Jack Altman on Product-Market Fit
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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You've gotta have some North Star vision of your product. It's obviously wrong to scramble to every single customer request. It's also wrong to ignore it all. Some of it's good. Some of it's bad. You're both hungry to just, like, find product market fit, you have some people who are asking you still, oh, if you could do this, I'd really like that. And you kinda have to just, like, trust yourself to say, I'm gonna ignore that. Sometimes it's clear. Sometimes you know it's right or wrong, but I think most of the time those calls are hard.
One of the most common pieces of start up advice is listen to your customers. But what happens when customers ask for the wrong thing? Founders are constantly balancing competitive forces. Conviction versus feedback, focus versus opportunity, and short term revenue versus long term vision. Jack Altman has spent years navigating those trade offs, first as the cofounder and CEO of Lattice and now as an investor through Alt Capital. In this speedrun conversation, Jack shares lessons on product market fit, customer feedback, hiring, fundraising, and what separates companies that find momentum from
Let's talk about Jack Altman. Started off investment banking. Then you were an early startup employee at Teespring. Then you built Lattice, unicorn company. Then you started a fund, $275,000,000 first fund. Three kids, a really popular podcast. Yeah. What's next? Energy drink, or are you going to start training for MMA fighting?
I don't know. I might just come do speed run all the time.
Talk about this part of your life that you're in now. What's lighting you up? What's firing you up? Is it just caffeine?
It's a lot of caffeine. The little kids take every minute. They're six three in one, so that's a lot of it. But I'm loving investing right now, and I did some of it while I was running Lattice but the truth is when I was building a company investing was totally uninteresting to me. I just wanted to work on my company and like going and meeting another founder I was like I'm happy for you but I just can't get myself excited. Like I'm just too in the tunnel and now I'm enjoying being not in tunnel vision. And so for me I feel like life has always been chapters and I just embrace the changes but
And then in terms of your journey, so when I met you, you were at Teespring, and you were the VP of business development. Had you been a VP of anything at that point?
No. I had never managed anybody. When I joined Teespring, it was like ten ten people or 12 people, and over two years, it became like 300 people as you saw, and that was probably too fast. You know, there's like you know, it's hard to do. Obviously, we'll talk about this, but right now we're probably in the most momentum centric moment of startup building, at least I've ever seen, which isn't a bad thing, but we definitely had that. So no, I've learned everything about management in that period of time, I guess.
What's interesting is, I'm wondering, what was it about that experience that made you say, You know what? Next time I'm going to be the founder, I'm going to be the one in the hot seat, know, where there's scars or anything you need to work through from that experience.
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