Altman: Long-term employee retention outperforms squeezing extra work hours
Jack Altman · Roundtable #5 with Jack Altman, Auren Hoffman, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings | E1077 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 3, 2023 · at 36:55
Jack Altman, founder and CEO of Lattice, explains why optimizing for multi-year employee retention yields better long-term results than demanding late-night overtime.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What I've also seen, though, is things like employee retention for long periods of time is extremely valuable. And so a company that retains employees for five years instead of one and a half on average, those employees are going to be so valuable in years three, four, five. And so things that a company can do to retain people for longer outperforms incremental work hours, you know, in most cases, in my view”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jack Altman
Altman: Investor help does not scale proportionally with check size
“I do think that when people invest more, they naturally end up being closer to the companies. So I think if somebody does half of your seed round versus if they are a small angel, you will generally get more time, but it's not proportionate. And to your point,…”
Altman: Replacing an early-stage founder CEO fails 90% of the time
“In the early days of a company, the replacement move is more likely to fail than succeed nine times out of 10 before the company's got a certain amount of, like, stability to it.”
Seed Investments From Multi-Stage VC Funds Carry Major Signaling Risk
“One thing we did do that has a trade-off is we took on some signaling risk by including large funds like Thrive, And Coastal and our seed round that can cause an issue down the line where if they don't end up supporting you, it makes it challenging for a new i…”
Raising Huge Early-Stage Rounds at Peak Valuations Harms Founders
“At the very early stage of a company, you don't need that much capital and you don't need that high of a valuation. I think it can become very tempting to raise all the money at the highest valuation when all you've got is a pitch jack. And I think in most cas…”
Startup Employees Get the Worst Equity Terms and Need Reforms
“I would love to see ways for employee equity to continue to get friendlier. So employees are the true absolute champions in the ecosystem of VCs, founders, and employees. They have the worst type of equity between the fact that it's options, it's common, there…”
Altman: Early founders shouldn't invest until business can run without them
“I think it does when time constraints are the dominant force. And for that reason, I think early stage founders spending real time investing is it's just too expensive. And so when, like, there are definitely things to be learned from your investing that poure…”