The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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: Long-term employee retention outperforms squeezing extra work hours
“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 thr…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Jack Altman: Working over 50 hours yields diminishing returns at scale
“My experience with it was that once we got to a certain size, I found that incremental hours on Lattice were not that valuable past a certain number of reasonable hours past, let's say, 50 hours at some point. It just doesn't, more hours doesn't do you good th…”
Jack Altman allows Lattice employees to pursue outside work and board seats
“I have never also been one to ask our employees not to do Other work. A lot of our employees are also angel investors sit on other boards. And I think that's great for them.”
True Product-Market Fit Manifests as Urgent Customer Demand
“What we heard once we launched a product that people really wanted was instead of sounds cool, I'll check it out. We heard people say, Hey, I need that by Monday and I need you guys to ship feature X, Y, and Z. And if you don't ship it, I'm not going to be abl…”
The Best VCs Aggressively Challenge Founders on Strategic Decisions
“One of the things that I find the very most valuable about investors is Is if they're able to truly incredibly challenge your thinking when you're making your most important strategic decisions.”
Lattice's Pivot to Performance Reviews Sparked Initial Traction
“And then a year after starting the company is when we released our performance reviews product, and that was a really important night and day flip for us. That became something that companies really, really cared about, and it became really important, and we s…”
Lattice Reached Product-Market Fit With a Six-Person Team
“In our case, there was about six of us. So it was me, my co-founder, two other engineers, a marketer, and a sales rep. And the six of us were able to basically take us from not having product market fit to, you know, now in hindsight, what was the beginning of…”