Monthly investor updates eat half a day. A founder pulls KPIs from product analytics, cap-table changes from Carta, narrative from Notion, then writes, edits, and chases two co-founders for sign-off before Mailgun sends. The Dock pattern moves the assembly and the approval trail into a shared workspace where an agent does the first draft and humans approve named rows. Notion, Carta, and Mailgun stay authoritative. Dock records who decided what.
Notion, Carta, and Mailgun stay the system of record for the raw data. Dock is the system of record for what the AGENT INTERPRETS. Each Dock row carries a pointer back to the platform record, agent identity, decision, reviewer, and timestamp. The agent re-fetches platform data via fresh API reads when it needs current state. See the Cloud 2.0 for product pattern for the broader shape, and agent identity for why named agents matter on multi-author drafts.
The update-draft surface
One Dock table holds the current month's draft sections. The agent populates rows. The founder and exec team review and approve in place.
| Section | Source | Agent draft | Reviewer | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| KPI block (MRR, burn, runway) | Carta + Stripe API read | "MRR $312k (+8.4% MoM), burn $185k, runway 14 mo" | Founder | Approved 05-28 |
| Highlights | Notion launch log | "Shipped self-serve onboarding; closed Acme ($48k ACV)" | Founder | Edited, approved 05-29 |
| Lowlights and asks | Notion exec sync notes | "Sales hire slipped 3 wks; intros to 2 fintech CFOs" | CEO + COO | Pending COO |
The agent (agent-fundraising-bot) writes each row with a pointer to the source Notion page or Carta entry. The founder edits in line. The COO approves the lowlights row before Mailgun is allowed to send. The send action itself is a separate Dock row that requires two approvers, which is the dangerous-ops contract pattern applied to outbound investor mail.
The workflow, end to end
On the 27th of each month, the agent pulls the prior month's KPIs from Carta's API, product metrics from the warehouse, and narrative bullets from a Notion page tagged exec-sync. It writes one row per update section into the investor-update-2026-05 Dock surface. The founder gets a Slack ping with a link to the surface. She edits the highlights row, leaves the KPI row as-is, and reassigns the lowlights row to the COO. The COO opens the row, edits one phrase, marks approved. A separate send row goes to the CEO. She approves. The Mailgun send fires with a templated email body composed from the approved rows. Every approval, edit, and the final send is logged with the human identity that performed it. The agent collaboration primer describes the same review choreography for cross-functional drafts.
Why it matters
Founders skip updates when assembly is friction. Visible found that monthly cadence drops sharply past seed stage, mostly because the work compounds across tools (Visible, 2024). The Dock pattern collapses assembly into a single surface and converts approval from "reply-all email" to attributed rows. The agent is allowed to draft because it cannot send. The CEO is the only identity that can fire the Mailgun call. Bessemer's 2024 State of Cloud notes that "most AI agents don't yet operate reliably enough to function autonomously in complex use cases" (Bessemer, 2024), which is why the send step is gated to a human row, not the agent. If you're on the receiving side of these emails, see Dock for investors for the LP and portfolio-tracking variant.
Start with the Dock for founders pillar to see the full set of founder workflows.
FAQ
Q: Can the agent send the email itself if all approvers signed off? No. The send action is a separate row owned by a named human identity. The agent can stage the Mailgun payload but cannot fire it. This keeps the audit trail clean and matches the dangerous-ops pattern.
Q: What if a KPI changes between draft and send? The agent re-fetches Carta and warehouse data when the send row is opened. If a value drifts more than a configured threshold, the send row reverts to pending and pings the founder.
Q: How is this different from a Notion template plus a Mailgun integration? The template gives you a doc. Dock gives you per-row approvals, named-agent attribution, and a re-fetch loop. The Notion page remains the long-form narrative source; the Dock surface is the decision log.
Q: Does this work for quarterly updates to a board? Yes. Same surface shape, different cadence and reviewer set. Board updates typically add a finance-reviewed row before CEO send.
External references: Bessemer Venture Partners, State of the Cloud 2024, https://www.bvp.com/atlas/state-of-the-cloud-2024. Visible.vc, Investor Updates Best Practices, https://visible.vc/blog/investor-updates/.
