Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.345]

My guests today are Jack Altman and Miles Grimshaw. Jack is the co-founder and CEO of Lattice, an HR software platform. Miles is a General Partner at Benchmark, an early investor and Board Director at Lattice, as well as a former guest on Invest Like the Best. Jack started Lattice in 2015 and has scaled it into a multi-billion-dollar business that already serves over 5,000 organizations. In our discussion, we look at all aspects of building and scaling a software product from both an investor and operator’s perspective, which made this particularly fun to do. Please enjoy my conversation with Jack Altman and Miles Grimshaw. Listen to Founders Podcast For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. Stretch your research budget with flexible expert calls you can trust. At a fraction of the cost of traditional expert networks, Tegus customers pay only what an expert charges – with zero markups and no confusing call credits – netting an average 70% savings. Don’t want to conduct a full hour call? Tegus offers the ability to schedule 30-minutes, an offer you won’t find anywhere else. And they don’t stop there. With white-glove custom sourcing for every project and robust compliance measures, including a dedicated 50+ analyst team that vets every call transcript, Tegus ensures your privacy and protection. As the industry innovator for qualitative insights, Tegus helps you find the right experts you need at a quality and speed that can’t be matched. For a limited time, as a listener, you can trial Tegus for free by visiting tegus.co/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes (00:02:55) - (First question) - How Jack & Miles met at Y Combinator in 2015 (00:04:22) - Lattice found a niche in mid-market HR software (00:07:55) - Discovering Lattice's true market need (00:11:14) - Fear of stalling drove the need for business growth beyond initial product (00:12:06) - Deciding on multi-product focus over up-market expansion (00:17:01) - Prioritizing quality of usage over frequency for customer health scores (00:20:06) - Balancing customer health scores and actual needs (00:24:31) - Prioritized community by spotlighting HR voices (00:28:20) - Building community helps companies sell a vision or lifestyle (00:31:05) - Cultivating broad awareness instead of hard-selling (00:35:33) - Overcoming the culture of 'perfection’ (00:37:22) - Flywheel effect makes suites efficient: lower go-to-market costs, more focus on product (00:41:06) - The challenges of juggling current needs and future demands (00:46:27) - Navigating disagreements and trust-building within a company (00:50:36) - Investors' roles extend beyond founders, focusing on their own goals and interests (00:51:52) - How transparency eases the founder-investor dance (00:55:16) - The changing employer-employee relationship (00:58:37) - Navigating growth from startup to public equity (01:05:43) - Lattice's ultimate aspiration (01:07:42) - Evaluating founders' authenticity (01:11:18) - What Jack & Miles are most embarrassed about, the most proud of, and the most excited for (01:14:30) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for Jack and Miles