Lattice

“Did you know that when we took over SBMC from Microsoft, that we integrated our UI and features that we've been building on Lattice in less than two weeks? Like, we literally, like, we did in two weeks what the army had been working on for years because we've …”

“It turns out though that what you're picking is somebody who's going to be there with you longer than most of your employees are going to be with you. And you're going to talk to them about stuff that you're not going to talk to your employees about because yo…”

“Lattice is the kind of product I mentioned that could be sold with Figma mockups. Looker couldn't be sold that way. Looker, you actually had to do a demo with their real data. So it required, you know, a lot more work to do that. Vanta was neither like a demo …”

“The reason it probably didn't work is there needs to be a low time and effort to value use case, and Lattice is like an operating system. It's not something like a single person is going to download and start using it, like a Dropbox or a Calendly”

“Early on our close rates were like 20%, 15 to 20%. [443] Mark Roberge: Okay. [444] Dini Mehta: And then we changed, made the change, and it bumped up, doubled. [447] Mark Roberge: Crazy. [447] Dini Mehta: Went to 40%.”

“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,…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“The right way to do it isn't just building sort of random products that you think your buyer might want to build, but instead thinking about the user journey And what does this sort of human who's using your products, what else exists chronologically in their …”

“We were at two million of ARR, and we had seven engineers, and we put five of them on this engagement product for like nine months.”

“I remember at Lattice we looked at some point a couple of years ago and we had like 370 vendors or something like that.”

“We had a humongous lift. We almost doubled our quarterly bookings rate overnight when we launched it. But then when you pulled it open, like, 20% of the lift was explained by the higher pricing. Almost all of it was explained by the better conversion rate and …”

“Surprisingly, you would think, generally speaking, you would expect to see like more velocity on cross-sell because you already have the customer relationship. What tons of companies find is it actually comes more easily on the net new side than on the cross-s…”

“Even years after 2018, when we had launched our second product, people still just thought we had a performance management product.”

“What I've found is that when it comes to building and then taking to market new products, having unbelievably clear ownership is really essential or everything gets tripped up over, over everything. So when you when you build, one of the things that I think yo…”

“I think that the vast majority of the time building is better than buying. I think buying companies, particularly when you're small, comes with a huge amount of overhead that is hard to foresee. You have to integrate the team, the culture, the product. You're …”

“More than any other sort of project I've ever worked on, at least, and that, you know, by projects, I mean a new product, but also things like going international, changing segments, trying to expand into a new industry, standing up a new function. More than a…”

“Building products is cheaper than ever, taking products to market is sort of more expensive than ever, multi-product, I believe, is one of the most powerful forms of differentiation that's available to many companies.”

“Once you build that kind of media property, if you will, the nice thing about SAS is like, there's only one advertiser and that was Lattice. And so we could sort of use that as a bridge between providing value to the folks before they were ready to buy perform…”

“It is really hard to just go out and create a brand new category and Lattice did a tiny bit later, which we get into, but we really redefine categories. And that's, I think a much easier way to get your traction in the market because we could go to companies a…”

“And just to give you a sense of like how much that's scaled, flash forward five, Years. We had a virtual event where 40,000 people, and we called it resources for humans virtual. That was after years and years of doing these webinars monthly.”

“We first started the Slack community trying to go after VPs of HR and we were like, let's make it a VIP community. And it fell flat, like no conversation, nothing happened. But once we sort of broadened it up to sort of more all HR people, what we found is peo…”

“That went from, you know, zero to like 20,000 People in the Slack community, I think it is today.”

“And this campaign generated millions and millions of pipeline and revenue.”

“SaaS is funny because you can just like take customers from everywhere, but I thought a lot of great go to market strategy is how do you make sure like everyone in New York is using Lattice and then everyone in Austin is using Lattice.”

“So like, I think the, probably the toughest moment for me at Lattice was, I think it was like series B ish. Like right before I really started hiring some of these more strategic leaders, Jack sort of went to me and was like, Hey, are you the guy? Like, are yo…”

“There was a priorities exercise where I wrote out on a whiteboard every single thing that we were doing, every single thing that we could be doing. And then we kind of went down the line and said, okay, what are the five things we're going to put above this li…”

“Events and conferences, like there's so many conferences you can go to and they work and you can stand at the booth and you can talk to people, but it's like kind of expensive and it's kind of time consuming and it can work. And those were things that I did in…”

“I think what's most important around conferences and the way to do it right. And I would say we only kind of did this at Lattice was you want to try and like dominate a conference, you know, from a brand presence perspective. So you have the booth, but then yo…”

“One hire, you know, I sort of made a mistake on was somebody who was maybe a little bit more of like a creative writer. And I thought, oh, they could apply this like really creative writing. And they had done a lot of other, you know, like really interesting f…”

“Somewhere around 10, 15 people, you go from this early stage founder to, for the first time, becoming a manager and a leader. And, you know, something flips where now the way that you can affect the most change is by impacting more people a lower percent than…”

“Lattice in the early days had a culture that was what I would describe as very consensus driven, very inclusive in terms of the way that we came to conclusions on ideas. we really got to places as groups. And I think that actually worked really well for us in…”

“You really need a very acute self-awareness and willingness to hold up a mirror and say, I am responsible for everything that's going on here, and if things aren't going the way I want, I need to first look at myself and think, is the way that I'm operating, t…”

“Before deciding you've got the right, the wrong person, you should quickly test multiple modes of operating. And this is one of the things that you need to develop as a more experienced, more senior leader at a company is you can't just manage everybody the sa…”

“Any founder who's going to go through the process of maturing a company is going to need to go through the process of building a team of increasingly operationally mature executives, and they're going to do things that feel foreign to you on all these dimensio…”

“I think it can be cultivated. I absolutely think it can be cultivated. I think it's a type of work that is beyond corporatism, though. It's beyond like management training. The work that you have to do to build that self-awareness starts Very deep and very muc…”

“And this is one of the great paradoxes is that to, you know, have the hubris to start a company and to think that you're going to change some big and existing industry, you kind of have to feel in a certain way, like above the sort of normal decisions and the …”

“An uncomfortable conversation today saves you so much pain. Any uncomfortable conversation that you think you need to have That you're just gonna push off. You're almost always taking on debt to do that.”

“For a lot of decisions like that, velocity massively outperforms accuracy, and for the vast majority of decisions, velocity is your friend, and so For those kind of things, I'd say 60% is great, particularly if you're willing to reverse course, if you're willi…”

“The more senior you are in the company, the more you should be working on the machine rather than in the machine. Obviously, we're all going to be part of the machine as well, but generally speaking, you know, your company gets past a certain size, and as the …”

“It's tempting to do a lot and you actually don't need to do that many things. Mostly you need to be learning. Most of your time should be spent gathering information, Understanding where people are at, understanding what progress is happening, understand what …”

“I would actually tell you to go be friends with 10 and what being friends with 10 is going to do is it will get you past the sort of more corporate back and forths and niceties and the surface level things of, okay, I'm talking to Lattice, so I should tell the…”

“Basically no companies can afford to pay top one percent talent and comp You know, for the whole company. Like you actually need people who are sort of in the median around the median.”

“There's lots of times when the absolute right thing for someone to do in a well-performing but low growth situation is to be happy with that. That's like the backbone on which a lot of companies are built.”

“Being ahead of whatever at a, 25 person company is now better or worse or easier or harder than being the head of marketing at a 250 person company or probably 2500 for that matter. Definitely it's gonna require like more, you know, years of experience and the…”

“And so being living in fear of this person's going to leave and then their whole team's going to quit. And then we're going to go out of business. Like those are not real cycles. Those don't, it doesn't happen like that.”

“Sometimes people like somebody because they're actually helping others do their jobs. In fact, that's often why somebody is liked in a company context. I might not be, you know, perfect at what I'm doing. I might even be a lowish performer at what I do myself.…”

“There are people who legitimately carry a lot of culture, and that that's not just a fuzzy thing, it's actually a really important thing, and so people who are liked because they embody the values that they uphold and they enforce the values around with the pe…”

“I would feel a sense of Anxiety and fear if I worked at a company where when someone was let go, it was, like, walked out all the reasons they were let go. In fact, I'm not even necessarily a fan of saying the person was let go. I'm, I prefer to just say, hey,…”

“Managers need to not just be focused on how do I act in service of the employee, but also how do I ensure that the employee's work is being directed in service of the company, and that balance is new.”

“The craft of management is getting people to spend as much time in the aligned middle as possible. People are people. People have incentives. People are driven by what they're interested in, by what's good for them. And so the goal of management is to have peo…”

“Some of this too goes back to starting with a bit more discipline on what the right shape of the organization is for the business needs and making that the premise inside of which you put people into those roles, as opposed to a world where you start with peop…”

“I do really believe that people end up rising to the amount of potential impact you give them. And I think somebody who you thought had 45 points of utility to contribute under the right circumstances, and with the right permissions, with the right structures …”

“We actually integrated more external systems that the DoD already owns Than internal products.”

“I joined, you know, we were 800 customers, single digit in revenue, 30 folks, In 2018”

“40% of my management team at Lattice was promoted from within.”

“I mean, we haven't talked about it much yet, but I mean, what we build with Lattice, it's an AI sensor fusion platform that can take data from thousands of sensors and merge it into a real-time, three D model of everything, and then tag everything in the model…”

“I'd say the three most, the three companies we bump into most often are a company called Reflective, another company called Lattice, and a third called Betterworks.”

“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…”