Jack Altman on Product-Market Fit

**Jack Altman** (0:00)
You've got to have some North Star vision of your products. 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 find product market fit, but you have some people who are asking you still, oh, if you could do this, I'd really like that. And you kind of have to just trust yourself to say, I'm going to 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.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
One of the most common pieces of startup 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 co-founder 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, fund raising, and what separates companies that find momentum from those that stall.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:04)
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 million first fund. Three kids of really popular podcasts.
Yeah. What's next? Energy drink or are you going to start training for MMA fighting?

**Jack Altman** (1:30)
I don't know. I might just come do Speedrun all the time.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:35)
Talk about this part of your life that you're in now.
What's lighting you up? What's firing you up? It's just caffeine or?

**Jack Altman** (1:43)
It's a lot of caffeine. Yeah, the little kids makes, they take every minute. They're six, three and 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 like can't get myself excited. Like I just two 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. I just like embrace the changes. But at the moment, I'm loving investing, and that's what I've been doing the last two years now.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:19)
And then, you know, 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?

**Jack Altman** (2:31)
No, I had never managed anybody.
When I joined Teespring, it was like 10 people or 12 people. And over two years, it became like 300 people, as you saw. And that was probably too fast. 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.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:02)
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? Were there scars or anything you need to work through from that experience?

**Jack Altman** (3:15)
I think on some level, I had the Jeff Bezos regret minimization thing, which is I was like, I know I love tech, I know I love startups, and if I don't try to build my own company at some point, I'm like, that is, seemed to me at least, like the pinnacle startup experience out of all of the different seats in tech, and that was how I felt about it. And so I just was like, if I don't try my hand at building a company, I'll always regret it. And I was at an age in a point in my life where it made sense to do it.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:44)
But then just in terms of like the origins of this spirit, right? There's entrepreneurship in your family, right? This seems to be, it just seems to be kind of a core value.
Did you have some, you know, elementary school candy business like I did? Or, you know, when did it start?

**Jack Altman** (4:00)
Not at all. I mean, look, we grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and it was not like there was no sort of focus on tech or even like professionalism in general. Like for the future, I would say, you know, like embedded in our childhood.