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From Solo Founder to $3B People Management Empire: How Jack Altman Made Performance Reviews a Strategic Business Weapon

"The companies that win in the next decade will be the ones that figure out how to bring out the best in their people. That is the whole game."

story_timeline

2015

Jack Altman leaves his role at a venture firm and co-founds Lattice in San Francisco, targeting the broken performance review process at fast-growing startups

2019

Lattice launches its Engagement and Growth modules, expanding from performance management to a full people management platform and crossing $20M ARR

2022

Lattice raises a $175M Series F at a $3B valuation, serving 4,500+ companies including Reddit, Slack, and Asana with 350+ employees globally

story_struggle

Jack Altman came from a venture capital background, which gave him an analytical lens on startups but made the early days of Lattice uniquely difficult. He understood intellectually what product-market fit looked like, but building it was a different kind of challenge entirely. The HR technology market in 2015 was dominated by legacy incumbents — Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM — and most potential customers assumed that "performance management software" meant expensive, slow, consultant-dependent enterprise implementations that took months to roll out and that employees hated using. The first version of Lattice was a simple OKR (Objectives and Key Results) tracking tool. It was clean, fast, and affordable — but the market was skeptical. HR buyers at fast-growing startups were managing performance reviews in Google Sheets or Notion because existing tools were either too expensive, too clunky, or both. Convincing these buyers to adopt another HR tool required demonstrating value that went beyond feature checklists — it required changing how they thought about performance management as a business function, not just an administrative task.

story_breakthrough

The breakthrough came from a deliberate product decision: Lattice would make the performance review process genuinely enjoyable for employees, not just managers and HR teams. While every competitor built tools optimized for the HR admin — reporting dashboards, compliance workflows, bulk data exports — Lattice designed the employee-facing experience first. The result was a review flow so simple and non-threatening that employees actually completed it voluntarily and on time, which gave managers richer data and gave HR leaders fewer escalations. This design philosophy spread Lattice virally inside companies, with employees at one team recommending it to their managers at other teams. The second breakthrough was expansion. Jack recognized that performance management was just one layer of a much larger people management stack. Lattice added employee engagement surveys, 1:1 meeting tools, compensation benchmarking, and finally an HRIS (Human Resources Information System) to replace legacy systems like BambooHR. Each expansion converted an existing performance management customer into a broader platform customer, doubling or tripling revenue per account without any new customer acquisition cost. By 2023, the average Lattice customer used 3.2 modules — a testament to the platform strategy that took a single-product tool from $0 to a $3B valuation in eight years.