YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Altman

lines on the record: 52
first: 2023-09-26
most recent: 2023-09-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I feel best when I'm working on something that's hard and not just the kind of hard that is not like daily challenge hard, not weightlifting hard, but intellectually hard, something where there are puzzles that need to be answered, where there are real questions that require stretching your brain a little bit or a lot of it to get there. And I realized I didn't have those things, but I also realized that that was what I cared about. And I think having sort of professional values for yourself at that fidelity that is pretty generalized but somehow specific, I think that for me, that was really important.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of them was that I wanted to work with people who were energized, optimistic, inspiring, smart, pushing for greatness, and that when I was around those people, I was happy. And when I wasn't, I wasn't. And I realized that I had that in my earliest days at Teespring and then I had lost them. And there were various other things. But I'm like very people oriented in general and I can't be happy if I'm not working with people who sort of share a bunch of those values. Another that I realized was that I don't want to be ego driven, but I also recognize that I'm human and I want to do something that matters. I want to feel like I have impact. I want to feel a certain sense of importance. And I don't think it's an ugly value, but it's maybe not the purest. But it's like something that matters to me. And I recognize that. And I'm like, I'm just going to admit that to myself, that like, I want to be working on building something, doing things that matter and that I care about. And then the last was that I realized that”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can with everybody that I've worked with, and it helped me create my own values. So I think that exercise, even if it didn't cost him a lot to do, that turned out to be hugely impactful.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking it out with people and thinking about it, I got to answers, I bring them back to him next week, and he helps me and he pushes on them. He doesn't just say great. He says, well, is that really this? Like, give me an example of that. Well, do you actually mean this other thing? Why don't you take one more rev at this? Because this is going to be really important. So I go do another rev and I come back with these things that really matter to me. And this time I feel very solid in them. And it was obvious to me at that point that I wasn't going to be able to do those things in the context I was in and that I would need to go start my own journey and make those things extremely central. And that exercise, like along the journey of getting there, I was just so much more clarity about what I needed than I had had. And if you've ever been in those career moments, 17 things are swirling and you have no clarity. That's so stressful. You know, you can't sleep at night every things don't feel right. And all of a sudden I had this set of guideposts. And that was something for me as a manager that now I try to do that as often as I can.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These different ways. I think there's a depth of insight that is possible with HR where you can elevate the employee sort of dynamic for a company from one where you're just employing people to one where you're incredibly strategic about all these details because all that information exists. It's all knowable. In some sense it's harder to get and to massage than sales data or finance data, but it's all there. And I think it starts with this very human lens, but it requires building a huge amount of product in the long term because you need to connect all of these things. And so my hope for lattice is that we end up with a suite that treats employees with that level of respect for how valuable they are and is warm, not cold and is sort of human, not process oriented. And so to me, I think that is what we need to build towards, but it still is full suite build because you want to own as much of that employee journey in life as possible.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think for lettuce to reach its full potential, what it'll look like is still grounded in the original insight, which is that what companies need is a modern set of tools that help them do HR processes that put employees first and sort of honor the fact that employees are the most important asset that the company has and treating talent the same way that Salesforce treats the quality and clarity of insight that you get from the whole pipeline or what you get in finance with the finance suites where you can track things with incredibly meticulous detail. I think in the HR realm that has not been possible in the past where you don't have good connection points between the whole journey from their first interview to the way they got onboarded to did that interview make sense. How are they performing now? Which managers are being effective? What happens when I change compensation?”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That coming to fruition. So I think that is one method, I think, where the framework can at least help you see where something is structurally broken. And it's a multi-year journey to fix it. And I got to start now.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need to do on all of these different functions from there, you can start to say gosh, what we have today is structurally not set up yet for that to be a believable story. So we're going to need to do different things. We might need to open offices in a different location because this cost structure is never going to make any sense because I know we're going to need 400 engineers by this date and there's no way the growth is going to get there or we need our cost of acquisition to look like this. And you say, well, we know that selling a net new customer costs this much today versus a current customer cost this much today. Maybe I can believe a story that we improve either by 20% or 40%, but I can't believe improving it by 200%. So I got to sell more to current customers. Oh, geez, I got to sell more new products to current customers because it's cheaper. And you can like walk through those exercises from that. And that can start to paint to picture for, I'm not going to have just a fantasy about 20% cash flow margin. I need to have actual tangible ways that I can see.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At 22% of revenue is being spent on RD. Maybe we're going to spend 30%. Okay, so there goes 30%. GNA, like what do public companies spending? We don't have a real reason to believe then the long term will look different. So there goes another 16% or whatever. We've got some amount of customer success we need for us, our long-term gross margins are basically all to do with people costs. We think it's going to be whatever percent, 82, whatever it's going to be. There goes another 18% that's just gone there. We know that we market and sell in these kind of ways, but we only have 26% left or whatever the number is. And it all has to happen in that. And then when you start to think in those terms and then you look at where you are today and you start to think about things like, geez, what does our net dollar retention need to be for this all to have a chance of working? What's our CAC payback period going to need to look like for this to make any sense? What ACVs do we need to have implied?”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why I think it is actually valuable to think I have to actually plan five years out, but visualize what needs to be true five years out and then at least try to understand like what are the beginning steps I can take to getting there. One new lens that is on my mind now that was not a way I've been thinking to date and it's still not quite how we're like managing the company, but I think is going to be important between here and a day when the public market investor would be asking those questions is imagine a world where you have 20% cash flow margin on a business and like something that public investors would be really excited about. For me, it's really easy to just like think in simple terms. And when I'm thinking about like a new product, just price times quantity and simple is good. So if you're like, okay, we get to spend 80% of our revenue on the business because we need 20% left for cash. We know that we are like a multi-product company. We know what public sort of comparables look like on engineering and product spend. So let's say that most of the market.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The product, there's the team, there's the sort of management of the company. But Miles, I'd be curious to hear you speak a little bit to the genetics piece because company product and just like market genetics is something that I think Miles has pushed on for a long time. On some level, you're going to set up an initial condition set. And that's going to define a lot around it. You're going to work within that. And I think even for us now with this HRIS push, what I'm thinking about, what I know Miles has been thinking about is what is the setup you're going to need to believe a story where at a billion you can add 200 a year. And to me, I think so much of that is putting in place today the product market customer segment genetics that are going to make that possible. But I'd be curious for you what you think about from here to a billion.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both this multi decade journey as well as this moment in time journey in the sort of smaller 10-year run that we had or 12 year run or whatever it was, things just got to a wild place. And I think now to your point, that long-term secular trend still exists, but we did come off a crescendo on it.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The superstar effect where one person's impact is so unbelievably magnified that happens in small ways and big ways where people are not just in today's economy, it's not that everyone is just I'm doing a thing on a unit time and that unit of time can go up. It's actually the impact scales way outside of time. And so you get to these just crazy dynamics where the competition is just ruthless for talent. And I think you take that backdrop and then you add ZERP on top of it and employers were just doing anything to hold on to people. You would go in an interview process for a candidate. You'd meet them on Monday and for the first meeting. And on Tuesday, they're calling you and they're like, hey, I know you've got an interview process, but I have 11 offers and I'm going to sign one by three. And here's what I'm getting paid. And I know it's 30% over your highest end of your bands. Are you going to present me with an offer? And you're just like, wow, we got to a place like that. That was at the crescendo of.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Versus taking working at, say, just like a great software company like Asana, you think about what are the skills that are being used there and how transferable are those, it's obvious that you can move around much more easily to many more substitute companies in today's world than it was in the past. There are of course also with just the rise of tech in general and then you get rising salaries, you get sort of just like market dominance as tech in the last, let's say, 15 years went from you get to a place where the winning companies are so unbelievably winning and so unbelievably well capitalized that the wars over talent are just fierce. And then you pull it open and it actually makes sense. Imagine what it's worth to Google to put an incredible engineer on AdWords and make it 0.1% better. It's worth paying them almost anything. And so you get to these places because of the internet where you have these”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's this pretty long deep, real secular trend that happened over Zoom out a little bit to, let's say, 30, 40 years or something like that. And a bunch of things happened between 1980 and 2020 that structurally gave employees a lot more advantage in the employment relationship. The internet obviously was a big one. It allowed for remote work, but it also allowed for a lot more job transparency LinkedIn. So it was much easier to move between jobs. There are a lot of ways in which the skills that people have in modern companies, certainly in tech, but I think in a lot of places are incredibly transferable. So you think about working at general motors and spending a 30 or 40 year career at General Motors and the work you are doing in the specificity of what you've learned in the context of that corporation in your town where that was like the dominant company.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just by disposition, you wouldn't be the type where this kind of confusion, I think, would happen for founders, which I think is a positive thing. The difference is imagine like a situation in like a personal dynamic where you were just meeting somebody for the first time, pretend this is like the founder of EC thing. And instead of ending with a term sheet, it was going to end with being invited to their birthday party. Private market transactions has some of this inherent where the capital is choosing the asset and the assets also choosing the capital. It all follows naturally from it. So I don't begrudge anybody”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Journey and gets you to a place of this fundraise is going to be easy. They're pumped. I'm going to crush this. And then you learn that that's all a no until there's a term sheet. And I think that's one of the updates that I think a lot of founders go through this, though, where you end up getting hardened through that one time when you have a tough fundraise and you then don't have to learn that again”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned there that they have a job to do and they have a set of responsibilities that are nothing to do with helping a founder who they're not yet invested in. And that's okay. That's normal. That's how capitalism works. That's like why the market is good before I buy some toothpaste. I've got no sort of obligation to Colgate, whatever. Like that's just like how the world works. But the job of doing VC well requires making founders think that you think things you don't sometimes. And that's the cynical layer that I've added on top is that their whole job is to be out meeting all companies and having all companies think that they might want to invest in them. Like that is what's required in order to get the option to invest at some point. Because I think I probably had heard that before, but when you really watch it play out with somebody who is incredibly charismatic and smart and takes you all the way through.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were right that it was not series B fundable at the moment. Empirically, it turned out to be true. But I'm also really grateful that that happened because we learned so much, both about ourselves, how the market was going to think about us. I learned a lot about fundraising. But that moment when we couldn't raise, that led us to this internal period that summer that we internally branded wartime. We ended up becoming so strong as a result of that where we said, you know what, this company might not be something that VCs want to fund, but we have so much confidence that we can build something big. So we need to set ourselves up that in case we can't fundraise ever, we can go from a company that was on the VC train to a company that's just going to self-fund. And that's just what it's going to be. And we did end up six months later, still a really tough phrase. We got one firm interested basically for our series B. We did get it done, though. But that sort of DNA that we rebuilt.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Summer of 2018. So, this was 3 million of ARR, and we're part way through the build of engagement surveys, and growth is linear. 40 employees, let's say.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think we would. That's not that we don't meaningfully disagree on substantive issues, but I can't imagine a situation where we would not be working hard to convince the other one and both trying to be very open-minded to the other one's perspective, which, by the way, is also, I think, a really important thing in like a co-founder relationship. You can't do this with an entire board, but certainly for Miles, he led our seat and then he joined our board when he let our A. So it's like a long, deep relationship where he's extremely close to me in the company. A lot goes into that. But I think that type of relationship where just like you shouldn't go to bed angry, leaving something open with a co-founder, I think if the CEO and the board member who is closest to the company are really on different pages and they can't work through that, then I would, you know, there's going to be a relationship thing that is worth investing in.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like we're constantly disagreeing on small things and resolving them. I don't know if we've had a big lingering one. We have this style of relationship. I've seen Miles do this with other founders too, where we don't leave it open. We're not the type where our relationship is not the type where we would disagree on something important. It almost sounds too personal to say it this way, but I don't think we would go to bed with that kind of disagreement open. Like we would probably be arguing at 11 at night more likely.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This also reminds me of what I think is one of the nuanced sort of challenges of being a board member or an investor to this type of company. Miles will, in the same conversation, flip between pushing on what's the current quarter and like where are we with the current products and where's the business, but also what's next and are you investing enough in this new product? And those are at odds. I think that is one of the nuances. Those two things are at odds, but both have to happen. Like you can't pick”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the bigger you get, the more people you're bringing along, the more people you have who have less experience with what an early stage startup looks like. And so basically it's harder and harder and harder the longer you go before the rubber band sort of snaps and catches up with whatever post you were holding. Those last moments are just tough.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2018, before we launched it. And that year, our growth was linear. You'll never know if we had spent, instead of putting five of our seven engineers on this thing no one was working on, if we had all seven working on the core product, would we have grown faster? Like you'd think so. You'll never quite know. It gets much harder as time goes on. The bigger the company gets, the more dissociation you have from the people who are thinking in mature ways and the scrappiness and immaturity that is inherent to a new product. Now today for lattice, it's 600 people. We just got through this big launch of this HRIS product. We spent over a year and half of our engineering project and design team resources on this thing. That's like a painful thing to go through where you've got this mature company in a hard market and you're spending all of that energy on this thing that doesn't exist yet and you're sort of holding this tension of this future story out for the company where they're all like let's hope.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way Miles described why it's hard for a business, that is so true. It is the hardest part. It's the last moments before you launch the new thing where you have spent so long laying this groundwork, pulling the company along, you're deflecting resources from an existing business that is working, that is crying out for more resources as you're doing these things, your mainline product is just hungry for more and you've got real customers and real growth. And can you please build these features? No, we're all in the tank over here building something we can't tell you about. That's awful. And then your customer success team is like, hello, we have this long, obvious feature list and real people saying they'll pay us real dollars tomorrow. Can we build it? Or the sales team is like, this is so obvious on the main product. And you're pulling people through a long period there. And, you know, we'll never know because we'll never get to run the experiment twice. But we spent nine months building engagement products.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is much cheaper. And so you can spend a lot fewer go to market dollars on the process of selling into that base. And then you can spend more money building a better product. And so even though it's cheap, you can then build more product. So to me, there is a flywheel where if it's possible to do, it's a huge structural advantage for companies because you can Relatively less on go to market.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are more companies should be suites than there are. There obviously exist a bunch, but my view is basically that a lot of the dynamics of software building in general lead to a conclusion or it sort of must be the case, I think, in the long term that the biggest, most winning companies will offer many things to their customers. And it used to be really hard to build software. And it's now fast and easy. It's however expensive to take things to market because there's so much venture capital. There's so many companies doing this. It's super mainstream now to build products. And so the cost of building quality new software has gone massively down. The cost of winning markets has gone, I think, massively up. And so what do you do in that situation? You build more software and you find ways to have cheaper go-to-market. And so if you've already got, for example, 1,000 or 10,000 customers or whatever, selling into that existing customer base.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should be providing value to them along the way. And so this is why, like with the community thing, I really liked the idea of we're going to bring people into the community and we're not going to sell them once they're there. We're just going to keep producing good content for them. We're going to keep telling the story, but we're not going to sell them hard. But we did go really hard on top of funnel. We did go really hard on getting a wider set of early conversations. So rather than pushing any individual human, we had the goal of how can we make sure that every HR person who could buy a lattice knows what we are. And that's it. And so a lot of our go-to-market dollars became thinking of before somebody buys, they need to see this thing seven times in seven different ways. They should see our billboard. They should see a podcast. They should read a blog post of ours. They should hear from a friend. They should be at a dinner. And then they're going to request a demo and then hopefully we'll have a great product for them. So our orientation in the beginning, which is a little bit slower than just sell, sell, sell, was more like market, market, market, and just get as many people in hearing as possible.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The nuance for me that I think about here is I do think once you're in market because products are so competitive and categories are just full like Miles was mentioning, we weren't the first year. This was a crowded market when we entered these spaces. So I do think once you're in the game, you want to be pushing. However, the way I always thought about it wasn't take an individual customer and push that one human on the individual human relationship. There's a lot to be said for letting that unfold naturally and people will buy when they're ready.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facilitation plus the community structure like that, and then letting it go, and you're not trying to overly control it, you're letting it be its own thing. I think that was a big one. And for us, Slack was the way to do that, but there are like other things you can do.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've talked about three pillars of it, which we've called content community and events. Community in this case, it's all under the really community, the community piece of that shows up in forums where people can basically meet and talk to each other. So a big one for us was this Slack group, which today we got like 20,000 people in it, but we did this early and we just did the lightest of facilitation. We made a group. You could do this in Slack, but you could also probably do this in like a bunch of other platforms creating a space that has some structure to it within the Slack community. we might have breakout channels that are around compensation or hiring or performance reviews or promotions or executive recruiting whatever and you make these spaces and then you also do light facilitation where you have somebody creating prompts somebody getting conversations going somebody may be noticing that these eight leaders have similar interests or have a similar problem they're going through and maybe creating a group for them like”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't just sell you a product, we're selling you on being the kind of person who wants to buy this kind of product. And this idea that we stand for, even though like Miles said, a little dismissively that it's just a cred app, but it's totally true in a lot of these cases, we're also selling you a style of working and a system on which you do your work. I think if you can get to that point, I think that really matters.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's smart, at least speaking in Silicon Valley so much of the infrastructure of Silicon Valley is geared around founders and investors. And that's really important. Being a founder's lonely thing, it's great that that exists and that's a big part, I think, of why the industry has done well is that there's this communal support system. But so many people inside the companies building the companies, it's much harder for those groups. It's harder for some than others. There's a lot for engineers. But if you're in HR, there's just a lot less. And so providing that it's good for them and it's a good opportunity for the companies doing it.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wrote a book that was all about sort of this new way of doing people management, and it was taking all these ideas together. That was a few years later. But even in the early days, like Miles was mentioning, we made this big Slack community where we got thousands and thousands of HR people in this place because there just weren't enough homes for it. And so between that and throwing events and these big conferences and dinners, a lot of it was just giving a venue and attention and a space for people who weren't getting as much as they deserved.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that was really important for us to not be the ones taking the spotlight, but creating this space for this underheard, under listened to customer. That's also where the real relationships and friendships come in was I got to a point where I even felt frustrated for them that I was like, they have these important ideas. And their exec teams and CEOs aren't listening to them. That was a fuel for it.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practitioners who were already really sharing the gospel if there's a new way to do employee management, and here's what it looks like. And at the time, we had no HR experience. We were young and experienced. And so what we would do is we would just spotlight them. And so the way that we got started with the content and the community was basically taking these CHROs and even COO, like other people outside of HR would care a lot about this too. But we would take these HR leaders and we would do these really high quality video interviews with them or blogs or find ways to basically take their voice and amplify it and really high quality ways that nobody was doing. And that led us make champions out of these people who are already preaching this thing. So our view was rather than us trying to be sort of the cult leaders of a community, we just want to put out an umbrella under which this community was gathering. And that was always the way we thought about it.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even that 10% that we would spend on Facebook ads or whatever was join our community. So we weren't even trying to say, I mean, we would experiment with like, hey, here's Lattice, book a demo. But in our minds, that just like didn't make sense as a user journey. Maybe today we could maybe do that. But at the time, you don't know what Lattice is. You're maybe not even bought in on this kind of performance management yet. So to take somebody from, I'm just learning about lattice on this social network or in this Google ad for the first time. I've never seen this company before to I'm going to book a 30 minute demo to see the product that just like didn't compute for us. And so instead what we would do is we would have these touch points where we were evangelizing this new way of employment management. And the way we evangelized it, because we had come to it in 2016 instead of 2014, when nobody was thinking this way. But in 2016, there were these pressures.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not really, but to your point, what this is sort of making me recall is we did say if a lot of these products are twice a year products, which are one that after engagement were as well, things like compensation cycles, things like that. Do end up building a journey throughout the year where I might still have eight company level moments and they connect to each other. And so the performance review flows into a calibration cycle, flows into promotions, flows into compensation. You run an engagement to see how people are feeling. And so you do end up building like a tapestry end employees journey. To Miles' point about genes, we were thinking, what does this sort of stack need most next? And what does our customer using this current stack want from us most next? And then given that constraint, we would then think about the usage.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, I'm a big believer in the dog and the tail matter equally in some ways. And you actually want to hold that tension where you've got some sort of top-down longer-term vision that you're driving towards. And then there's the reality of what's in market right now and what the people on your front lines and the company are saying, but customers are demanding this from us. And so that creates a strong voice of the customer based on what you have in the market today. And then you have this strategic direction. And that combo intention, I think, is actually really healthy.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extremely predictive. And it's not just more usage is better, but it is certain kinds of usage are better. So, in fact, some of our F health score customers are using it constantly and they're just using it. If you open it up, it turns out that they're using it in weird ways or using it wrong. But so this sort of process of creating a customer health score based on usage and refining it quarter after quarter has been super important to us to understanding retention.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had so many internal debates about this because, like you said, these products are designed to be used quarterly at maximum. We did build some products on top, some smaller products that had daily or weekly use, things like feedback and one-on-ones and whatever else. But like you said, this is not something that for the most part people are using all the time. And so we had different theses in the company of some people saying the more people use it, the better it's going to be and others saying really it doesn't matter as long as the customer sort of expresses that they're content that should be all that matters. What we ended up doing over time was building these customer health scores which were started as just a hypothesis where we would say here's the usage. We think it's going to lead to healthy ABC health scores. And then we would refine it quarter by quarter as we saw the retention come back. We've now gotten to a point where our predictability on like an A health score by usage and a D or an F”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behind it, but really it was just the surveys, and they described it as though they were like driving a car and they had just wiped all the mud off the windshield. And they're like, I can finally see I've got these action plans. I can communicate to the rest of my exec team why this is important. I can follow up with employees. I can see where there's smoke and go look for the fire. And they were just raving about just the ability to do that. You open up what's in that product and you're like, well, it's not that complicated of a product. Maybe more importantly, it's the exact same buyer as Lattice's current performance management product. And they're even coming to it from the same spirit, which is this employee-centric mindset. And so we were like, well, this is going to be an easy go-to-market if we can do it. It's not that hard of a product to build. People are raving. Let's go.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friends at them and loved them, got to a place where I definitely, and I still do consider some real friends, only that I met in the context of lattice. There's lots of ways to do it, but there has to be some source of passion. And for me, especially in those early days, getting to a place where you really love the customer as much as you care about your employees even, getting to that place was really important. But at those dinners or even just in talking to them at any time, it was so obvious we would have these prompt questions go around, what are the tools you're using? What's most important to you? What practices have been most important for you? And obviously people would always be generous and say, oh, lattice is great. You know, like they're there. But it almost in some ways felt even more passionate to the customer was these engagement surveys. And customers were talking about the fact that they had finally gotten by and after all this time to buy these engagement survey products and that they could now listen to their employees in these detailed ways and they would run twice a year engagement surveys with 50 questions and there was some science.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That point in time, one of the things that we did, I did, that was unbelievably helpful was I would do probably two or three dinners with customers per week. Like I was just talking to customers constantly. Which you'd never know as someone who was never an HR leader. But I always think it's interesting and the question of how many customer cell phone numbers does the CEO have probably. And I was always really surprised by the number of HR leaders Jack would be on text with.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we had seven engineers and we had a couple million of AR. And we put five of the seven on this second product. And it took us nine months.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every company in the world can use this, which means you then take what does that implied? It implies going enterprise and doing these things that Mouse was just talking about where you're going to sell this to Honda and you visualize that experience, or you're going to need to build way more stuff for a smaller customer segment. And so it was almost an obvious thing early that one or the other had to be true. And then the prod that you just said, we just did it earlier than what's typical.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing Miles has said different versions of over time, but even from early days, when we were like tiny and this sounded impossible, is he'd be like, if you want the company to really matter, at some point you need to be at 100 million of ARR growing 50%. And saying that to a founder with 2 million of ARR is terrifying because you're like, wait a second, we're adding 130K of ARR a month. I can't even visualize it at all what you're talking about, but it sort of helps you highlight that even when you're small, you're like, we need some plan to get to some market that even makes that possible. And I think having that kind of orientation, not before you're pre-launch, because then that would be sort of distorting. But once you're in market thinking just along the lines, numbers aside of this has to be in some swim lane that can be huge at some point. And so what's our path going to look like? I think that's really clarifying to say in our case, either you're going to have to make it so that”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked about this a lot early, but one of the things that I found to be the scariest idea of all with starting a company because starting a company is scary in a lot of ways, but almost more than just outright failing, the idea of getting to a medium situation and then stalling, that to me was scarier almost where you had something going, but like it wasn't ever going to get you there. And I had this just like a sense this was partially from customers, although customers were coming in and they were liking us, but like Miles said it, it went linear at some point in a few million of AR, still adding, but the second order was not exciting. It seemed by the market shape, even that that product alone, single product like that for the mid-market, it was too hard to believe that that would carry us when you ran the math on it.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All it did was a 360 lightweight performance review. That was really all. And it was super configurable and it let you have your peers. It let you do a thing where you could have your peers or other people throughout the company give you feedback and you could manage that as opposed to like just a manager giving you feedback. And this was in contrast to these tools where it was really just this hierarchical performance review that was designed to be really heavy, that required being connected to goals and had ratings and it just had this old structure versus here we were with this thing that felt closer to just a feedback snapshot where the three of us sitting at this table here could go into the product, set it up, go through the whole thing and be done in like 10 minutes. That just wasn't possible in the old system. So it was just delight.”
2023-09-26 · Invest Like the Best · Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source