Jack Altman
31 statements across 2 episodes · 9 bullish · 3 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Jul 6, 2023 by Jack Altman · said 22 times in 3 episodes since 2023 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Jack Altman's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Alex Kracov (12), Brett Berson (2), Jack Krawczyk (1), Adam Guild (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Jack Altman, oldest first
Jul 6, 2023
Founders must evaluate their own operating styles before blaming external factors
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023
New leaders must speak to 100 customers before making business decisions
“Before you do anything, go talk to a hundred customers, or 200 customers don't do anything, don't make any business decisions until you've done that. Talk to customers of every different size, talk to Talk to the heads of HR. Talk to the admins who are deployi…”
Jul 6, 2023 positive
Micromanagement is an extremely important tool that CEOs must use sparingly
“I believe that micromanaging has a very bad rap and is extremely important and effective. And I believe CEOs should do it. I believe executives should do it. I believe managers should do it. I just believe it's a tool that you should use sparingly and know wha…”
Jul 6, 2023
Effective management aligns individual employee self-interest with company needs
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023
Scaling founders must manage executives by outcomes, not inputs
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023
Leaders must adapt their management styles before declaring a hire failed
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023 negative
Perpetually micromanaging an employee means they need to be replaced
“Like a bad way to use micromanagement would be to use it as a crutch to help somebody who is in over their head in their job and to perpetually be doing their job for them. That would be a bad use of micromanagement. That would be a sign if you need to do that…”
Jul 6, 2023
Founders must genuinely befriend 10 customers to uncover true motivations
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023
Organizational structure must follow business needs, not employee preferences
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023
High decision velocity with 60% accuracy massively outperforms slow perfectionism
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023
Scaling requires balancing relentless hubris with radical humility
“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 …”
Jul 6, 2023 positive
Jul 6, 2023
Founders must shift from doing to multiplying at 15 employees
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023
Jul 6, 2023
Executives should spend most of their time gathering information, not acting
“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 …”
Jul 6, 2023 negative
Companies should never publicly announce that an employee was fired for performance
“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,…”
Jul 6, 2023 negative
Consensus-driven startup cultures create massive inefficiency at scale
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023 positive
Jul 6, 2023
Jul 6, 2023 positive
CEOs should seek targeted peer mentors for specific functional strengths
“I've found that there are CEOs who are particularly good at something that become, like, a go-to default on, like, a topic where I think I've got, like, a lot to learn from them on. So there might be somebody who's, like, incredibly good at, like, managing exe…”
Jul 6, 2023 positive
Corporate transparency requires narrative context, not just raw data dumps
“What matters most around transparency is the narrative and the why. Like helping people make sense of the data, connecting it back to the strategy of the company, the thesis of how are you going to win in your market? How are you going to be a successful busin…”
Jul 6, 2023
Non-obvious, counterintuitive decisions are what define successful startups
“Every great startup does not obvious things. Many times along its journey. Whether that's, you know, betting on a hire that like most, you know, VC board members are going to pull up their LinkedIn and say, that doesn't make sense to me. Whether it's getting i…”
Jul 6, 2023 positive
Jul 6, 2023
Founders cannot outsource their most uncertain decisions to investors or consensus
“When you're in your most uncertain moments as a founder, it's really tempting to offload that decision as much as you can to your investors, to other execs, to your co-founder, to try to basically see, all right, if I'm like, 55, 45 on this decision, let me ju…”
Jul 6, 2023
Carrying company culture provides concrete value worthy of performance consideration
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023 positive
Executive self-awareness requires deep ego work, not corporate management training
“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…”
Jul 6, 2023
Low performers are often well-liked because they help colleagues do their jobs
“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.…”
Jul 6, 2023 positive
Employees can produce 10x impact under the right managerial conditions
“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 …”
Jul 6, 2023
Scaling executives must work on the organizational machine, not in it
“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 …”
Aug 10, 2023 positive
Kracov: 'Above-the-line' whiteboard prioritization protected marketing focus at Lattice
“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…”
Aug 10, 2023
Kracov: Lattice CEO Jack Altman questioned his ability to scale to VP
“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…”