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Chapter 1: What is product-market fit and why is it important?
You've got to have some North Star vision of your product. It's obviously wrong to scramble to every single customer request. It's also wrong to ignore it all. Some of it's good, some of it's bad. You're both hungry to just like find product market fit, but you have some people who are asking you still, oh, if you could do this, I'd really like that.
And you kind of have to just like trust yourself to say, I'm going to ignore that. Sometimes it's clear. Sometimes you know it's right or wrong. But I think most of the time those calls are hard.
One of the most common pieces of startup advice is listen to your customers. But what happens when customers ask for the wrong thing? Founders are constantly balancing competitive forces. Conviction versus feedback, focus versus opportunity, and short-term revenue versus long-term vision.
Jack Altman has spent years navigating those trade-offs, first as the co-founder and CEO of Lattice, and now as an investor through AltCapital. In this speedrun conversation, Jack shares lessons on product market fit, customer feedback, hiring, fundraising, and what separates companies that find momentum from those that stall.
Let's talk about Jack Altman. Started off investment banking. Then you were an early startup employee at Teespring. Then you built Lattice, unicorn company. Then you started a fund, $275 million first fund. Three kids, a really popular podcast. Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How should founders balance customer feedback with their vision?
What's next? Energy drink or are you going to start training for MMA fighting? I don't know. I might just come do speed run all the time. What's kind of, talk about this part of your life that you're in now. Kind of what's lighting you up? What's firing you up? Is it just caffeine or?
It's a lot of caffeine. Yeah, the little kids makes, they take every minute. They're six, three, and one. So that's a lot of it. But I'm loving investing right now. And I did some of it while I was running Lattice. But the truth is, when I was building a company, investing was totally uninteresting to me. I just wanted to work on my company and like going and meeting another founder.
I was like, I'm happy for you, but I just like can't get myself excited. Like I just... two in the tunnel, and now I'm enjoying being not in tunnel vision. And so for me, I feel like life has always been chapters and I just like embrace the changes. But at the moment, I'm loving investing and that's what I've been doing the last two years now.
And then, you know, in terms of your journey, so when I met you, you were at Teespring and you were the VP of business development. Had you been a VP of anything at that point?
No, I had never managed anybody. When I joined Teespring, it was like 10 people or 12 people. And over two years, it became like 300 people, as you saw. And that was probably too fast. You know, there's like, you know, it's hard to do. Obviously, like, we'll talk about this.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of hiring the first employees in a startup?
But like, right now, we're probably in like the most momentum centric moment of startup building, at least I've ever seen. And which isn't a bad thing, but we definitely had that. So no, I've learned everything about management in that period of time, I guess.
And what's interesting is I'm wondering, What was it about that experience that made you say, you know what, next time I'm going to be the founder, I'm going to be the one in the hot seat? Were there scars or anything you need to work through from that experience?
I think on some level, I had the Jeff Bezos regret minimization thing, which is I was like, I know I love tech. I know I love startups. And if I don't try to build my own company at some point, I'm like, that is... seemed to me at least like the pinnacle startup experience out of all of the different seats in tech. And, you know, that was kind of how I felt about it.
And so I just was like, if I don't try my hand at building a company, I'll kind of always regret it. And I was at an age and a point in my life where it made sense to do it.
But then just in terms of like the origins of this spirit, right? There's entrepreneurship in your family, right? This seems to be, it just seems to be kind of a core value, right? Did you have some, you know, elementary school candy business like I did? Or, you know, when did it start?
Not at all. I mean, look, we grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. And it was not like there was no sort of focus on tech or even like professionalism in general, like for the future, I would say, you know, like embedded in our childhood. Not in a negative way. I think I'm like a positive way. I was just like focused on being a kid is really how I remember it.
And it wasn't until coming out here, but I think once I worked at a YC company and you're at a small company, I'm sure for all of you, hopefully most of your 12th employees will want to start startups one day. I think that's a really good thing if you have the types of employees that have been founders or want to be founders or could be founders.
So I think some of it too is once you work at a company that's like that, you're like, I want to see if I can do it.
You're like, I could do that. You're like, maybe. Maybe I could do it. And then in terms of the idea for Lattice, can you kind of talk about how you came, how many of you have heard of Lattice? That's pretty good. So Lattice is a phenomenal success story. I think you guys, what, raised it around $300 million?
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Chapter 4: How did Jack Altman navigate the early days of Lattice?
And that's the issue with it is like some of it is like it is wrong to it's obviously like It's obviously wrong to scramble to every single customer request. Like there's plainly that won't work. It's also wrong to ignore it all and just be like, no, I know best. Like, let me tell you why the thing I'm, you know, building is perfect and why your idea is wrong.
And so some of it is like a judgment, you know, back and forth dance with customers to figure out You know, you've got to have some North Star vision of your product, but then I do think customers are good at helping fill in the gaps of like within this outline, like what's the color in the blanks. So I think you actually have to listen to it.
One of the trickiest things is when you get like a big customer, like some big enterprise comes along and they're like, hey, we'll give you $400,000 a year if you do this thing. that zero other customers have asked you for. And right now you're at 220,000 of ARR. And you're like, oh, I could triple if I just derail myself for like a month. It's like kind of tempting.
And usually, you know, usually that's a hard call. Sometimes it's clear. Sometimes you know it's right or wrong. But I think most of the time those calls are hard. But it's never a month. And it's never their last ask. Yeah.
You know, you'll hear stories about like at a company like Stripe, for example, they had a couple early really big customers, I think like Shopify and Lyft, who pushed their product roadmap in directions that turned out to be really helpful for a lot of other customers. And so this is why it's not straightforward.
And I don't think you can apply like this is correct or this is incorrect thing to it. I think you really have to like think about it and see like if we listen to you know, Shopify? Are we going to get a lot of features out of these requests that other people aren't currently asking for, but that will help a lot of other large customers or whatever else?
And then when you were first kind of ramping up in sales, did you hire seasoned sales folks or did you hire kind of You, but a couple years younger, right out of school. How did you think about it?
What we had good luck with early was we needed sales reps who were like pretty creative and entrepreneurial. Like we tried a couple sort of like out of huge org sales reps and that just like worked less well for us. They like wanted to play a book. They wanted to just like throughput this thing that like wasn't ready yet.
And they like had to figure out how to be creative and like figure out a process. Because like at the beginning, you're trying to figure out a sales process as much as you're just trying to like sell stuff.
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Chapter 5: What lessons can be learned from fundraising experiences?
And it's like we built the shit out of this product, like way too many features, and then people just like didn't want it that bad. And then on performance reviews, we built like some of it, and then we were just like, here's designs of what it's going to look like. You should trust us that we're going to be able to build it. And people were like, great, we'll pay you for it.
But I remember the very first like annual paying customers we had for performance reviews launched performance reviews without there yet being a completed way to close the performance review and do the follow up work.
And so as the first performance review was going live, my co-founder is like programming the ability to end the cycle and share feedback and stuff like they were like on the beginning of the roller coaster that didn't yet have the end. And so like, and I'm like, that's good. And it worked. And like, you know, he was tired and he got it done and it's fine, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
But I think that's a better way to approach the early crunchy days of a startup than like trying to make everything absolutely perfect. It's just like, it's not the right energy usually.
Yeah, I mean, I think that often you just build the wrong thing. Yeah. You sort of have to You have to go through it.
One cat. I mean, we could talk about things that are like the same and different from, you know, I started last in 2015. Now it's 2026. Like a lot has obviously changed. I do think one thing that has changed is the like standards of product quality have just gone up a lot. And, you know, I remember thinking this and I guess we got the performance reviews things live like end of 2016.
But I remember talking about like, oh man, these companies from 2010 that just like got this like piece of junk live, but it was cloud based and they just like ripped. Like how lucky were they? Because those products were awful. And look how much harder, how much better ours have to be. Now I see like, you know, a product of, you know, a series A company with like 3 million of ARR.
And I'm like, whoa, that is a much more polished product than we had. So I do think that like, I don't know if this is a, I think this advice maybe should be a little bit adjusted for the time because I do think standards from customers are a little bit higher on what product quality should look like. So I'm less confident on this.
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