Jack Altman & Miles Grimshaw - Building and Investing in Lattice

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:53)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities as discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:25)
My guests today are Jack Altman and Miles Grimshaw. Jack is the co-founder and CEO of Lattice, an HR software platform. Miles is a general partner at Benchmark, an early investor and board director at Lattice, as well as a former guest on the show.
Jack started Lattice in 2015 and has scaled it to a multi-billion dollar business that already serves over 5,000 organizations. In our discussion, we look at all aspects of building and scaling a software business from both an investor and operator's perspective, which made this particularly fun to do. Please enjoy my conversation with Jack Altman and Miles Grimshaw.
I would love to know when and where you guys first met, because this is an experimental format. I've never done a conversation with a very early investor and founder in a company that's grown to this scale that have been together since the beginning. So hearing about how and where you met would actually be quite interesting.

**Jack Altman** (3:15)
It was 2015, I guess. It was in the middle of YC, which is frenzy time as a founder, where meeting a gajillion investors and all these things. But I actually remember then, and I said this to you, I think even at the time or years later, but I didn't want to say it at the time because it was kind of overly flattering, but I was 26 at the time, you must have been 25, and just talking to him in the depth at that age, and I was young too, but I was like, oh, this is such a young guy, and he's talking at such depth about the business.
And I was at a part of my journey where I was just consuming every podcast and blog and whatever, and I was actually very deep on listening to Bill Gurley at the time, and I was like, Miles is gonna be a future Bill Gurley, and now here we are at Benchmark. But I remember just even in the midst of this crazy YC thing, Miles at the time was just so much deeper and forward thinking versus just what's the deal, what's the terms, what's the traction, he was really thinking about it in a different way.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:06)
Why were you interested in business in the first place?