I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say here, so don't take any of this personally, because maybe I'm misreading you.

Telling any startup engineering team that they should maximize their SOC2 Type I audit is borderline malpractice. Every engineering decision you make to support a Type I is something you'll need to live with in your Type II. That might just be an irritating own-goal if it's you doing the Type II, and you have to waste a couple hours on the phone explaining to your auditors why you've decided to remove ClamAV from all your servers. But it's could actually be destructive if it's someone other than you running the Type II, and gets cornered by your original Type I claims into supporting that bad decision.

Telling any startup engineering team that they should build a security practice informed by a SOC2 audit --- that they should take the COSO framework and figure out what they can learn from it --- might also approach malpractice. There are probably reasonable corpsec process controls you could build based on the AICPA Security TSCs. But the TSCs are not based on modern software engineering best practices and they aren't informed by modern software security. They are heavily influenced by the security concerns of medium-to-large sized enterprises with sprawling legacy IT footprints, and you can easily lose security by rolling out controls that aren't relevant to your environment but require you to add attack surface and operational overhead to mitigate vulnerabilities that you don't have because you don't share printers or run Windows Server 2008.

SOC2 is not security. Security is its own thing. Good compliance work is a byproduct of sound security engineering. It does not work the other way around.

Naturally, it's easy and gratifying to point out that a SOC2 report doesn't make a company secure. I don't think we could have come up with a clearer way to have said that, or, for that matter, to explain that we did our best to minimize the impact SOC2 had on our engineering practices.

As for background checks: once again, we can't background check a decent-sized fraction of our team, because they're in jurisdictions that (very reasonably) forbid employers from running intrusive background checks. We considered just background checking the unfortunate US team members we have that can be made subject to them. I had a fairly long conversation in a Slack channel full of secops people from about a dozen security companies, and none of them told me a single story about how background checks (which are, as it turns out, performative, superficial, and error-prone) was a win for them. I did get stories about how they were problematic: for instance, I did not make up the thing about high school transcripts.

So, long story short: because of our workforce, our platform needs to be resilient against bad hires. You don't get that from background checks; you get it from security engineering, tight access control, tightly designed roles informed by those access control decisions, regularly reviewed internal audits, detailed audit logs, and sound hiring practices. SOC2 covers most of this stuff only superficially. Security engineering is the real work, at least for technology startups.

Later

This is way angrier than I want this to come across. I promise, it's not personal, and if I'm caricaturing any point you made, I apologize in advance. I had a 6-hour tattoo session that ended with an hour of ditch work and I am in a fucking _mood_.

Also, since I'm predictably being pulled in the direction of repeatedly dunking on SOC2 in this thread, I want to say very clearly that I had a fantastic experience with our auditors, who were more clueful than any other auditor I've worked with. Our auditors are great. Don't flunk us!