The Wisdom Wall

“one of the things that's unique about founder CEOs relative to like a professional CEO is you do, 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 you exercise that is by staying deep in an area.”

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

“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 normal sort of operating of, of that industry. And so you…”

“I think there are, for most founders, you'll have at least one thing you should never give up, um, or at least that you shouldn't give up permanently. Commonly those things are going to be either product sales or marketing.”

“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 what you're using. It is like a potent tool that should be used…”

“Basically no companies can afford to pay top one percent talent and comp You know, for, for the whole company. Like you actually need people who are, who are sort of in the median, uh, around the, 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. Um, that's like the backbone on which a lot of companies are built.”

“Sometimes people like somebody because they're actually helping others do their jobs. In fact, that's often why somebody is liked in a, 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. But for various reasons, I might actually make the…”

“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, this is, you know, they're, they're leaving, this is their…”

“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 people and then you build an org shape that they're all happy…”

“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 Uh, impacting more people a lower percent than just doing everything yourself. You know, like for…”

“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, the way I'm choosing to make decisions, uh, is that not…”

“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 same. You actually have to, uh, develop chameleon skills where…”

“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 dimensions, and so there is this process of letting go and trusting…”

“I think it can be cultivated. Um, 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, uh, Very deep and very much at the like ego level.”

“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, that's not the right way to think about it in my mind, um, or I'm, I'm an amazing marketer, I'm not gonna hire a head of marketing. You're just hiring to build a partnership with that…”

“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.”

“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. And if that's what you feel you need to do to be getting…”

“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 business? And what are you seeing in your shoes?”

“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.”

“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 just go pulse the wisdom of crowds of the people around me…”

“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 into a second product category before you really feel like…”

“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, for those kind of things, I'd say 60% is great, particularly if you're willing to reverse course, if you're willing to make lots of decisions, and you're gonna do those…”

“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 CEO, you really want to be constructing the machine from the…”

“blowing up your whole calendar once every three, six months, and then the things that are important will find their way back, and the things that Weren't needed. It's like a, you know, it breathes, it breathes relief into the system.”

“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 decision points we're looking at, getting data, but you…”

“before you do anything, go talk to a hundred customers, or 200 customers, uh, 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 deploying the tool. Talk to some managers and execs who are…”

“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 them about XYZ and it will get you to the more real places of…”

“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 execs, uh, as you scale, Uh, there might be somebody who's…”

“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, uh, or probably 2500 for that matter. Definitely it's gonna require like more, you know, years of experience and there's some people issues and things like that, but it's…”

“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, those are not real cycles. Those don't, it doesn't happen like that.”

“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 Uh, with the people around them. I think there are some things like…”

“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 people in roles where what is good for them is also good for…”

“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 around them, with the right motivations, can produce 450…”

“an uncomfortable conversation today saves you so much pain. Uh, 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.”

“If you're the founder CEO, you don't, you don't get to work with, you know, another CEO who's 20 years more experienced than you in real time, so you have to kind of go outside the company for that.”