Jack Altman on Product-Market Fit

0:00You'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.

0:27But 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 Alt Capital. 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.

1:07Then 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, 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, what's lighting you up? What's firing you up? It's just caffeine or? It's a lot of caffeine. Yeah. The little kids makes, uh, they take every minute. Um, they're six, three in one. So that's a lot of it.

1:49Um, but I'm loving investing right now. And, um, 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'm just too 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.

2:19And 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. 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.

2:57So no, it all, I've learned everything about management in that period of time, I guess. And what's interesting is I'm wondering, you know, 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, I'm going to be the one in the hot seat, you know, and were there scars or, or anything you need to work through from that experience? I think on some level I had the like 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.

3:33And, 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. 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, like 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.

4:14not in a negative way. I think I'm like a positive way. I was just like focused on being a kid. It's 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 like a small company, like I'm sure for all of you, like hopefully most of your 12th employees will want to start startups one day. Like 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.

4:43You'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? $300 billion, yeah. No,$300 million. No, it was$3 billion. About a$3 billion. Yeah. $3 billion valuation. Yeah,$300 billion. Let's go with that. You know, you got to unicorn status in five years. It all sounds very easy. You know, how sure were you about that idea when you set off on the adventure?

5:17I knew there was a problem, but I didn't know. It was actually like our third pivot. So it was, we had the problem right, which was that like people management was a problem at startups and that there was coordination issue between employees and feedback and compensation, all these like murky HR people issues, but we didn't have the right solution. So we knew the problem, we got the problem right, we had the wrong solution. What was sort of the rubric you used to say, okay, pivot time? This is not always true, but this was something I came to believe both with like, you know, getting initial product market fit.

5:47And then Lattice was also a company that launched many products. We had four product lines at substantial revenue over the years. And so I came to the view that most of the time when stuff works, it works fast. And I still believe that. And now with my investing, I still mostly think that. And that's not like a hard and fast rule. There are things that take time. And there are situations where you don't quite have price market fit. And it is actually right on the other side of like a few more features or a little bit more sanding of the edges. But directionally speaking, when people want what you're selling, you know kind of quickly, I think.

6:27And we just weren't getting the pull. And so it always seemed like one more feature, one more feature, and it was just never there. and then on a third, you know, a third attempt, it was like all this stuff was broken and we sold it anyway. And at the beginning, you were really hands-on in sales, as I remember. How big did the company get before you started to kind of step away from that? Step away, probably like 10 million of ARR. But I wasn't like, I was not the best sales rep even by like 2 million of ARR. And I didn't do sales for the, I mean, I did sales at first to see, to try to have a business at all.

7:05But then at some point, the reason I still think it's good for founders to do sales, even when you have a sales team that can be productive, is I still think it's how you find... I think sales is the best way to find product market fit. And even when you're in early revenue, I still think that the person who's doing the sales conversations or the customer success conversations just as good, if not better. I think being in those rooms is like the best way still to know exactly what's not resonating, what lights customers up. And so I just didn't want to get away from that. And the truth is, you know, still the end.

7:38At 100 million in revenue, I was still selling customers periodically just because I was like, I just want to see what feels hard. And how often did you have to sort of wrestle with this potentially large customer wants this one thing or they think they need this one thing that we don't currently have and it kind of pulls us away from our roadmap? Do we do it? Do we not do it? Every day, like constantly. Then how did you manage that? Well, some of it's good, some of it's bad. 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.

8:16It'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.

8:58And 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 task. Yeah, and 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.

9:32And so this is why it's not straightforward and I don't think you can apply like a 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 of years younger, right out of school? How did you think about it?

10:04What 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 the beginning, you're trying to figure out a sales process as much as you're just trying to like sell stuff. And how far ahead of your current capabilities were you selling? You know, you're always sort of, as the CEO, you're always selling a little bit ahead.

10:39How far ahead are you? Definitely. I was selling like six months ahead. Wow. And my co-founder would get really mad at me. So, but then at some point he was like, you know, kind of accepted that it was like useful. I would say the sales team was trying to, I was trying to tell them not to sell ahead, even though I was doing it. Because like, I actually think that like, by and large with customers, if you are selling things you don't have, I actually think that's really expensive to your brand and reputation. So I didn't want to do that, like broadly. Like people talk, the best referrals are ones from existing customers.

11:16And so like, I actually think it's important that customers like your product and get what they thought they were getting and all of that. but at the same time, speaking out of the other side of my mouth, I did find it helpful to say, you know, we're thinking about doing this thing. We don't have it yet, but if we do, would you be interested? And that you can kind of feel as a founder, you know, will my aperture open a little bit or a lot if we had this thing? And that can kind of guide your product roadmap. So I do think some amount of it's important. And then as you start to scale, then it shifts from not just the challenge of selling, but actually getting folks implemented in live.

11:51were there any kind of any if I could do it all over again how would I think about implementation oh yeah on the first product that didn't have good product market fit which was this like goal management tool okay or management you remember from I remember and um it's like we built the shit out of this product like way too many features like 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 the old ability. People were like, great, we'll pay for it.

12:23But 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.

13:04It'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 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.

13:44Like how lucky were they? Because those products were awful. And look how much harder, how much better R-Sets have to be. now I see like you know a product of you know a series a company with like three million of ARR and I'm like whoa that is a much more polished product than we have so I do think that like I don't know if this is a I don't 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 um on what product quality should look like so I'm less confident on this so you mentioned your co-founder which Eric Koslow is co-founder, really great human being.

14:19And you guys had a very successful co-founder relationship. Lots of startups really struggle with that. Do you have any kind of pattern recognition on what works and what doesn't work? There was some luck involved. I mean, we were friends and colleagues from Teespring. And so there was like a lot of trust there. But like, I don't think we knew when we got started how close we would be. So there was some luck involved there. But like, to like highlight what it like, you know we I think with a different co-founder for both of us we would have like quit you know before we had found product market fit and there was the sense of like oh I asked this person I really care about to like take the sleep and so we got to keep pushing and like not give up just yet so there was like a lot of care and trust in there which I think like that just like helps you get through tough times I think the other thing that was really useful was there was a high degree of like professional trust like I thought he was good at what he was good at he thought I I was good at what I was good at.

15:10And as a result, we like had clarity in like domains and there wasn't a lot of second guessing each other. There wasn't a lot of like getting in the way of each other's stuff. There wasn't a lot of like both looking over the computer at the same issue trying to solve it together. So there was like a high degree of divide and conquer and trust the other person. So those were really good. And did you guys have any sort of rituals that you think supported the partnership over time? We were definitely co-founders who were friends. It wasn't like we were just like best friends doing a company together.

15:41Like our relationship was rooted in work for sure. But like the fact that we spent so much time together outside of work too, I think led to like a lot of shorthand at work. So I think it was like just a large amount of like time together. I also think there was like a degree like in a personal relationship too of like, we both like let little stuff go. Stuff never got ad hominem. We didn't hold back from telling each other the truth. Like, we would get into loud arguments, like, in front of everybody, not hiding anything. But it was always over, like, the ideas at hand, never, like, attacks at each other.

16:17So it was, like, a high, it was, like, a high trust relationship. But that included, like, a lot of arguing. Creating something is hard. And so there's going to be friction. And so I think it sounds like you guys kind of said, okay, we are having a disagreement right now. Yeah. And we would, like, kind of, like, bicker in, like, a sibling. You know, it's like it wasn't like if you said X and I thought 20 degrees different from what you said, but I didn't have that close relationship. I didn't feel like fighting with you. I just like, yeah, sure. But it wasn't like that. It was like, actually, I think it's a little bit different.

16:47You know, and I think I think that actually mattered. In hindsight, what were the sort of what were the big leverage points that you got out of the YC program? I think there's like two things that stuck out to me. One was the clarity of what actually matters. like I do think programs like Speedrun like YC are very good at helping people really just internal because it takes some repetition to internalize these things that we've all seen in blog posts and we've all like seen on Twitter that like the only things that matter are like getting product market fit and building a great team and the only things that get product market fit are talking to users and building product and like it feels like there's so many other things that are important when you're running a very early stage startup and they kind of are, but they basically aren't.

17:33And it just, it requires repetition. And so I think that was one thing was like setting the DNA early of like the clarity of this matters, this doesn't matter. And then was there anything that was just kind of noise? The advice that you're going to get in any program, maybe there's an exception here, but generally speaking, anytime anybody's trying to give advice, this is why I'm like trying to say like, nothing I'm saying I'm totally confident about, but like any advice that you get that's given to a group of companies is doing its best to fit to the highest number possible. But there's no advice that's right for 100 % of companies.

18:06And so what you end up getting is a bunch of advice that probably is actually right 80 % of the time. But like if, you know, there's 10 pieces of advice given, two out of those 10 aren't gonna be right for you, just statistically or whatever. So I do think that if you listen to it all as dogma, you're gonna, something's gonna be wrong for sure. When you think back to hiring those first few employees, sort of, you know, where did they come from? And how did you sort of convince them to join? Two things are true. One is, in order to be a great company, you need a high percentage of your first 10 employees to be, like, truly great.

18:43There's, like, almost no examples of great companies where, like, that didn't happen. And so that's the task at hand. and you also have to sort of take the pragmatic view that an obviously great employee, it doesn't make that much sense for them to be the sixth employee at a startup. The reason it doesn't make that much sense is if they are that obviously great, they're going to go get$10 gazillion from a frontier lab or SpaceX or whatever, or they're going to get an exec job at, you know, some, you know, super hot series D company, or they're going to be a founder. And so what you're really looking for is diamonds in the rough of people who are in fact great, but are not legibly great to the entire world.

19:28It's the only way. So this is like a piece, you know, again, this is 80 % confidence advice. Like there are tons of other examples. There's a lot of situations where like somebody will be sitting here and they're like, oh, I built, you know, this is my third company. My last two were unicorns. I have all these amazing people who would follow me to the ends of the earth. Like this isn't for you. but generally speaking, the goal of the first 10 employees is diamonds in the rough. And like, that has to be the mindset. And then, you know, when you think about onboarding on a small team, so how did you, how did you sort of set the tone for that, that first 10 people?

19:58We didn't do a heavy onboard because when you're 10 people, it's just like, you could do the hour or two hours a day of onboarding, but you're just all together in a room all the time. So it was like no onboarding needed. Um, cause it's just so quick and so organic. That said, we did like really fun stuff. Like when we were seven people, we went to Nicaragua for like a week and we just like hung out in an Airbnb altogether. And that was like super gelling for the team. We did like all sorts of like random stuff outside the office. We were also just all together all the time, working on the same thing, caring about the same problem.

20:31People actually like for us to ask company, like it was pretty mission oriented. So people care about what we were doing, which I think is like really helpful. When you think about the, the, the hunt for the right investor, You know, what stands out in your mind from your processes that you've gone through? You'll get a range from how helpful investors are from founders to like from zero to medium. And some will say it just truly doesn't matter. So all you want is like the most money at the best possible terms and the least control imaginable. There are some that'll tell you you're actually like hiring a partner basically.

21:04And so you should, you know, take your time and do it. That's a personal taste thing. I know some like really great founders who would kind of describe it to you either way. Speaking personally, I liked liking my investors. And so I wanted to have a relationship. So I did spend time like getting to them a little bit and references were super important and all of that. But a few just like general thoughts on fundraising is you guys are probably in like the best fundraising market imaginable. Like it's just like a very, very good time. So you're on like the right side of things. I think things are very momentum driven right now.

21:41And again, I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that like, you know, we all see this, that like AI companies are growing at these insane rates. And so the whole market has really rotated in that direction. So as you think about talking about your companies, a lot of investors are very geared towards what's the story of how this is going to take off. And, you know, whether you have like a, you know, a go forward rationale for that or some data you can point to, I think it seems highly driven by that in a lot of ways. I think like, you know, the advice you get from accelerators like this about how to run a fundraiser are mostly like extremely correct.

22:21And I would basically just fully listen to them, which is like... I'm sorry, could you say that again? If there's one thing, it is that the fundraising advice is very good, which I'm guessing that the fundraising advice is something along the lines of like, talk to a wide funnel, do it all in a compressed timeline, practice what you're talking about, follow up, keep the whole thing short. You know, that is the right way to raise a seed ground. And so I wouldn't mess with the template on it. We also would add, avoid raising at this point, wait till we're post-demo day. A lot of people will try to get you to like raise early.

23:02And the way they'll try to get you to raise is we're so excited about what you're doing. Come meet us. We want to get to know you. We want to, we want you to, we're going to make you run a process. And like what, you know, somebody gave me the, you know, I was like, oh, I remember one time during last, I was like, oh, they're going to invest in someone like some other founder who's like more experienced was like, oh, cool. They gave you a term sheet. I'm like, well, no, but they like, okay, well, if you don't have a term sheet, they're not investing. So like, you should stop saying that. And that's the same thing with like preemptions is like, if you don't have a term sheet, you're not being preempted.

23:30And so like if, you know, some if some amazing investor comes to you and says, I'll give you exit Y and you like that. That's one thing. If someone's trying to drag you into a process, my process is in, you know, in the time that the team tells me it's in. As you think about the role of CEO and no two people experience it in exactly the same way. We joke a lot, you know, job number one, don't run out of money. But what was the sort of internal scorecard that you used on yourself? Like, did you have sort of Jack's report card? How did you check in with yourself? Well, like at a high level, it's just like, is the company going well?