EP 80: Jack Altman (CEO, Lattice) on Founding Lattice ($3B), Motivating Employees and Growing up with Sam

Jack Altman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lattice, a $3 billion HR software company. In the episode, we delve into culture and performance management, hiring best practices, and the journey that led to both Jack and Sam Altman becoming thoughtful entrepreneurial leaders. Jack also shares insights on maximizing employee performance, fostering work-life balance for himself and his team at Lattice, and the importance of separating "fundraising mode" from other business activities for founders. Overall, a thought-provoking discussion that offers valuable perspectives on leadership and business growth. (0:00) Intro (0:39) Doing venture capital and launching a podcast (6:30) How does culture get created within a company? (10:14) Is a company more of a sports team or a family? (11:42) No 100 hour work weeks (16:13) Employee retention (24:19) What you want to know when hiring (30:06) Advantages startups have over big companies (37:20) What should all founders know about letting people go? (45:55) Finding product market fit (54:22) Building relationships with VCs (1:01:00) Hating software acquisitions (1:07:46) Sam Altman, brother of the HR software guy (1:09:43) Thoughts on AI and its future (1:13:08) Saying the same thing over and over again in leadership (1:20:06) Thoughts on San Francisco (1:21:31) Logan Bartlett: VC, podcaster, meme king (1:25:49) What are you investing in now? Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're gonna hear is a conversation I have with Jack Altman. Now, Jack is the co-founder and CEO of Lattice, a $3 billion HR software company. Jack and I had a interesting conversations about culture, performance management, around hiring, among a bunch of different things. We also talked about the state of AI, why I actually do this podcast, what it was like in the water in St. Louis that led to both him and Sam growing up to being such thoughtful entrepreneurial leaders, among a number of other things. Trust you'll enjoy that conversation with Jack here now. All right, Jack, thanks for doing this.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:41Logan Bartlett?

  So you're now doing venture capital and you launched a podcast.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 0:45Logan Bartlett?

  What the fuck?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's too much.

• 0:47Logan Bartlett?

  This is false pretenses that you were...

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Well, that's Eric. Eric made the podcast easy.

• 0:50Logan Bartlett?

  So, all right, so I want to talk about founding and we, maybe we could talk about podcasts at some point. But you once said, "It's tempting for founders who want to innovate on things beyond product." And that is a mistake. I've seen that in my experience as well. But why, why do you think it's tempting to try to innovate in those things? And why is it, why is it a mistake?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Well, there are definitely cases where founders have innovated on recruiting or a crazy different way to do marketing or sales or things like that. I just think like 49 times out of 50 or something like that, the most important innovation that any company needs to do is a better product. And changing everything else is so hard and usually unnecessary. And it's not like there's like one option for how to do these things. It's like if you have a certain type of product, it's not always do marketing the same way. It's choose from, okay, we should be like a PLG self-serve type of thing. We should do really enterprise, like, you know, analyst-driven marketing.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  But I generally think that everything outside of product innovation is usually a fool's errand. And let's take like, you know, software as a category example. Most software companies, the structure of them is so similar that the way to do go-to-market is going to look like one of maybe five blueprints. And so trying to create a sixth is usually just not worth the time and effort relative to just making your product better.

• 2:09Logan Bartlett?

  And there's some role... Rules that you've classified as upside creation versus downside protection, which I think is kind of a related concept. Can you explain that?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is a Keith Raboy ism that I saw at some point that really stuck with me. That there are some roles where what you're looking for is people who are going to basically just create infinite upside. The more of whatever they do, the better. And so that would be something like, like a product person, for example. You just want the product to be as good as possible. They're generating alpha upside for the company. And then there's roles maybe on the other side, like, let's say, like a general counsel, a CFO, although it flexes in both ways in some cases where really what you're trying to do is mitigate stuff going wrong. And it's not that one's more important than the other. Obviously, you can't have the company without the upside creation, but they're just different mindsets. The way you call them is different. The way that they operate is different.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Types of experience and background you want is going to be different. I think it actually relates in a big way to like hiring, for example, like what you're looking for when you're hiring execs of one sort or the other, I think really changes.

• 3:09Logan Bartlett?

  You spend a lot of time thinking about like org structure and performance management and culture. What are the different breakpoints of org design from an employee's side standpoint?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  I think what I've mostly settled on over time, there's a lot of ways to describe it. People talk about number of employees or your first exec or a certain ARR threshold. I kind of think on some level what it really comes down to is layers of management. And I think it basically, there's the moment when you hire your first management, so you know you're 10 people and you finally can't manage everybody directly, you hire managers. And then you're 40 people and it doesn't scale again because each manager has five reports or seven reports or whatever. And now you hire first execs. And each time you do that, the way that communications works is different. The level of jobs you have changes, what you as a CEO, like the information you have access to is different. The way that you need to learn about what's happening in the company changes.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  So to me, I think the biggest difference, like the biggest defining moments are new layers.

• 4:10Logan Bartlett?

  There's this Concept I think came from you where the numerator is the number of new employees in an org and the denominator is the number of total employees in the org and that there's this natural rate of absorption that a company can take without their culture breaking, without things getting totally upside down. Every company is going to be a little different, but how do you think about that?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  The growth rate you can tolerate basically of employees?

• 4:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, like is there a natural absorption rate of the number of people that you can bring in without breaking your culture?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  There definitely is. The way I think about it is less that the culture, maybe not breaks, but it comes at some cost. And there's probably some like ideal speeds, like growing headcount not at all, or shrinking headcount, that also is like hard on cultures. Growing ridiculously fast is really hard on cultures because everyone's new. I mean, like sometimes a company will like quadruple in a year. You'll see something like that. It went from 100 to 400 in a year. I mean, 75% of the company at the end of that year has been there for less than 12 months.

• 5:15Logan Bartlett?

  Well, you factor in attrition and it's actually even more than that.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  It's even more than that. Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, you ask how many have been, how many people have been here for less than six months are like still onboarding? And so what that ends up doing is like, who's onboarding them? Existing employees? Like what work's getting done? Whatever the old employees have time left for, you know, the recruiting is going nuts, the managers spending all their time on helping people get started and recruiting more people. Their trust just takes time to build between people, unfortunately. Like you can't just walk in and know everybody. People are trying to navigate the org, but it's changing constantly. And so that's what you're, you know, contending against on the upper bound. And then on the lower bound of not growing, you run into things like there aren't new departments being created, there aren't promotion paths available, like people don't have newness, people don't get to like, you know, if somebody

• 6:01Speaker 01

  had been working in product marketing and maybe wanted to try product management, those changes just become harder. So there's some happy middle, I think, just optimizing on culture. All that said, there's like definitely moments when a company is just winning so hard that it's worth it to spend down the culture battery to capture the market opportunity. And then on the non-growth side, there's moments when you just, you have to do that. So it's all trade-offs, but those are kind of the boundaries I think about.

• 6:30Logan Bartlett?

  How does culture get created within a company?

• 6:31Speaker 01

  You know, I don't want to sort of like lionize founders, but it definitely starts there. And in general, I think, you know, the cascade ends up being more about actions than about what you say. But I do believe that culture generally starts from the top and works its way through.

• 6:50Logan Bartlett?

  When should it get codified?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  I'm not a big fan of when founders codify it formally early. I think like it becomes a little bit, in the very, very early days, I think it's a little bit performative. I put it a little bit in the realm of startup house, like playing startup house, which, you know, in the very earliest days, before like real product market fit, I think that the focus on getting product market fit has to be so extreme that even things like codifying the culture don't make the cut. I think the only things that should make the cut are talking to customers, building product, building the team. And anything that's not one of those three doesn't deserve to be on the list. Shouldn't be like spending a lot of time worrying about press, fundraising you have to, but like, don't get caught up in like being obsessed with fundraising.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I think things like codifying the culture and spending your time doing revs on docs about these are our values when you have eight people and you're still figuring out what your product's going to do in the world. I think it's better to just be authentic. You'll end up hiring the people who are authentic around you. And then when you're at a certain size, and then maybe a few dozen employees, do a combination of describing what you see that you like and sort of mixing that with what you aspire to be. But I think doing it too early isn't great.

• 8:03Logan Bartlett?

  No reason to memorize High Output Management by Andy Grove if you're not going to be managing anyone.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  What I would go back to is just the ruthlessness of it's not on the list of three. And High Output Management is a great book. Every manager should read it, but just clinically, I think if it's not one of those three, just don't do it.

• 8:21Logan Bartlett?

  And getting product market fit and having people actually buy your product is probably number one.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  By far.

• 8:26Logan Bartlett?

  Two, maybe three.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:28Logan Bartlett?

  In the early days of a company.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  There's just no company without it. This is something that I think for like employees who haven't ever worked at a company pre-product market fit, and you take it as a premise that there's a product that people are buying from you on some regular cadence. It's just this moment that is so hard to come by. It requires everything without it, you just never have a company. You once said there's no such thing as a perfect culture. What do you mean by that? The way I think about the best culture is in relation to the company. And so the best thing you can hope for is that culture is in harmony with your product, your market, your storytelling. Like, Apple's a great example for me of where the culture,

• 9:09Speaker 01

  the product, the marketing, it's all like facets of the same crystal where what they do is these, a small number of these really high-quality products, they're private about it, they have these big launches that are highly anticipated, and the culture matches it. You know, like you talk to people who've worked at Apple, it's a culture of, you know, precision, excellence, doing few things right, high degrees of focus, secrecy even within the company, and it all makes sense, which is a different culture than what you'd hear at Google, which is going to be much more open and sort of free-form, and they have the 80/20 policy, but that matches their products. And so I think the key is that the culture matches the rest of the company.

• 9:51Logan Bartlett?

  Hi, this is Logan Bartlett, the host of the podcast here. This is not an ad. As you may know, we do not advertise or monetize the podcast in any way. I just wanted to jump in and say that we have a bunch of killer guests coming on over the course of the next couple of weeks. And so if you're enjoying this show and hearing behind the scenes from world-class entrepreneurs and investors, please do subscribe to our channel so that you don't miss out. Now, back to the episode.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Is a company more of a sports team or a family? What a lot of companies end up doing, just sort of, this is now descriptive, instead of saying what it should be, but a lot of companies start as a family and become a sports team. And I think that is a natural and healthy evolution that I've seen a lot of companies go through. My hunch is that a lot of second-time founders or older founders probably started as a sports team from day one. I think both can work. I think it needs to become a sports team, though, at some point. I think which one you start as is probably up for debate. And being a sports team, becoming a sports team in your vernacular means? Well, when you're a family, the loyalties go much deeper than what happens, you know, based on your performance on the field. When you're a sports team, it's the best person for the role at the right time.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And when it's time for a different person, you know, you shake hands like professionals and you both go your own different ways.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  I think a sports team is about like demanding excellence. A family is about accepting who you have and sort of like going forward as best you can as a team. I think the, the way you treat each other sort of socially and interpersonally is different in those contexts. So to me, a lot of it is, it's not that one's better or worse. I actually, I really, you know, I think that the instinct is to say that it's always better to be a sports team, which I think is true past a certain stage. But I, maybe I would say by the moment you're defining your values, 30, 40 employees, be a sports team by then. What you want to be in the first 10, I think that's founder preference. I think both work.

• 11:42Logan Bartlett?

  You said that you didn't want to be a company where people worked 100 hour weeks, stayed there till 11pm. Why is that the case?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to do that. I did that my first job out of college, literally like we would, like I was in investment banking for a year. We logged our hours, we did 110 hours actually, and I know what that's like, and it's really unpleasant. I also just don't think it's necessary and I don't think it's, I don't even think it's optimal and like take 110 off the table, but take like 80, which probably is like a number that a lot of people work at companies. I'm not sure that you're making your best decisions the Friday morning of an 80 hour work week when you're, you know, sleeping five hours a night and you've just been in a complete grind and you've been stressed in conversations and all the rest of it. Like, how long do you want to do that? Do you want to do that for two years? Do you want to be at that company for five years? I think hard work really matters.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  I like working hard and I think like I'm, I want to be around other people who want to work hard too.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  But I don't think that burning yourself to the brink, I don't think that's something to aspire to, either for the quality of what the work's going to look like, or like, just like the sort of life design you want to have.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  So I've never found it to be necessary and I think that it comes with this advantage, which generally speaking, when there's balance, and I want to be clear, the balance to me is not the, I'm checked out. Balance is still like, whoa, it's Friday afternoon, I'm tired. Like that was a hard, that was a good hard week of work. But I think that balance lets people stay with the company longer. I think there's a lot of value that is underappreciated to having a much longer average tenure. Like, you know, in tech, the average tenure is like two years or something like that. But you're like getting warmed up for your first six months. You're still like coming up the curve by 18 months. And in my experience, it's really years like three and four where people just crush. Sometimes people crush into years five and six, although I do also think there's like an end to that curve.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  But like, there is these like sweet spot pocket years or round years, probably three, four, five, I would say. And so keeping people around to be there and having people be in like a long-term marathon with the company. It's worth a lot and it's like hard to put numbers on it, but I just like, I feel that.

• 13:54Logan Bartlett?

  Besides using Lattice, what should people know about performance management?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Just using Lattice isn't enough?

• 14:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe it is. I don't know.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  It's a start.

• 14:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Um, maybe a couple of the things that I think have been most poignant for me, just specifically on performance management. One is people rise to the expectations you hold for them. And if you, in your own head, believe that people are going to be low performing, needing to be coddled. If they aren't going to be able to manage complex situations, if you save them every time, there's going to be like a tricky situation. People will match that. If you tell people directly and you tell people in third-party ways in a way that you even know that person's going to hear. I say, oh, Alex is going to crush that. Alex knows what, what he's doing. Oh, I trust Alex. Like, there's no one who's going to do it better. People rise to match that.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  And so to me, part of performance management is setting people up in a way that they're like, oh, wow. The, my manager, the founder like believes in me in a big way. Like, hell yeah, I'm going to go do that. And I, I've just found over and over that the best starting point, but beyond High Output Management book and all the metho-, you know, methodology of a good one-on-one and whatever else. It's like, what are you going to choose to expect from people and believe about them? And people are just gonna, they're just gonna gravitate towards that, whether it's high or low. So that's one. The other big one is, and this just comes through experience, but

• 15:23Speaker 01

  The clearer you are with people, the earlier you are with people, the less dramatic it is. And we just all have to learn this lesson because we don't want to have a hard conversation. We don't want to like challenge somebody. We don't want to do all the stuff that's just like, ugh, I've got to like spend emotional energy. And the longer you do it, the more you just realize the minute you think something, say it. And make it as undramatic and clear and direct as possible. And even if it's hard, even if you're what you're telling somebody is, hey, I've noticed these things. I hope this can work out. It might not, but like, let's like try, but like this is serious. You say that early, that is like a 10 times easier conversation than surprising somebody months later, who like thought everything was fine. So just the directness.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  But the, the first point is the one I think I would say is more, more, a more unique belief for me. What have you learned about employee retention that's not obvious? The thing that I've most experienced that makes employees want to stay starts, it's going to be unique to everybody, but it starts with you as their manager, understanding what they actually care about.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  This is one, I mean, there's, there's value to having a close relationship with your team just because it makes them more fun. It makes transacting easier. But one of the purposes of knowing your team for real is understanding their true motivators. And that could be a lot of things. Some of them are pretty, some of them are ugly. Sometimes people's motivators, they want to have impact. They want to help people around them. They love seeing people grow. Sometimes they have like less pure motivators. They want to make a bunch of money. They want to impress their parent. They want to like prove somebody wrong. They just want a big title because they've got an ego on social media, like whatever. And it's all, it's all okay. But I think starting from a place of actually understanding what the person cares about,

• 17:10Speaker 01

  knowing them well enough will then lead any reasonable person to know what it takes to set them up for success. Or no, geez, this person is not getting the thing that they care most about. This probably won't work in the long term. But I think without sort of understanding your team at that click down level, it's, it's really hard. How much time do you spend on hiring? A third. A third, so over a day a week in totality. When I'm in searches, it can be more than half. Like if I'm like, for example, if I'm running two exec searches at the same time, it's easily half.

• 17:42Logan Bartlett?

  When you're making a hire in an executive, how long are you thinking about them in that role?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  It depends, but probably like two to three years. I would say the more, the longer Lattice exists, the longer I'm thinking about them in the role. You know, like when we were small, I would say, God, we just need somebody this year, this quarter.

• 18:00Logan Bartlett?

  The slope of the line is so steep, it's hard to see beyond.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  I think I heard Patrick call us and say this on some podcast or whatever at some point, that basically you can plan in the future like half as long as your company's been around. Sorry if that's a misattribution, but I actually really kind of believe that spirit, that if your company's two years old, don't think further than when you're out. If your company's five years old, don't think further than two and a half years out. And it probably decays somewhat. Like a 40-year-old company probably can't think 20 years out. Maybe they can, but I think it's the same thing with kind of everything to do with the company, whether it's recruiting, or forecasting, or your product roadmap. It's in relation to the maturity of the company. So as Lattice gets more and more mature,

• 18:41Speaker 01

  I think I can safely say, okay, we want to have a C-level exec who's going to work for, hopefully, four years. At least two would be great. So it kind of changes over time.

• 18:55Logan Bartlett?

  You won't do searches without bringing in a outside search firm for executives?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Never.

• 19:01Logan Bartlett?

  Why is that the case?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  To me, I, and I'll still do tons of my own outreach. I'll still ask my network for tons of intros. To me, the role of each exec is so valuable that even if we spend the exec recruiting fee, and we don't use their candidates, or we hire somebody different, or whatever, it's still just to me a no-brainer. Like, the cost of getting it right, and the value of getting it right, the cost of getting it wrong compared to the search fee, is, it's just so different. So just looking at the math of it, it's just so easy for me to talk myself into like happily, happily paying it every time.

• 19:38Logan Bartlett?

  Upside creation, downside production.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Another thing, by the way, I believe about exec recruiters is I think a mistake a lot of founders make with exec recruiters

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Outside counsel, maybe there's a couple of other service providers like that, but those are the big two that come to mind. Is ideally you find a recruiter who becomes like a long-term partner of yours. Like the search firm that I work with for nearly everything at Lattice, I've been working with for like six or seven years now, which is like longer than I've worked with like any, you know, almost anybody. And so there's a, you know, a consistent partner there with a team around them who has, I totally trust them. I think they totally trust me. They know our whole exec team. They know what I'm like. They know the company. They've seen the whole evolution. They can pitch the story. I think of her as an extended member of the exec team.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of founders, their relationship with exec recruiters, they, they, they can be so transactional with it. They don't, you know, they're not willing to just like invest in somebody great and like see a long-term path there. And it's been like a huge sort of boost for us to have that.

• 20:46Logan Bartlett?

  So we don't need to actually cosplay and act this out, but if I'm a candidate, like what are you trying to accomplish in your first meeting with that person?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  First meeting, I'm probably trying to see if we have like chemistry, like can we have an easy conversation? And you kind of just feel that or you don't like you just like come away from the hour like I could have kept talking or like, oh man, the last 20 minutes were a little bit of a drag. Or the conversation was stilted or that was free flowing or we were interrupting each other in like fun and good ways. Or like, it was like silent and weird. So I think that's like a huge piece for me. I've, I've found that even if somebody's talented and amazing, it's really hard to work with somebody that you just don't have a good vibe with, where you're dreading the one-on-one, where you just like can't get along easily and naturally,

• 21:34Speaker 01

  where they're not going to vibe with your team. They're going to have weird relationships with their directs, you think, because the company kind of ideally is matching. You know, I think you hopefully can trust as the founder that whatever your vibe is, will be a decent proxy for what the company's vibe is. So I kind of go in and I say, well, you know, The best barometer I have for will the company like this exec is do I like this exec? Because you know, the company and I have some just relation, you know, naturally over time. So that's probably the first thing in the first meeting that I'm trying to get to. The other thing I really like to do is get their story of the last two companies. And I really try to get as much detail as I can, like, like what I, what I'm ideally doing is, and it doesn't have to be two different companies, it could be two chapters within the same company.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  But I really want to get the story of something specific. So like, let's say, just, I mean, you said, don't cosplay, but like, let's say I were interviewing you. Uh, and we were talking about it, I would ask you about like, a deal that you won. And like, just like, walk me through the whole thing. And like, how'd you get there? Why'd you get excited about it? What was the relationship with the founder? What was the competitive set? Why did you care? What were you worried about? Did you have to convince your partnership? How'd you work through that? Like, whatever else? And then I would ask you about a deal that you wanted to do and lost, a deal that you may be passed on. And I would just like, want to see how deep you can go on the things that really matter. And see what it's like to talk to you about a big problem. I find that that just has helped me the most.

• 22:57Logan Bartlett?

  And is it the communication style that you're getting to the detail on? Is it their ability to actually converse about the specifics of something?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Well, the beautiful thing about this is you can't fake any piece of it. So you can't fake being a good communicator about it. You can't fake having had good ideas during that story. You can't fake your ability to like, um, you know, connect the dots between what that was and what your broader role looked like and what you needed to do. And you can't fake how much detail you know. So I find that it is a proxy that helps me understand like many things at once. And I don't go into it with like a rubric in my head of I'm testing for these things. But, you know, you do enough of these, you know, I've done hundreds of, of these types of interviews over the years. And you get to a, you know, you get to some pattern matching of it where you can feel like, okay, this is, this is gonna,

• 23:49Speaker 01

  this is gonna be weak here, this is gonna be strong there, or whatever.

• 23:52Logan Bartlett?

  You probably also tease out how much they want to throw other people on, under the bus or take credit for themselves.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And there's like subtle little things with the language there too. I did this versus we did this. I built this thing versus, you know, the team built this and I supported them like, and it's not that one is always better or worse. I definitely have preference for the exec who is much more like we oriented. There are some founders who are gonna like the exec who's much more I oriented. That's fine, but you can feel the spirit through a lot of that language.

• 24:19Logan Bartlett?

  If you could find out one thing about a person that you hire and what you're ultimately teasing out, you get to all the specificities of that. What is the single thing you want to know about that person before they join?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Ideally, you get to, you get to have, just on a personal integrity level. It's wonderful if you can spend time with somebody in the real world a little bit. If you can have dinner with them, are they respectful to waitstaff? How do they operate, you know, around people? Like if you can like see them in a context with somebody else they work with. I think there's a lot of little signals you can pick up with somebody just that you just need time exposure for. And you can just feel integrity or not when you're around somebody. So that's, that's one is just like, can I get to some sense of just like, high integrity and do I spend enough time with them that the story always lines up that they're, you know, if I ever have a moment where, wait, last time we met, you said this thing. This time you met, you said this other thing or these numbers.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  I just like get the heebie jeebies from some of that stuff. So I think there's, there's one set there. We talked earlier about the work ethic thing and I don't like the burnout work thing. I similarly, it's not fun for me to work with people who don't like working hard. And so finding people who are like resonating on that same frequency, that's a really big one for me. So like, not that I'll like, I'm not like doing, I'm not testing people, but, you know, a lot of times my day is busy and I end up needing to like text or call them at night or on the weekend or whatever. And like, is that a big deal or not? You can kind of like feel some little things like that.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  And then the last one, I just, the references matter so much to me.

• 25:50Logan Bartlett?

  Reference checks. What's your style and how do you approach them? When do you introduce them into the process?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Early and often, um, I do so many reference checks that to me is, and there's a lot of competing views on this. Some people don't like them. I love them. I've never had the false positive of unbelievable references from like 10 plus people and then it didn't work out.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  There are definitely situations where you get negative references and they're great. But I've never had the positive false reference where if you talk to their direct reports, their managers, their peers, everybody that you could care to, and you talk to as many as possible. Like, one of the best, like, when you ask someone for their references, somebody who immediately gives you like 20 or 30, like, that's another thing you can't fake. I love these sort of tests where you're like, you can't fake it. Someone's like, yeah, here's everybody I've ever worked with around me in every role I've had. Call whoever you want. Like, that just like can't be faked. Versus somebody's like, yeah, let me get back to you. And then three days later, they send you two or three. That, that's an initial first blush thing. And I'll also tell candidates that I'm gonna like, you know, I'll, I'll get front channel and back channel references.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  But yeah, as many as possible, as early and often as possible. There's like tips and tricks probably for like, you know, a good reference call, a bad reference call. Like, there's basic things to know that are probably like written everywhere that we've all read. Like, if, you know, someone says they're in the top 10%, that means they're in the top 30%. There's stuff like that, but to me, it's just have real conversations with as many people as possible and take the time to like, keep probing and asking questions and don't make it this like calibrated. Here's my five questions, but like a real conversation where you're digging to actually like, try to get your hold on what was the relationship like and what was working with them like.

• 27:34Logan Bartlett?

  Stylistically, like, people don't wanna talk shit, even if it's back channel.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:39Logan Bartlett?

  Like, they're incentivized actually to give you platitudes in that way. How do you try to cut through on the call to get to the meat of the, the answer?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Um, for me, it's just you keep pushing, discount everything by like 20 or 30%. And then you just like, kind of keep probing. I don't know. I don't know that I have like the one trick, but, and you know, it's not basic questions. Like, if there's one thing they could do better at, what would it be? I mean, that's an okay question, but I actually prefer to be like, when they did this specific thing, same tactic, by the way, of making them talk about specific instances. Like, I find getting into a store, a particular story or two, I learn a lot more than just like, are they good at communications? Yeah. Okay, cool. Next question. Versus like, okay, when they launched that product, like, can you walk me through what happened? Like, were there? Any hiccups? Was everybody on board? Did their marketing partner like it? Did they have any resolutions? How they managed that?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  So I think specific stories just gets away from the like thumbs up, thumbs down land and into like, like bits.

• 28:39Logan Bartlett?

  Because people feel like they're not giving opinions at that point. They're stating facts about the marketing partner actually didn't like that.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 28:47Logan Bartlett?

  That was a point of conflict.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  That's right. And the facts of the story can tell you what somebody, you know? If one of the facts of the story is before the big launch on Monday, you know, the CEO was at their house all weekend, like working through the details of it. That's a good fact to know. That means the CEO really trusted them. So there's stuff like that too, where I think you can kind of get it based on the facts of the story.

• 29:06Logan Bartlett?

  Ideally, you like to do a project or something, work with someone so you can get a flavor for their style. And you, you learn a lot about people once the Rubicon is crossed or whatever, and you're on the other side of it. But short of getting someone to spend nights and weekends with you actually working on something, how do you solve for that similar point?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  It's really hard. That's one of the best advantages that early stage startups have. We used to do this. It's really hard to pull off when you're past a certain size. But we would just say, hey, come work with us for like a week. We'll pay you like a normal amount. But just come work with us. We're going to ship this thing. Or we're going to like plan this, you know, marketing program or like whatever. It's awesome. There's nothing that beats that. Short of that though, it, it, it does just come down to a good interview process and references. It's like all you can do and it's much more limited. And it's also why as companies get bigger, I think you become less and less sure of your hiring than you were in the early days. And so, you know, this is where things like performance management come in. It's just like one of the realities of scale.

• 30:06Logan Bartlett?

  Any commonalities between people that their, their personal slope of the line has outpaced Lattice's growth? And so someone in the early days that has actually scaled into a C level or VP level, that background wouldn't say that, but they've really proven that internally. Are there any commonalities?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Yes. This is one of the other many advantages startups have over big companies. It would be much harder for, let's say me now, if there was a, a frontline sales manager that I was like, this person's unbelievable. It would be way harder for me to. Sort of skip that person massively ahead and put them in a VP role just because I believed in them. Like that would, you know, 30 people at Lattice would be very upset with that. Rightfully, when you're small, you can make those crazy bets. It still makes people uncomfortable. Like if you take somebody and you accelerate their role crazily, it still does make people

• 31:06Speaker 01

  around them uncomfortable, but you can do it. And that's a huge advantage. We had examples like this. One example like this was our first marketing leader who, he just joined as our first marketer when we were tiny. And he just kept scaling. And he was, I mean, I can't, I don't know how old he must have been when he joined, but like mid, you know, mid twenties or something like that. And just kept scaling. And we just kept building things under him. And he definitely had things he still needed to learn, like nobody's perfect, who's like never done a role at that kind of scale. But because we were so early, we were able to just keep betting and keep betting on the same person leading this thing that was, you know, on paper, bigger than anything they had done. And it worked, it worked wonderfully.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  And we've had other examples of that. I'm going to say something again that is founder lionizing, which I hate to do, but a lot of traits that I see in a lot of great founders, you can sometimes see that in an early employee. And, you know, what you've basically done is you've gotten the opportunity to hire a founder before they like knew they were a founder kind of thing. And actually, the, the marketing person I mentioned did go to become a founder. But a lot of the people who I think are able to scale ridiculously like that have the combination of confidence and humility. So they're willing to keep learning, but they're like, nothing's too big for me. I can, I can do and learn whatever. They're unbelievably autonomous, maybe to, you know, almost to a fault where they're like, I got this, I

• 32:34Speaker 01

  got this, I got this all the time. And, you know, it's like throwing somebody into a pool who can't swim, but who thinks they're going to make it work. Like, they're gonna, they're gonna sink sometimes, but they're also going to learn to swim faster. So there's probably a couple of just like foundery things that have been my experience of that.

• 32:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I found the upside creation roles are oftentimes the ones you want to take that chance on, which is a little bit. Counterintuitive because those are the ones that are going to create the value of the company. But why would someone that's really good join your startup?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:06Logan Bartlett?

  In an upside creation role, you need some reason, either they have some personal connection to you or whatever. There has to be some narrative.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 33:14Logan Bartlett?

  If someone's just sat in a upside creation type role for their entire career and they're, not to be ageist, but they're in their

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Logan Bartlett?

  Upper 40s or something, that tells you something about that person. It's probably not worth the risk versus a G C.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Totally. Absolutely. Yeah. And I wouldn't want to have a 23 year old G C is not that you have gone to law school necessarily, but you know, that that's right. And there's some roles where experience is worth a lot. And then there's some roles where output and creativity and risk taking are worth a lot. But you know, like you, the, the, the ageist thing, it's like, there's a lot of like, uh, good data about like, how like a lot of like great scientific discoveries or the like best pieces of music or like these like incredible feats of like human intellectual accomplishment. A lot of those happen in people's twenties. A lot of the best companies of all time were started by people in their early twenties. And so like, I think there is a, there's a tendency to, to

• 34:10Speaker 01

  underappreciate whatever that X factor that young people have, um, but startups can bet on it, both because they have to, and because they don't have the red tape to not be able to.

• 34:20Logan Bartlett?

  You've actually encouraged employees to go start companies or you built a program around it by which you'll invest in them. Can you talk a little bit about that as you reference your old marketing leader?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. The, the, the spirit, uh, we did this program where you, you know, Lattice will invest a hundred K and a company and an employee who's been with us for a certain amount of time who leaves to start a company. Um, the spirit of it is similar to like the Netflix culture doc vibe of we want Lattice to be like a great place to be from. And so my hope is that Lattice, you know, in the long term, will have many more alumni than employees at any given time. That's just how the math ends up working. And my hope is that it also becomes this alumni community that it's like, oh, that person worked at Lattice. That's awesome. Like, I'm interested to talk to them. Some of that is based on, you know, how The company does after they leave, of course, that's just like the natural fact of things is somebody who, you know, left a company 10 years ago and the company then ended up doing

• 35:14Speaker 01

  great, that person gets a lot of credit for the 10 years that they weren't there. So some of it comes from that. Some of it just comes from like the way you treated people on the way out, the relationship of it. But I'm a huge believer that just like Lattice and any great company, you know, any company that wants to be great needs to be willing to say to people, you know, this is not the right place for you anymore. People also who want to be great need to be able to say, this company isn't right for me anymore. And that's okay. And that's healthy. Like, it's actually, you know, it's a, it's a harder thing to believe that a human who is changing every year, hopefully, and a company that's changing every year, hopefully, that those just stay in alignment indefinitely across hundreds of employees. It's, you know, an impossible thing. And so knowing that that's

• 35:58Speaker 01

  the reality, creating a dynamic where, you know, you normalize it. You say, hey, if you want to leave, it's totally okay. And it's not just okay, we want to be there to support you. We want to connect you to other jobs if you want. We want to, you know, help you start a company if you want. We want to help you do whatever you want to do. I just think that's a, that is a way healthier, long-term mindset, even if it means that in, you know, the interim, some employees who might have otherwise had the fear of leaving, won't have that fear. That's an obvious easy trade for me.

• 36:26Logan Bartlett?

  I'm sure coming from the top down empowers people to hire folks that have entrepreneurial ambitions as well. Is there any bit of framing about tour of duty? Hey, you know, give us two years that people will actually do and?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  For sure. All the time. We don't talk about tours of duty at the company level, but there are so many roles we have where someone joins for a particular project or mission. And then at the end of it, it's like, we'll see. And sometimes there's another tour that they want to do. Sometimes there's not. I think it's a great framing, the tours of duty, the LinkedIn Reid Hoffman thing. I love that because it, it, it, it makes clear that there's a chapter that we know is good. And then at the end, we'll like have a new decision point and like, that's okay, whatever that is. But I find that's much better than like, we're going to cling on to after this mission is complete, I have to keep working here. It's, it's, it's a really healthy mindset.

• 37:20Logan Bartlett?

  What do you wish all founders knew about letting people go?

• 37:23Speaker 01

  In so many cases, I have seen as you go through enough cycles of it and enough years of it, that everybody's better off.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  It's really rare that you let somebody go and you years later realize, oh, they would have been better served if I didn't do that. Like if by the time you want to let somebody go, it wasn't working for you. Nine times out of 10, it wasn't working for them in that context. And that doesn't mean that the person's not good. It just means that whatever fit they were in, they just like weren't flourishing. And I think it feels so unkind to let someone go. And in the long term, it is basically always kind.

• 38:08Logan Bartlett?

  And at some point, you need to serve the company as well and great hates mediocre.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And, um, and I think that there's this thing where it's really hard because in a lot of cases, when you're having this one-on-one conversation with someone where it's not working out. The people who aren't in the room are the whole rest of the company who it's, you know, it's not serving them if there's somebody who's in a bad fit role somewhere else in the company. And it's, it's this asymmetric thing where it's very painful for the one person. It's only a little bit of gain for everybody else, of course, you know, because it's a small thing. And they're not in the room and so it's, it's set up to be hard, but the like overall impact is positive. And on top of that, I believe even for that individual, it's positive. It's just, there's a dip that has to go through and that's hard.

• 38:58Logan Bartlett?

  One of the interesting things I heard you say is you actually need to prove to people why it's important to have a diverse workforce for people to care about it. Can you elaborate on it?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, um, the conversation around diversity and equity and inclusion.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  There's a lot of people who feel a lot of different ways about it, obviously. The thing that I think you can unify and pull together everybody's mindsets around is that this isn't like, you know, a this isn't a, you know, a mission for the, you know, just helping diversity itself, which lots of people, myself included, think there's value to that. But they, there's actually value to the company and I, I have come to really see that and believe it where. Having, you know, people at the company of all backgrounds does make it easier to connect with more customers and better understand who you're building products for. And diversity comes in a whole lot of forms.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  But the more of that spread you have at your company, I do think the more sort of organizational empathy you have for customers. I also find that there's a lot of employees who it is really demotivating for if they feel like the company doesn't care about this at all, or if they don't have somebody that they can look up to in leadership, who they can resonate with. And so I also think there's like an employee morale impact, which also impacts performance over time. So the reason I think it's important for founders or leadership to not just talk about it as like, this is our duty, but this is valuable to the company is because you can't control how everybody feels about this stuff, but almost everybody can agree that if it's going to be good for the company, that's certainly a good reason to care about it.

• 40:43Logan Bartlett?

  I want to back up. You're founding prior to Lattice, you were at a company called Teespring, which probably a lot of people don't remember. Once upon a time was a very hot company. Despite when we describe it, it will not sound like something that was a hot business, but it was. And it has a interesting mafia has kind of come out of it. Who all was there with you or that has gone on, names people would know?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Well, the founders were Walker Williams and Evan Saitz Clayton. Walker started a new company. Evan has also started companies and also is running a super cool incubator. We had a bunch of other founders that have come out of it, too. A couple off the top of my head, there's a guy, Tony Staline, who started a company. There's a guy, Jesse, who started a company. Sam Ross started a company. There's like a ton, actually.

• 41:32Logan Bartlett?

  Delian.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, Delian started a company and became an investor. There's been a ton. There's way more than I can even think of.

• 41:39Logan Bartlett?

  What was unique about the culture of Teespring? Maybe describe what Teespring did for people and then what was unique about, because it would not be obvious that this would be a business that a bunch of people will come out of.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  No, it was an e-commerce company. It was a, it was a platform for creators to make customized apparel. So if you were a YouTube creator, you could Like make a bunch of shirts with your logo on it and then you could promote that and you could get pre-orders and then we would make the shirts. And we had all these tools to like make it sort of social and promotable, but the flip of the model where you could just like wait until enough shirts were created, ordered, and then you print, it was like a really good business model. It made for like negative network like capital. It was just a really positive model and it went super viral.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  So like I got there and we were like 10 or 12 employees and we just grew like nut. I mean, like we were measuring the growth in like day over day growth. It would just went unbelievably viral for a while. And it was a really young company. That's one of the things I think back to the founders were really young and they hired young people. Like, I think it was probably not till our 30 or 40th employee that we had somebody who was even like their 30s. Maybe I'm like slightly misquoting, but it was like directionally like that. And so I think you had a lot of people who were, who love startup, you know, ecosystem and the lore and it was in like the Y C vibe. And you just, it was just a team of a lot of people who were scrappy and entrepreneurial and that attracted more people who were scrappy and entrepreneurial.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  And to the point of fast growth being an attractive thing for employees, the growth was just nuts. And so the nuts growth allowed for a lot of cool career development. So I think those are some of the things that set it up well.

• 43:25Logan Bartlett?

  What ultimately happened? What, what broke down in the journey?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  So much of the business was generated through not just creators who were like making a shirt for their fans, but people closer to internet marketers who were specifically targeting audiences in these hyper-targeted, very smart, very programmatic ways. And just finding out that with the, with a tight enough audience, you could really, really target people and do a lot and have really high conversion rates. And it was all being promoted through social platforms that had super specific audience targeting, which was good, but the platform dependency was basically the problem. And so at some point, the platforms were like, that's enough.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  This is how much we can allow of our platform to do this, which makes sense for a platform to do, but it was a platform dependency issue.

• 44:19Logan Bartlett?

  HR software. So what was the nugget of, hey, I should go start in HR software?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I started this with my co-founder at Lattice, Eric Coslow, was also sort of like the lead engineer at Teespring. So there's another Teespring founder. We didn't even think of Lattice as HR software when we left. Like, when we left, we weren't even like, we just like knew we wanted to start a company when we were first leaving. We were like, we, we knew we were friends and had a great relationship, which turned into like an extremely close relationship over time, which was like one of the luckiest things for Lattice and for, for me personally. But we didn't even know. And even when we had the idea of what we started with, which was OKRs, not even performance reviews, which by the way, the OKR product just like failed, more or less, we didn't think of it as HR software.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  We didn't know anything about HR software. We knew that, we knew that there were things about Teespring's culture that had gone away. We didn't love as a result of not having infrastructure for what I now understand to be things like feedback and listening to employees and having clear career development and having compensation conversations. And all the stuff that Lattice does was, we just didn't have it. Maybe partially because we grew fast, maybe partially because we were young, maybe a little bit of everything. Maybe because Lattice didn't exist yet, but we didn't even understand it to be HR, HR software. We just felt a particular small problem and we wanted to build against it. We didn't end up solving it well with software, but we built relationships with HR leaders and that gave us the insight to build performance reviews, which was the product that worked.

• 45:55Logan Bartlett?

  How'd you go about finding product market fit?

• 45:57Speaker 01

  What we built first was an OKR tool. And we were able to get a lot of interest because it is a real problem for people. Like managing goals at a company is in fact a big problem. And so a lot of people were interested. It was actually really easy. Like we would like post on Product Hunt or just like directly email people. Tons of CEOs of like, you know, 100, 200 person companies would be like, I need this. I need that to work. I've been struggling with goals. It's a real problem. Software is not a good solution to every problem. Our software was not the best available solution of software to solve the problem. But in general, it is a hard problem to solve that and software is not the key solution for goal setting in a company.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  And so we realized relatively quickly, within the first several months, just from the data, it was just so clear to me that this was never going to turn into a big business. It was just too hard. The retention was too forced. The only way to get people to log in and set their goals for the second goal cycle was by really calling and forcing it. And it just wasn't going to happen. But luckily, we had built such good friendships and relationships with our users who were the CEOs, but then also the head of HR got involved, that we were able to just say to the HR teams, like, okay, what else do you care about? And it was just so blatantly obvious that there was just this real gap in the market around performance reviews. And we said, okay, and we started mocking up that product.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And after what in the end was like nine months of just like beating our heads against the one that you care our product, like, we were able to sell annual contracts on design mockups on reviews. And it was just like, it was so obvious.

• 47:36Logan Bartlett?

  When did you know you had that that product market fit? What was that feeling that that you sort of had at that moment?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  In retrospect, it was like nearly instant. The way a performance review cycle works in software is like you are kind of taking people through like a big workflow, like you're setting up the parameters of the performance review, you're choosing who's going to be in it, what are the questions going to be? You're inviting everybody to go in there to select their peers, to have those emails go out, to start filling in feedback, to close the cycle, to give feedback, to get the data at the end. It's like a, it's like a bit of a roller coaster or a ride. And we hadn't even built the end of it when our first users were going through it. We had the front of it and like Eric and team were scrambling to complete it. But people were paying and they were yelling at us to fix things and they cared so much.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  And we were continuing to get inbound leads. I heard you have this thing. Can I buy it? Can it work by next Thursday? Can you make sure it has this feature? But people were like mad at us about stuff. And until that point, nobody cared about anything. It was all like, oh, cool. Yeah, I'll give it a try. I'll poke around. And now we had people who were like holding us to account as like a vendor that they needed. And it was just, it was instant.

• 48:48Logan Bartlett?

  Did you raise the seed up? Off the OKR product?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:52Logan Bartlett?

  And the Series A?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Not the Series A. The Series A was off reviews.

• 48:55Logan Bartlett?

  Your Series B, every good company, it seems, has a shitty fundraiser. Every single one you go through, and yours was your Series B.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:03Logan Bartlett?

  What was it in that moment in time that made it difficult for investors to dream the dream?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Basically, this was, the fail of the Series B was in 2018. In 2018, we went from 2 million to 7 million of ARR. And, but it was going linearly. So we were adding, the first three quarters of the year, it was at a million, at a million, at a million. We were secretly building this engagement survey product. So out of the seven engineers that we had at the company, five of them were working on employee engagement surveys, which is, that was a big, you know, decision, but like this is kind of always how Lattice has done things, which we just did with the HRAS, where we, you know, well, we are investing as much as possible in the current product while working hard on the next one. This was the first time we did that. And, but it wasn't out yet.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  And we were low on cash, like, you know, we had like, you know, less than a couple million bucks in the bank. We had probably 40 employees. We were not burning huge amounts of money because we had real revenue and it was growing. We were at 3, 4 million of ARR with, it was probably 30 employees at the time or something like that. And we just like, we just needed money. And so it wasn't that I was like, this is a perfect, perfect time to raise, but we kind of needed money. Like, or it would have like, really helped us keep investing in this future product. I wanted to hire more engineers for performance. We were just like, at the wire of it. And VCs were just not having it that summer. In the summer, you know, 3, 4 of ARR, we were, this is 2018, so we were not in 2021, when that round would have super easily gotten done. We were SMB.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  We were HR software, which nobody liked. And we were like a point solution. And we had won. And so based on those sort of just high level things, I kind of get it. Like, I can see why, you know, HR software at the time was not, people had not grocked that it was a big category. I was only kind of grocking that it was real. I mean, I had the feeling, just because I was in it every day, and I was like, You know, I was going to VCs being like, trust me, like, people want this thing. Like, I'm in here, like, every day. It's just like, we can't go fast enough. Like, the feature list that people would pay us for is crazy. I think I also, like, was a much worse fundraiser than I became over the years. But so that was just like a basic, that was basically just a fail. And our insiders topped us up with a couple million as a bridge.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  And we then, like, made an internal sort of plan to just, like, go profitable. And we, like, really rallied the company around it. It turned out to be this really strengthening moment for the culture where we, like, we branded it wartime and we, like, really, people dug deep. And I think the benefits of that actually lasted for, like, a couple of years after, which was really cool.

• 51:40Logan Bartlett?

  Process-wise, what would you have done differently in the Series B?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  We launched this engagement survey product in, like, September or October of that year. And it clicked overnight. We went from booking a million, a million, a million, a quarter to two million immediately. And then it just scaled up from there fast. And it was like a slam dunk, that second product. What happened was, when we went multi-product, there were so many immediate, obvious values to the customer that instead of being in a feature-to-feature knife fight against a bunch of other companies that, on the surface, looked just like Lattice. And the only way that we were winning those performance management-only deals was by the rep really teasing out exactly why our feature set was a little bit better in these ways. And we really do have a better mousetrap. And I think we did have a better mousetrap, but you still gotta tell them why it's a better mousetrap.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Versus now we had a headliner that was like, this is a better offering. And now the work of underneath was just verifying that the thing worked. But if it did, they wanted it, based on the headline. And that was just a game changer. Like, our win rates went through the roof. Everything got, just, the whole, the whole funnel, leads, win rates, you know, average size on the deals, retention, cross-sell, everything got better overnight. And so on some level, the best thing I could have done would have just been waited until we were on the other side of that moment,

• 52:58Speaker 01

  which is what ultimately happened, although actually, we still barely got it done. But that would have been the best thing. I think, process-wise, the other thing I got tripped up on is... By nature, I'm like very trusting and very agreeable. And I was getting pulled into one-off conversations. VCs are incredibly good at getting companies to have a one-off conversation with them. And it's just a bad move. There are probably exceptions to where it's not, but it's almost always better as the founder to do your conversations in parallel. And I didn't do it that way. They would say, oh, like, just, you know, you don't need to prepare anything. Like, we'd love to just come hang. Can I, like, swing by your office? Whatever metrics you have off the shelf.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  But it's a horrible look, you know, at the company. You don't have your metrics prepared. They're saying it's not, you know, an interview, but it is. You're not in fundraising mode. You're like thinking about like the fire at hand of a particular customer or a feature that's being hotly debated. And then a VC walks in who's like there to see if this is a good investment. And you're like, okay, wait, what are we, okay, like, you know, it's, it just doesn't go as well. So process-wise also, I should have been deliberate and said, I'm, I was not fundraising yesterday. Today I am fundraising and therefore I'm not working on these things internally and I'm making good materials and I'm practicing the way I talk about it and I'm, I'm going to many at once.

• 54:22Logan Bartlett?

  Building relationships with VCs is a, I think, a good thing. Obviously, I'm talking my own book here a little bit. But you are always fundraising in some way in those discussions. And it doesn't mean you need to have materials there, but you should be cognizant that you're being evaluated at any point in those discussions.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  That's absolutely right. And, you know, for me, I just like, didn't have the experience to navigate the difference between this is us getting to know each other for real and actually building a relationship. But I'm going to set clear boundaries at the beginning that like, this isn't fundraising. And so like, let's not talk, let's not go into the metrics, let's not go into like the cash position. Like, I'm down to have this conversation, but like, are we cool to just not go there? Yes, great. Let's get to know each other. Tell me about yourself.

• 55:08Logan Bartlett?

  It's tempting, oh, this will be easy. Like, this person seems very interested.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 55:11Logan Bartlett?

  I just give them this information and then we'll be on the other side.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 55:14Logan Bartlett?

  And we'll be able to get back to building.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the way it ends up going is I'm giving this person information and they're probably just kind of like vaguely hearing it, but mostly it was like, you know, a casual thing, but it's not casual. It's getting logged into CRM the second you leave the meeting. And that's okay. That's the job. But I didn't have the experience to navigate that well at the time.

• 55:30Logan Bartlett?

  So earlier this week, you've launched an HRAS product. So for people that aren't nerds of enterprise software and HR, what is HRAS and why did you go about doing it?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  HRAS is an HR information system. It's basically, on some level, it's like the database that stores all employee information, the way that Salesforce is that for sales, or Marketo is that for marketing, or there's NetSuite. But like, basically, every asset in a company needs some system of record, which is, you know, a great venture term, but just using it sort of in the technical sense, you need some place that is the source of truth for the information about that piece of the company. And in HR, there's a thing called an HRAS that basically stores all the information about the employee record. And it's like the thing that then syncs to all your other tools to say, you know,

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Bob started on this date, this is Bob's manager, this is Bob's t-shirt size, this is where Bob lives, this is Bob's salary, and here's who can see what pieces of that information, here's who can change that information, here's how it flows to the rest of the company and whatnot. It also tends to be the place where you do things like store documents, you onboard an employee, you offboard an employee, you tend to have other small applications around it, like vacation, and birthdays, and time tracking, and a bunch of other stuff. And then you also like can manipulate the data through workflows. So the way that in Salesforce, you've got a bunch of flows that, you know, change an account from a lead to an opportunity or whatever, you know, in an HRAS,

• 57:04Speaker 01

  you might want ways to, you know, make somebody have a new manager or whatever. And then there's like reporting and things around it. But that's basically what it is, the central system of record that stores employee information.

• 57:15Logan Bartlett?

  Why build it?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Fundamentally, we built it because for years, for many, many years, I had an inkling that this was something customers wanted because they have been telling us. And we've always had a whiteboard of all of the things that are adjacent to what we do that customers could want. It's generally speaking, my view, that there's a balance of doing as many things as possible for a customer in HR, balanced by you got to do them to a high enough quality bar. Those things can actually go together at some level, but they, you know, become in tension with one another at some level. And I've always aspired for Lattice to do as much as possible for the customer. And this is a natural extension for us because we've already been storing so much data about the employee.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  We already have so much information about the org chart and management that it was still a challenging build. But it was not that far of a hop away. I've also believed that for the mid-market, which is the part we serve, I really like being this like big open ecosystem player where we partner with like as many of our partners as possible. I think it's really good for customers. One of the things we've learned is like people change out their tech stacks constantly in HR. Like basically every HR team in the say 50 to 1,000 employee segment in any given year is 100% considering changing out at least one part of their tech stack. It's just the nature of things like the segments that HR companies build for.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  There's just different product needs, like what work day needs to do is just going to be different than what an SMB focused company needs to do. And that's, that's a good thing and that's a natural thing. And that's like why the market works the way it does. But so I also thought that for the mid-market, Lattice's sort of dynamic with other companies was well suited to what I think is like a good option for, for companies to have a tech stack that plays like that.

• 59:02Logan Bartlett?

  It kind of puts you in co-opetition, or maybe you always are in co-opetition with other people in the stack and the ecosystem. How do you think about playing nice in the sandbox, but also wanting your, your toys?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  We've got a whole bunch of partners that we've had for a really long time that are of all flavors. But like in this particular case, our partners that have HRIS products. One of the things I love about HR is the people who build companies in HR, for whatever reason, tend to be really nice people. Maybe that's just how people are, but I think like there's a lot of other companies that genuinely have a similar mission to us that want to see HR elevated. And so, you know, a lot of them have given me calls when they've built performance products. I give them calls when we're going to build product that overlap. And even a company that overlaps with us on performance and we overlap with them on HRIS. My view is like, we should, in many cases, be able to share customers for very long periods of time. And if it's right for them.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  To use one of our products now and switch at this time, we should all be doing what's best for the customer. And I don't think that those things are at odds, like a lot of our competitive products sort of companies are also some of our best partners where we like market together and have been for years and have like a thousand shared customers. So I don't see this pie as particularly fixed. Like we all have such a small fraction of the market. And it's sort of like gas stations being next to something, next to each other or something, except that in these cases, based on each of the other products, there's so many nuanced differences that it's obvious to us. There will be cases where it's obvious to us that a customer is not, that a current lattice customer isn't right for our HRAS or that we haven't built what they need.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  And so we'd love to connect them with a great, strong partner of ours. That's another HRAS partner that we know we play well with, that we know has a quality product. So I don't know, I just, and maybe this is, maybe I'm like a little too friendly for like business in these cases. I just, I just don't see the pie as fixed.

• 1:01:00Logan Bartlett?

  Did you think about buying or acquiring your way into the space or was always going to be a build your own?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I hate, I hate, I, software acquisitions just scare me. I think there are cases where they work and I think there are instances where there's a long R and D build that you wouldn't want to do that's disconnected enough for the product. Or where a space is moving so fast that you have no choice but to get into it tomorrow and then do the dirty work of cleanup on the other side. But generally speaking, I think it is so much stronger when companies build themselves.

• 1:01:35Logan Bartlett?

  How did you go about actually architecting the development of this product? Because it, a lot of standalone companies exist singularly focused on this.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Once you get to a certain company size, what I realized is it, it gets really hard to build products inside the typical org. What we ended up doing here was partnering with an amazing founder who had, who you know too, who had, you know, sold a company and was like an amazing product leader himself. And we basically put it in the corner. There's this amazing book called Zone to Win. I didn't read the whole thing, but I read the part specifically about, you know, doing this inside the context of a company and it was hugely helpful to me. And who knows, there's like, you know, there's pros and cons to everything. But we basically treated it like a startup inside Lattice, where they had their own resources, where they weren't going to have, you know, the engineers working on the HRS were not,

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  there's no world in which they would be asked to jump on, you know, a current product that had immediate present demands from customers, because that'd be a huge risk. You know, if you, if you don't coordinate off the resources is that the main existing business is going to want to suck that away from it. So, you know, ring fencing, what you had there, putting up, in our, in our case, we put a founder at the helm. But if not a founder of it, I think somebody who's really got that entrepreneurial drive is critical for a big new product build like this.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  And then we had to just like settle in for a long build. This was a long build. It was hard.

• 1:03:04Logan Bartlett?

  How long was it?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Like over a year of building, you know, and, and a lot of people, there's just like a lot of components to this thing.

• 1:03:11Logan Bartlett?

  Did you make people assume some shared backend service? Like, how do you actually make the, I get the concept of letting someone go build in the corner. That sounds great, but then you might end up with two totally standalone interoperable products. If they decide to go on Google and use this and you're on AWS using that.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  One of the hard things along the way was aside from just the features that needed to be built was we needed to update the architecture for the core product. There was a ton of debate about how to do this. And, you know, it's a matter of degree of, do you completely tear down and rebuild? Do you do nothing? We landed, I guess, somewhere in the middle. But aside from the product build, there was a huge amount of coordination needed because there was also a change to the architecture to be able to store these gigantic employee records. And so one of the things we did that was really important was at a certain point in the development, we took one of our VPs of engineering who was Super strong and it was, you know, leading platform for Lattice's products.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  And he went and worked with this HRS team. And that was the thing that allowed us to work through that change, which required collaborating while having a team that was cordoned off.

• 1:04:21Logan Bartlett?

  You've kind of been multi-product from the start, or at least from the early, early-ish days. How do you think about what goes into an existing feature enhancement of your core business versus what is a net new product?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  There's probably a couple of heuristics. One could be, does it change pricing or SKUs? Or does it change what you might see in the dropdown? So like, there's a lot of features that we would add that would just obviously fit in our performance management bucket, or obviously fit in our engagement survey bucket. And so we want to be making those improvements without charging customers more. And we want to still be pushing on those things. Sometimes within that, you might have a product within performance that looks like a new SKU of performance. So like, an example of this would be like, there's a calibration product where basically at a big enough company, you, it's really hard to coordinate across 500 engineers.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Like, the VPs of engineering across a 500-person engineering org like, don't know their teams inside. So you need some process by which you make sense of what the ratings mean across different managers. And there's a thing called calibration. It's part of performance, but it's, it's its own product. A lot of it comes down to just knowing the customer well enough that you know where the thing is bucketed in their mind. And then sometimes you've got these gray areas. Sometimes you have a product that doesn't cleanly fit and you just, you just make a call.

• 1:05:44Logan Bartlett?

  You've had a weird number of investors and board members move on from the firm they were at before. So you had, Keith was at Coslo.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Logan Bartlett?

  Went to Flanders. Miles was at Thrive.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:05:55Logan Bartlett?

  Went to Benchmark. Doug was at Shasta.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Logan Bartlett?

  Went to Iconic. Presumably, John Curtis at Tiger was.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Logan Bartlett?

  At least involved in around.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  You think it's me?

• 1:06:03Logan Bartlett?

  I don't know. I don't think so. You seem like such a nice, affable guy.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:06:08Logan Bartlett?

  Can you take through, just because you've had this experience so many times, and we don't need to talk about any specific of the examples. I think they've all landed in good places seemingly, but like, what's the experience when you get that call saying, hey, I'm moving on to a new firm?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  I'm always happy for them. That's always my first reaction. Like, it's the same thing as like employees moving on. And I'm like, this isn't about me. This is about them and their firm. And it's a hard decision to leave a firm. It's a big decision. In many ways, it's a bigger decision, I think, than like leaving companies. Um, or like, you know, it happens less frequently. And so my first place is like, wow, that's a big thing. How are you doing? You know, like, can we, can we stay, you know, can we have a working relationship still? Uh, but I don't know. I, I, I start usually from a place of being happy for them. And, uh, I've found that each time it's happened, everything has gone in a great way. So like examples of this, Doug Pepper, uh, left Shasta. He was awesome.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  We've been working with Jason Pressman ever since, and he's been a phenomenal partner. Like, he is, over the years, it's been a long time now, but he's like, like the most trusted call I know how to make. And when Miles went to Benchmark, I got really close with Vince from Thrive. Miles actually stayed on our board. Vince is, uh, on our board now from Thrive. And Vince is brilliant. And now I have two smart people who are helping guide and support the business. And so in each of these cases, I just, I haven't experienced negative outcomes. I know it's not about me, and it's just like how things kind of go. So you're right. It's been kind of a lot, but I don't know. It, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't bother me.

• 1:07:46Logan Bartlett?

  How annoying is it to have someone with the last name Altman out there in the press all the time, making all this noise? Have you ever met him?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Who?

• 1:07:55Logan Bartlett?

  Sam.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  What's he do?

• 1:07:57Logan Bartlett?

  I hear his name a lot. Uh, he runs this AI.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Oh, he's like the brother of that HR software guy?

• 1:08:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, that's right. That's right.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:05Logan Bartlett?

  That's right. What, what, what is the most annoying thing, not about Sam specifically, but about Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  There was a funny, so just the most classic brother thing to do. When I tweeted about our HRIS, he quote tweeted it, like, I don't know what an HRIS is, but happy for you. And somebody in his comments is like, you know, like, how brutal is that to, you know, build a big company or whatever and have your brother invent AGI? And I was like, eh, that's funny. But I don't know, like, I'm really proud of him. It's really cool. Like, it's like such an important thing for the world. And he's earned it. Like, he's worked so hard to make it happen. And I see all the work he does to keep this going and to like, keep pushing it. And like, look what it's done for tech. Like, where would we be right now without it?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Like, what would be happening in tech in 2023 without AI?

• 1:08:57Logan Bartlett?

  Renter capitalists wouldn't know where to put money.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Where would they put money? They wouldn't. It would be such a weird time. And it's not just about like, it's honestly, to me, it's not even just about what's happened in VC. It's like, it's possible that what's happening with AI is going to be so much bigger than like, SaaS getting a big booster pack. Like, it's just so cool. So, like, you know, is there ever a moment where I'm like, ugh, God, I like, just like, can never do enough by comparison? Maybe, but like, it's really awesome and I'm very proud.

• 1:09:29Logan Bartlett?

  Does it scare you at all in a weird way that like, somebody you shared a house with growing up is now, I don't know where he would rank on like, most powerful influential people? It's high, at least at this exact second.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  It's super high. I think it's, it's good because I thought what you were going to say is, am I scared about AI?

• 1:09:46Logan Bartlett?

  Well, we can talk about that, too.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  And like, I maybe a little bit, but like, the good thing is, I'm, I'm glad that I know that the person who is at the front of a lot of this, like, that I, that I know is character. So I'm like, well, at least if someone's doing it, there's a good person to be doing it. So that quells some of my just like, general AI fears. In terms of him being like, super powerful, I've kind of just, you know, it's like, if you like, watch your kid grow up and you just like, see them get a little bigger every day, you like, don't notice it. Like, he's been doing well for a long time. I've like, gotten used to it.

• 1:10:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously, in the last year, it's changed.

• 1:10:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, it's gone to a new degree. I, uh, he does seem weirdly thoughtful, cerebral, like, not self-serious.

• 1:10:32Logan Bartlett?

  Sent away, I forget, I sent you the quote where he was like, well, my sensibilities are that of a midwestern Jew.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38Logan Bartlett?

  I was like, that's funny. That's a good joke.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:10:40Logan Bartlett?

  I like that.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we gotta get him on this podcast.

• 1:10:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Sammy should do this podcast.

• 1:10:45Logan Bartlett?

  That's a good question. I hadn't thought of that.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  I'll call him.

• 1:10:47Logan Bartlett?

  Um, can you tell me about your childhood? What was it in the water in St. Louis in the nineties or whatever?

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  It was like so different than the Bay Area. Like now that I'm here and I've got two kids and I'm just like in the, in the water of the Bay Area. Like we were in a suburb in St. Louis. I mean, this was also like before the internet. So like a lot was different. But like I went to a public school, like I didn't even like think about college applications until it was like, oh, it's junior year. You gotta take an SAT test now. Like, okay, you know, but I was, it was just such a different vibe, like the, the values are, I really like them, that it's just like the focus is different. How people spend their time, what people talk about is different.

• 1:11:26Logan Bartlett?

  Where were your parents today?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Uh, my mom was dermatologist, still is. Dad was doing real estate development and it was just like a, like I look back at it as just like such a pure, happy childhood. Like, you know, we, we did work hard in school, but like it wasn't because our parents pressured us. They were like so just like supportive and loving and whatever you want to do and be is okay. And, you know, one thing I do note that I do remember that was unique that I want to do with my kids is like, they really reaffirmed to us. You're awesome kids. You can do anything you want, which I think is like similar to my management thing about wanting to have people know that you believe in them so much. And then they'll just rise to whatever that is. But it was a pretty like simple, happy, carefree childhood.

• 1:12:14Logan Bartlett?

  When you go to operating, why do you think being a great writer is an important skill of a CEO?

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  It's the primary format of communicating to large groups.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  And it's also the way that I think ideas end up getting fully distilled. You know, this is like one of the things among many that Paul Graham has said that I very much agree with that, like writing is the process of thinking. And good writing is good thinking. And so if you can't communicate clearly in written word, then you haven't thought it through enough. And if you haven't practiced how to communicate enough times, you're not going to be able to align groups of people, to inspire large groups of people, to get people onto the same page about things. And so it's just, it's the medium through which work gets done. I mean, obviously, there's talking, but it's really important.

• 1:13:08Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and you said part of leadership saying the same thing over and over again. Can you expound on that? And you alluded to it there.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still can't believe how many times you have to say this. Like, this is one of those lessons that I need somebody to tell me this over meta. I need to be told over and over that you need to tell people things over and over. Because sometimes I'll be like, you know, oh, we said this two weeks ago at all hands. Everyone knows. And like our chief of staff or like some example, like, no, no, no. Like, half my team doesn't, didn't think that. Like, what do you mean? They're like, ah, they just forgot. Or you just have to say the same thing so many times. And it kind of makes sense. Like, the world's really noisy. Like, if I am driving to work and I see a billboard about whatever product for the first time, I don't remember it. Like, the way that I end up wanting to buy a product, and this is what makes for good marketing externally too,

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  is you need to see it five times, or seven times, or 11 times. You need to see a billboard. You need to hear somebody talk about it. You need to read a blog post about it. You need to see a tweet and have a friend recommend it. And then you get an outbound email and then you get invited to a marketing event. And then you finally are like, okay, I remember what that thing is. I'll take an intro. And that's what it takes. And it's the same thing with internal messaging, is they have to see it in all hands and read it in an email. And there's got to be a slack about it. Their manager has to talk about it to them in a one-on-one. And it's not because they're not paying attention. It's the same thing with me. I probably, if somebody tells me something at Lattice once, I probably don't remember it. I probably need to be told seven times too. It's just how people are.

• 1:14:37Logan Bartlett?

  You know, it's a funny one now that you have a podcast as well. As you say something one time. And then people, there's a group of people that will listen to all your episodes and there's a group of people that will only listen to one episode. And if you tell the same story again, they're like, yeah, we fucking heard that. It's like, right, but that was

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Right, you're two percent.

• 1:14:52Logan Bartlett?

  A year ago.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Logan Bartlett?

  And

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:14:54Logan Bartlett?

  The listenership is very different than it was a year ago. Like, give me a break.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:14:58Logan Bartlett?

  And so that's one of the things that now that you have a podcast, you're gonna, telling some of these same stories over and over again, people are gonna be like, yeah, we got it.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Totally. It's also like, the, the thing about how you'll have some percentage of the people will react to anything in certain ways. This is true when you're communicating to the company about any topic, particularly a topic that's a little bit sensitive. There are going to be, and there's a normal distribution of how people receive everything. And when you have a company of hundreds of people, or an audience of a hundred thousand people, or whatever, you're gonna have some, some absolute N number of people that react in some strong way that you don't particularly like, but it might only be 4% of the people receiving it. And 80% might have quietly been nodding their heads and like, cool, I get it, that makes sense. And that's one of the things that just get, you know, I can't,

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  I would never want to be a politician. I can't even imagine. But yeah, you don't always hear the feedback easily when you're just hearing the voices that are the ones who choose to spoke.

• 1:15:56Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. A hundred thousand people yelling at you, if you have a 95% approval rate, that's still, whatever.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:01Logan Bartlett?

  Still a lot of people that are yelling at you, right?

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:16:03Logan Bartlett?

  What was the impetus to do a podcast?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Eric is, I think, an amazing podcaster. I really like getting to talk to smart people about, you know, the companies they've built, or anything that they do, is fun for me. I just like, have not had the ability to set it up. And Eric with Turpentine has like, made it really easy for me to just like, run a season with him, talk to some people that I can like, learn a ton from. And you just like, get an excuse to hang out for an hour and like, ask them your favorite questions. And it's, and it's really great.

• 1:16:33Logan Bartlett?

  What is the season? What have you committed to do?

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Uh, I think we're gonna do like 10 or 12 episodes.

• 1:16:37Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. Well, there's a plug for, for people to subscribe to it.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  It's great. We just, yeah, we had one with Eric Claman from Ramp. It was awesome.

• 1:16:43Logan Bartlett?

  He's, he's great. He's also very, uh, enabling of entrepreneurialism within the company, I think. That, when I heard that you guys were like that, he very much wants to bring in people.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  That, by the way, is an example of a company where the talent density is incredible. And they've just hired such Entrepreneurial people and clearly taking bets on them. And you know, you can see it both in the people who have left and clearly what's happening inside the company. Yeah, for sure. Whenever you talk to someone for diligence within the business, it's like, oh, that's an impressive human being. What about investing on the side? How much, how much of your time do you spend doing that? I really enjoy it. I don't know exactly what the amount of time is, but like definitely like many hours per week. How's it set up? It's a fund. It is an actual fund. It's an actual fund. There's someone I work with, Nimbala, who's full time on it, who's fantastic. But yeah, it's just an early stage fund. I've been doing it for years. I was angel investing for years before that. I've always loved it.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  So it's always just been like a part of, you know, my, my sort of work constellation. I just love getting to support founders to like learn about new businesses. There's so many times where I end up getting to learn from founders, things that I take back to Lattice that just make me stronger and you get to see that there are so many different ways that people can be great. And, you know, I still want to be obviously like my best version of myself, but that doesn't mean I don't want to learn something from other great founders who are just so good in their own domain or, you know, whether one's amazing at partnerships or at recruiting or at fundraising, like I learn from them all the time. So yeah, been doing it for a while. I love it. How has fatherhood changed you as a leader? I mean this in a good way.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  It makes me care a little bit less about some stuff.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  It was really easy before kids. When I'm, you know, when you've got, when you start a company, you're so engrossed in it and it's so, it feels like and is so everything.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  And it still is like outside of my family and friends, just obviously the next most important thing. But the, the gap between that distance is, is very high. And so something that would stress me out and make me lose sleep and be a ball of nerves for a week in the past. I don't have, it's really hard for me to have that reaction now when, you know, After the workday is done, I'm not just gonna sit there stewing on this thing. I'm gonna like have dinner and bedtime with my kids and immediately remember what matters most. It reframes, it doesn't lessen what lattice is, but it just exposes this different thing that means a lot more.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  And so it, I think, tempers me in my workday.

• 1:19:25Logan Bartlett?

  Has it made you more empathetic?

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  I've always been extremely empathetic. I, I think if anything, I actually probably have been empathetic to a point of weakness. And so my leadership journey has probably been to sort of round the edges off my empathy over the years. I don't know that kids, so I, I don't know that kids had the effect of making me more empathetic necessarily.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  I know it does that for a lot of people. It like opens up their heart. I think mine was already really open and it's possible that if anything, it just took, because I was aiming all of it at work. It's possible that I now show up as a little bit less, but I would say it's all, I've always been over indexed on empathy, probably.

• 1:20:06Logan Bartlett?

  Do you live in San Francisco proper?

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Peninsula. I did live in San Francisco proper until two years ago.

• 1:20:11Logan Bartlett?

  What's your meta view on the city versus the peninsula? What was the impetus for the move?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  With kids, the peninsula is really nice. Just like being in the suburbs is really nice with kids. You can obviously have kids in the city and that can be great, but I love being in the suburbs now. But I'm in San Francisco all the time. I love the city. I think it needs a lot of work. And like part of why we left was some of the struggles, like it was related to what's going on with the city. And just like, didn't feel good with little kids for us. But I think the Bay Area is like super strong. I actually think back to AI. I do think that AI is like a big part of what has re-centered the gravity of tech to San Francisco. Like I think it was hanging in the balance a little bit more before. I think it's, I think it's firmly back at this point is my read.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  So I'm hugely long on the Bay Area for tech. And I'm long on San Francisco largely because I believe that. Young people are so important to the ecosystem. And I think for young people, it's just, it's going to be more fun and more interesting to live in San Francisco than on the peninsula.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  But, you know, I got here from home in like 28 minutes. It's great. So it's not that far. So I don't know. I like both, but I'm very long Bay Area in general. I got something I'm curious about, which is.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  So the first, the first sort of way I interacted with you was just seeing your Twitter.

• 1:21:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Which was probably like a few years ago. And so my only experience at first was this like funny meme goofy thing. And I then, through watching your podcast, you sort of exposed the more serious side of you. This is the first time I got to meet you in person, but now I can like see what's behind it all. What was your, was there, how, like, was it planned? Like, did you go, were you like, I need to, like, how did you go through whatever that was?

• 1:22:08Logan Bartlett?

  What was that arc? Yeah.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Logan Bartlett?

  So I was, so I was at Battery for six years and Battery is an amazing firm, but is registered with the SEC. And so like, I would get slapped on the wrist when I would make jokes and stuff. And I joined Redpoint. I left in December 19, joined in March of 2020. Pandemic hits. We're stuck at home and I'm fucking around. Like literally that was what it was. It's just, I had some extra time that I was just spending on my phone, like anyone else spending on Clubhouse and all that. And it was a weird way of getting exposure beyond what I would get on my own without needing to expose the totality of myself. And so it was kind of this one dimensional version of me that was 2% or 5% or 10%, right?

• 1:22:51Logan Bartlett?

  And it, it worked and you get this feedback loop of like virality that comes with it and, and it, but it only works to a point. And I would get in meetings and people would be like, oh yeah, Twitter joke guy. I'd be like, right, you're right. Can we talk about your metrics? Yeah. Can we? And I think it was like a context switch of people. They were like, hang on. So I thought this guy just joked around. Yeah, there's a scene in Wedding Crashers, like make me a bicycle clown. Everyone would want me to like make them a bicycle. I was like, we have to work. We have to do somewhere. And so the podcast thing was kind of related, but, but different in that I felt the market was so competitive at the time. And you, anyone could be anywhere because of a screen and relationships were increased.

• 1:23:35Logan Bartlett?

  Capital was commoditized and relationships are increasingly deprioritized, I would say, by founders. And I was like, what the fuck? I'm not a former CEO. What do I draw on of experience? Like, I think I'm a nice enough guy who's trying hard to help my companies, right? And like, that pitch is kind of hard, too, on a screen for 30 minutes. It's hard to like, bat to come across. And so that was kind of the impetus for it was, hey, can I show a little bit more of myself and cut through some of the noise in some way? Because I was out of ideas. And if the market, the irony of it was 2021, it felt like I needed it. By the time it actually got going in 2022, the market had totally corrected. And like, people wanted to talk to me again because capital got scarce.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:22Logan Bartlett?

  And so if it had been, then I wouldn't have had time to do it because everyone was fundraising and you were running around with your head cut off. And then now, when I started, I probably didn't feel like I needed it as much, but I had the actual time to do it. So like a weird irony, but the hard part is being exposed, right? The hard part is having, inevitably, there's going to be people that dislike you when you're talking a lot, no matter what, which is a hard thing.

• 1:24:47Speaker 01

  Do you enjoy the meme version or the serious podcast version more?

• 1:24:51Logan Bartlett?

  Definitely this, definitely, like, not even close. I've asked myself why I keep doing this and it's, you want to keep growing and you want to keep having good guests and you want to have great conversations and you want to have some feedback loop. It's my own little like product market fit thing. I figured out the meme thing and it worked. And I was like, good, that is, I've moved on. And exposing a little bit more, this is much more effective way, I would say, even if the N, you can look at the Twitter impressions and you'll end up with whatever, millions of impressions, right? But like, the quality of those are low and the relationship is low versus someone hearing you talk and knowing your mannerisms and getting annoyed because you're circuitous in your question asking or whatever.

• 1:25:35Logan Bartlett?

  You're building a much deeper relationship with people. And so I like. This a lot more. And I also feel like I still haven't figured it out. I'm still like in the process. Twitter, at some point I had figured out the meme Twitter Twitter thing and I was like, okay, good.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Logan Bartlett?

  I've got it.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  You were good at it.

• 1:25:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  What are you investing in now? Are you like, are you big AI? You think it's overhyped? Do you think it's underhyped?

• 1:25:55Logan Bartlett?

  I think VCs didn't learn all their lessons of the past cycles. From a pricing standpoint of of deals, I think there's probably a bunch of different areas within it that are going to be super valuable. Picks and shovels of infrastructure enabling, I think, is really interesting. I think there's probably a lot of formerly what would have been shitty vertical software companies that can now be enabled by software and what previously would have just been service or headcount. So, I mean, law firms are the one that everyone points to, but I

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  But there'll be a bunch.

• 1:26:25Logan Bartlett?

  There will be a bunch and and it'll be a superpower for all different software companies as well. The stuff that I think is most interesting and hard to think about that I'm curious around are the things like mid journey and character AI and, you know, runway and whatever. The weird shit is sort of what I and I'm like, I don't totally understand.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  The consumer stuff.

• 1:26:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And the net new like form factor that wasn't possible in a way in the past that you can't vertical software, you can internalize. That stuff is hard to.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:26:55Logan Bartlett?

  I would not have bet that someone would want to talk to chatbots all day, every day for long periods of time.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  It's really hard, like predicting these like behavior changes, like an air, like Airbnb is like an easy example, but like predicting behavior changes feels so hard.

• 1:27:07Logan Bartlett?

  I thought about all the mobile stuff, the stuff that created value out of mobile and like the biggest winners were Google and Apple for sure. Right? Then after that, it was like kind of derivative related things that were counter that makes sense in retrospect, WhatsApp or Instagram or Uber or whatever it is. Like all those things make sense, but one, they didn't happen immediately after the iPhone came out. They happened in a slow trickle over time. And I don't know, I think a lot of those probably weren't totally obvious that they would go as far as they

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Logan Bartlett?

  Did. And so we're very like, I would characterize myself as AI curious. And I'm glad that there's enthusiasm and excitement. We had reached a point of cynicism in the ecosystem that

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:48Logan Bartlett?

  Just was unhealthy. And so I'm

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  It was.

• 1:27:51Logan Bartlett?

  I'm glad that. And then the other bucket I didn't say that I think is interesting are the foundational model companies. And I think that's like a It's a fascinating thing of how that whole ecosystem is going to play out. So there's this company, OpenAI, Anthropic, there's Mistral in Europe, there's whatever, a whole bunch of foundation, Google has their stuff. I think that's really interesting and I don't know, it's kind of like an orb of power that I don't totally understand.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  And you guys invest early in growth, right?

• 1:28:21Logan Bartlett?

  Correct, yeah.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Do you think at all about that where you're like, value is going to accrue to net new versus incumbents versus late-stage growth and therefore just at some high level of capital allocation, we should deploy 80% to growth and 20% to earlier?

• 1:28:36Logan Bartlett?

  It's like separate funds. And so Battery was that way. Battery had one fund and they would do growth equity and private equity and early-stage venture and late-stage venture and would think about where value would accrue.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  At a high level like that?

• 1:28:47Logan Bartlett?

  At a high level. And they had people that focused on specific areas, but like at a meta level, they were saying, hey, venture is crazy.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  We're going to allocate capital to these buckets.

• 1:28:55Logan Bartlett?

  Now, what makes that weird is from an LP standpoint, LPs are like, we want to be able to put you in a discrete bucket.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're like, we're the asset allocators, you just invest.

• 1:29:04Logan Bartlett?

  You just invest. And what they do is they make the sausage come out delicious on the other side, which is like net great returns.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:11Logan Bartlett?

  But it's hard to bucket them. If you haven't lived that journey with them, I think it's hard for LPs to put you in a in a bucket of that. I kind of view our job as because we're singularly, so I'm singularly on the early growth team, just doing Series B and C investments. And so you have to be conscious of valuation, you have to be conscious of the dynamics in the market and where value is accruing and all that. But at some point, your job is also to do the Series B and C investments that you told your LPs you were going to go do in the space.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  Oh, it's been hard for last year, I guess, because B and C has been like ice cold.

• 1:29:47Logan Bartlett?

  It's been ice cold. To some extent, you will get credit or suffer from the vintage's success if you're just going to be like singularly focused on that stuff. And so that's what you need to be cognizant of. But the good thing is time diversification is an important one that we use a lot on our side on early growth, doing Series Bs and Cs. Our fund lengths have been six years, five years. This one will probably be, I don't know, five years. So we kind of use time diversification as our forcing function.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  Do you think there's a catalyst? For B and C stage to thaw, like, or what would that catalyst be?

• 1:30:24Logan Bartlett?

  I'm nervous that there's just so much capital in the ecosystem that what's meaningful to me as a smallish, we have 700 million bucks, a little over 700 million bucks. And so we're like small in the grand scheme of other people that have $5 billion. And so what is an important investment for us is 30 or 40 million, right? That's a meaningful investment. That could be a rounding error to a $6 billion fund. And so that's what concerns me about the thawing of the market that's, that's happening is it's still, no matter what, people don't like giving money back. I've found that is.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Founders don't like giving money back.

• 1:30:55Logan Bartlett?

  Well, founders don't, but investors is what I was referring to. If you raise a $5 billion fund.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  You're gonna give four back.

• 1:31:00Logan Bartlett?

  You've started living and running your firm as if it's a $5 billion fund. And so you'll probably find a way to spend that money. And if it's breaking, instead of doing one $300 million round, if it's breaking it up into 10, 30 million dollar rounds, you might do that. And so I think at some point, all of this stuff recycles through from a capital allocator standpoint, and we will be judged on the merits of the decisions we made. And I think a reckoning's kind of happening right now. The one big wild card out there, and it, it makes me kind of cringe when I see the headlines about it, but is oil in Middle East. And there's a lot of money over there that is looking for places to park.

• 1:31:42Logan Bartlett?

  And I kind of wish LPs, it was more transparent who your LPs were. I wish founders were making more decisions based on like, oh, interesting.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Logan Bartlett?

  That.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  That's actually my cap table.

• 1:31:52Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that group's supporting a hospital system and that group's supporting a sovereign wealth, middle eastern, you know, thing. And that level of abstraction doesn't just get there. It's also self-serving because I think it would serve us well to have that level of visibility in the ecosystem. But until people start going back out for raising funds and need to reckon with the decisions that they've made, I think it's probably gonna be.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Totally. And that one's hard because just speaking from a founder point of view, I mean, like, if it's bad, it's bad. But short of something noteworthy, you're operating so much lower on Maslow's hierarchy where you're like, I gotta fund this company so I can like keep people employed and like hire its engineers for this product. It's just such a.

• 1:32:30Logan Bartlett?

  It sounds kind of crass, but like. Jamal Kaskoggi and like the considerations for sovereign wealth in Saudi Arabia, then giving money to a limited or being a limited partner in a venture fund to then to you. It's such a value chain of things. One, for you to even know that, you would have to ask the question, which most people don't. And then two, you'd have to have, well, is it more morally right for me to take money from this firm that took money from that firm or have a higher valuation for my own employees? That's right. That like, and so it starts to be a very difficult mental model. It's difficult. So. Yeah. Cool. Sweet. Anything else? No, this was great. Yeah, thanks for, uh, thanks for doing this. Yeah, I enjoyed it.