Jack Altman
General Partner, Benchmark · 1 appearance on the record.
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Jack Altman co-founded and served as CEO of the HR software company Lattice, growing it to a multi-billion-dollar valuation before becoming Executive Chairman. He is an investor who founded early-stage venture firm Alt Capital and joined Benchmark as a General Partner.
38statements → 0claims → 0claims resolved → 3.89/5average certainty → 2.21/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 24said about them ↓
1 opinion · 37 insights · every statement was checked. none of them is a claim the record can settle: opinions, insights and disclosures never carry an assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Jack argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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Everything Jack Altman said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Founder CEOs possess unique moral authority over professional CEOs
“One of the things that's unique about founder CEOs relative to like a professional CEO is you do have this extra chip of moral authority that lets you shake things up and keep the startup feeling like a startup even when you are at scale, and one of the ways y…”
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…”
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 …”
Founders should never permanently relinquish their core functional spike
“I think there are, for most founders, you'll have at least one thing you should never give up or at least that you shouldn't give up permanently. Commonly those things are going to be either product sales or marketing.”
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…”
No company can afford to pay top 1% compensation for every role
“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.”
Solid, low-growth performers are the backbone of many successful companies
“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.”
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.…”
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,…”
Catering to short-term employee preferences during the bull run was harmful
“I think we actually did a lot of disservice to people by adhering to every, ah, you know, interest in the short term that we did over the true bull run years.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Founders spiking in a function must still hire functional leadership
“That's where people can sometimes go wrong, is they'll think, I'm a product founder, I'm not hiring a head of product, and that's not the right way to think about it in my mind or I'm an amazing marketer, I'm not gonna hire a head of marketing. You're just hir…”
A CEO's ultimate goal is building an organization that functions without them
“I still think no matter who you are as a CEO, the goal is to build a healthy organization that could function without you, and I think that's always the goal, and then it becomes a matter of where do you spend your incremental time.”
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…”
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…”
Effective leadership communication requires repeating core ideas across multiple formats
“If you want to be communicative and you want a context set, you have to give people as many different avenues and as many formats and repeat yourself as much as possible.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
The other half of the tape: Jack Altman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 22 times in 3 episodes on In Depth. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Alex Kracov 12Brett Berson 2Jack Krawczyk 1Adam Guild 1
Statements about Jack Altman, by other people (2)
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…”
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…”
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Lessons in leadership | Scaling an org and tactical management advice | Jack Altman (Latti | Jul 6, 2023 | 59m |