Dillon Woods Found the Checkout Lane for Enterprise Software

The office had one peculiar advantage: it sat above Goldy's, the downtown Boise breakfast institution. It was not the sort of address that begs to be mythologized. Dillon Woods and Brian Denker had limited resources, a shared room and a problem they could not yet make hold still. They were building around cloud marketplaces, the digital shelves operated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The shelves existed. The checkout process for enterprise software was another matter.

Woods had watched the change coming for years. He and Denker had been involved with cloud computing since Amazon Web Services appeared in 2006. By 2014, they saw large companies beginning to buy software the way they already bought infrastructure: through the cloud, with committed budgets, centralized billing and a vendor relationship already in place. The obvious promise concealed a splendid quantity of administrative misery. Listings, contracts, metering, private offers, reporting and compliance all had to agree with one another. Enterprise software had acquired a digital storefront while keeping the manners of a filing cabinet.

That mismatch became Tackle.io. Formally launched in 2016, the company would eventually help vendors sell through AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud marketplaces. Yet its origin was less epiphany than attrition. Woods and Denker tried multiple ideas before they found the version customers needed. New Relic was not their first customer, but the founders call it their lighthouse customer: its problem lined up cleanly enough with their solution to show the way.

Before the marketplace, the databases

Woods is an Idaho native who graduated from Boise State University in 2005. His major was computer science. His minor was philosophy, chosen partly because the classes offered a gentler change of rhythm from the technical work. The detour proved useful. Philosophy of science returned later in his career as a way to examine how claims are formed, tested and trusted. A founder who spends his days making systems speak to one another could do worse than study why people believe a system in the first place.

After university, he spent roughly a decade around database and analytics companies in California, navigating several acquisitions and leading teams that built enterprise software and cloud solutions. At Alpine Data Labs, he wrote publicly about extending a visual analytics product with custom Java operators for Greenplum. The post is usefully dry. It patiently explains how to insert, update and merge data without pretending that plumbing is beneath notice. Years before Tackle, Woods was already drawn to the connective tissue.

“Solve a problem that you actually have, something that you know exists or that you have experienced yourself. That is a good place to start.”Dillon Woods, speaking to Boise State students

The advice sounds modest. It is also a defense against theatrical entrepreneurship. Woods did not begin with a desire to create a category called Cloud GTM. He began with a recurring obstruction he understood. A vendor wanted access to a buyer's cloud budget. A buyer wanted a simpler path to purchase. The cloud provider had rules and systems of its own. Tackle's job was to make those interests meet without requiring every software company to build a small internal bureaucracy.

A company designed from Idaho

Woods and Denker had been close friends since the early 2000s. They had worked around the world, shared a love of the outdoors and kept returning to Idaho to raise their families. Tackle was remote-first from the beginning, less a concession than an operating belief. The company could hire beyond Boise without treating Boise as an apology. Employees spread across the United States and Canada; annual gatherings and smaller team offsites were used to give the distributed organization some human gravity.

When the pandemic arrived, Woods said it was not even a speed bump operationally because the company was already working from home. The stranger effect was competitive: suddenly every company could recruit remotely, erasing one of Tackle's advantages for a while. His response was characteristically unsentimental. Conditions changed, then changed again. A practice is useful because it works, not because it makes a company look prophetic.

The Boise address mattered all the same. Tackle kept its headquarters downtown, near Boise State's computer-science program. Woods spoke about expanding the local office as a place for community and students, while maintaining equitable pay regardless of location. The arrangement avoided a false choice familiar to regional founders. A company could participate in a global market without cosplaying as a coastal startup.

The scale arrived in increments

John Jahnke joined Woods and Denker full time in 2018 and became CEO. Woods remained the product-minded technical founder, while the leadership group turned a narrow integration problem into a broader go-to-market platform. By 2020, Tackle said it worked with more than 200 software vendors. A Series A arrived that year. A $100 million Series C followed in late 2021, bringing disclosed funding above $148 million.

Capital did not abolish the need for restraint. In their early founder interview, Woods and Denker emphasized operating efficiently and staying close to customers. That principle was tested when the software market cooled. Tackle restructured in 2023, reducing its workforce while saying it still had more than five years of runway. The company shifted attention from growth at any cost toward the efficiency its product promised customers. It was an unpleasant symmetry, but an honest one.

Meanwhile, the transaction count kept climbing. Tackle reported more than $10 billion facilitated through cloud marketplaces by the end of 2024. When AppDirect announced plans to acquire the company in December 2025, it put the figure above $20 billion. Transaction volume is not revenue, and it is not a personality test. It does show that the once-obscure procurement route had become infrastructure large vendors relied upon.

A bigger map for the same idea

Woods has said Tackle measures time by AWS re:Invent and calls the annual conference its Super Bowl. At the company's ninth visit, the news was not another feature. It was the AppDirect deal. Tackle would bring cloud-marketplace listings, private offers, co-sell workflows and transaction data. AppDirect would bring subscription commerce and a network of more than 14,000 technology advisors. Woods said he would stay to help lead marketplace strategy.

The logic expanded again in 2026 when AppDirect acquired PartnerStack. Woods highlighted the prospect of connecting demand generation, partner lead routing, cloud co-sell systems and marketplace fulfillment. He also pointed to a newer concern: making software visible to the large language models that increasingly mediate discovery. The machinery had spread beyond checkout. It now began at the moment a buyer asked what to buy.

There is an obvious temptation to tell this as a triumph of foresight. Woods and his partners did see a market shift early. Yet the more instructive quality was endurance. Initial product-market fit was difficult. Competitors appeared. A pandemic made remote work ordinary. The funding climate reversed. The company reorganized. Tackle's thesis survived because the team kept translating it into the dull, exact work of listings, billing, data and workflow.

The grand idea was that software buying would move to the cloud. The daily work was making sure a private offer, a CRM record and an invoice all told the same story.

Woods tells students to develop and show a specific interest in computing. Genuine absorption, he argues, signals more than the wish to be hired. His own trail makes the point. Databases led to cloud architecture; cloud architecture led to marketplace friction; marketplace friction led to a company. Even the philosophy minor wandered back into view. Careers rarely move in straight lines, but attention compounds.

Above the bakery, before the funding rounds and transaction totals, Woods and Denker were simply trying to remove a nuisance they knew firsthand. It is difficult to make procurement romantic, which may be why it rewards people who do not require romance from their work. Woods stayed with the plumbing until it became a map of how software moves. The map now stretches from a seller's CRM to a hyperscaler's marketplace and outward into partner networks. Then the rest of the market started following the pipes.