can be live in about a day.

Under the hood, a lot of what a traditional team would hand to junior roles is handled by agents and internal automation:

• Account mapping

• Research

• List building

This lets a very small team behave like a much larger one—without drowning in admin.

The Future of Knock2.ai

Knock2.ai is already working with many of the most forward-thinking software companies in AI and SaaS. The next chapter is about depth and scale:

• Deepening penetration among AI-native, modern GTM orgs

• Continuing to refine which signals most reliably predict closed-won

• Expanding the internal “agentic” infrastructure so each human on the team can operate at a much higher leverage point

The thesis is simple and aggressive:

Every serious B2B software company will need a way to see who’s in-market before forms and demo requests. Knock2.ai wants to be the default layer that powers that visibility.

Why John Stands Out

Spending time with John, a few throughlines emerge:

• He consistently chooses environments that stretch him (JP Morgan, NYU CS on top of banking hours, first employee at GoParrot, hypergrowth at Flipdish, now his own company).

• He’s willing to trade prestige and comfort for steep learning curves and upside. Taking a 50% pay cut to be an SDR‑type first hire, then moving into GM roles rather than staying on a traditional finance path, are not moves you make if you optimize for short-term comp.

• He operates with a builder’s bias, not a slide-maker’s—willing to cold call, write the first terrible email, and iterate in the field.

• He thinks in structured, go-to-market mental models: capital efficiency vs hyperscale, focus vs platform, admin vs human-only work.

He’s not trying to automate salespeople out of existence or replace websites with bots.

He’s building the intelligence layer that shows you who actually cares about what you sell—early enough that your best reps can do their best work.

If you’re running an AI-native or modern software GTM team and you know your buyers are doing most of their homework before talking to sales, Knock2.ai is one of the sharpest tools you can add to your stack.

And if you’re early in your own GTM or founder journey, John is exactly the kind of operator-turned-founder whose path is worth studying—and whose playbook is worth borrowing from.

TL;DR

From JP Morgan to first-employee exits, and now founding Knock2.ai, John DiLoreto helps modern software companies identify and engage their highest-intent buyers before they ever fill out a form.

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