Something happens to a lot of fast-growing companies around the time they cross 100 employees.
Below that threshold, culture is largely self-managing. The founding team is still close enough to most decisions that their values propagate through direct example. People know each other. New hires get absorbed into an existing dynamic through proximity and osmosis. The CEO is visible. Feedback flows through hallway conversations. Goals are known because everyone is in the same room when they’re set.
Then headcount doubles and doubles again. The founder can no longer have lunch with every new hire. Managers are managing for the first time, with no training and no framework. Employees don’t know how their day-to-day work connects to company strategy. Performance reviews, if they happen at all, are annual conversations that employees dread and managers put off. OKRs get written down in a planning session, approved by leadership, and then quietly forgotten until the next quarter.
Jack Altman and Eric Koslow watched this happen at Teespring, the print-on-demand e-commerce platform where they both worked in the early 2010s. Teespring was growing fast, revenue and headcount together, and as the company crossed 100 and then 150 employees, the culture got genuinely hard. People didn’t know how their work connected to company goals. Managers weren’t equipped. Feedback was inconsistent or absent. The things that made working at a small startup energizing were harder to find at the larger company Teespring was becoming.
Altman and Koslow looked at this problem and didn’t see it as inevitable. They saw it as a product gap.
Princeton, AngelList, and the Question Nobody Had Solved
Altman had studied economics at Princeton and spent time at AngelList in various venture capital-adjacent roles before Teespring, picking up operational and investor perspective across early-stage companies. He had seen, from multiple angles, how the “people problem” at scaling companies played out and how rarely anyone had real infrastructure to address it.
His brother is Sam Altman, who at the time was president of Y Combinator and is now CEO of OpenAI. The Altman name carries weight in the startup ecosystem, but Jack’s founding story for Lattice is not primarily a story about connections. It’s a story about a problem he observed firsthand and couldn’t stop thinking about.
In 2015, Altman and Koslow incorporated Lattice in San Francisco. They went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch, with backing from Thrive Capital in an early seed round. The first product launched in May 2016: a goal management tool.
OKRs on a Shelf and the Pivot to Continuous Reviews
The initial product addressed the OKR problem that both founders had experienced directly. Companies would run planning sessions where leadership aligned on quarterly objectives and key results. Everyone would nod. The objectives would be documented. And then, reliably, the document would sit untouched until the next planning cycle.
The problem wasn’t the framework. OKRs are a reasonable way to align organizations around shared priorities. The problem was that there was no infrastructure making them visible or actionable on a day-to-day basis. Goals set in a Google Doc with no ongoing tracking or team-level visibility didn’t change behavior.
Lattice’s goal management tool made OKRs live in a system where employees could see how their individual objectives connected to team and company goals, update progress, and have that progress visible to their manager in regular check-ins.
But in talking to customers and prospects during 2016, Altman and Koslow kept running into a related and arguably bigger problem: the performance review.
The annual performance review was in the middle of what they described as an identity crisis. Companies had largely concluded that once-a-year evaluations were bad: they were backward-looking, they were often primarily a mechanism for calibrating compensation rather than developing people, they were conversations that both sides dreaded and managers routinely avoided scheduling until HR forced them to, and the feedback they contained was so delayed from the events it referenced as to be nearly useless for improvement.
Companies knew the annual review was broken. They did not know what to replace it with.
Lattice’s answer was continuous performance management: structured 1:1 meetings between managers and their direct reports on a regular cadence, ongoing feedback loops rather than bottlenecked annual events, visibility into goals and progress throughout the year rather than a single retrospective, and when a formal review did happen, a record of actual documented conversation rather than a manager trying to recall eight months of interactions.
In 2016, Lattice became one of the first software solutions built specifically for continuous performance review. The timing was not accidental: the conversation about killing annual reviews was accelerating, companies like Adobe had publicly dropped their annual review process and described the results positively, and the HR practitioner community was actively looking for alternatives. Lattice had one.
Dog-Fooding the Product and Growing Through Customers
Altman was explicit about one deliberate product strategy: Lattice used its own software for everything it was selling to customers. Every performance review, every 1:1 meeting template, every OKR cycle at Lattice ran through Lattice. The people team was the internal customer, and the engineers and product managers building the software could see real frustrations from colleagues using it daily.
This created feedback loops that external customer conversations couldn’t replicate. When something was genuinely clunky, someone inside the building felt it and said something at a meeting the product team attended. When a feature shipped that made something meaningfully easier, the internal team noticed before any external case study could be written.
By April 2019, when Lattice raised a $15 million Series B led by Shasta Ventures, the company had 1,200 customers including Reddit, Slack, Coinbase, and Glossier. The same round confirmed that the company had reached cash flow break-even for the first time in Q1 2019, which in the SaaS world of 2019 was unusual. Most performance management software companies were burning cash aggressively to grow.
The 60-person company serving 1,200 customers at break-even was a different statement about the business than what the fundraising narrative of the era usually produced.
The Pandemic and the $3 Billion Valuation
The conditions of 2020 and 2021 were complicated for most businesses and clarifying for Lattice.
Remote work, which COVID transformed from optional to mandatory almost overnight, surfaced every problem that Lattice had been built to solve. The informal culture machinery of a co-located office, the hallway conversations, the lunchtime visibility into what colleagues were working on, the ambient sense of shared purpose that came from being physically present together, all of it disappeared. What remained was whatever intentional infrastructure companies had built for connecting employees to each other and to the company’s goals.
Companies that had already invested in performance management systems, structured feedback processes, and documented goal tracking found those systems more valuable than before. Companies that had relied on the office as their culture infrastructure discovered they had very little underneath it.
Lattice grew five times in revenue between the start of the pandemic and early 2023. The platform expanded from its performance management core into employee engagement surveys, eNPS tracking, career development pathing through the Grow product, compensation management, and data analytics.
In March 2021, Lattice raised at a $1 billion valuation. Ten months later, in January 2022, it raised again: $175 million in a Series F led by Dragoneer, with participation from Tiger Global, Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Elad Gil, valuing the company at $3 billion. The valuation had tripled from the prior round in ten months.
Altman’s framing of the moment captured what had shifted: “We are staring at a box all day now, and we don’t have a manager who comes by and says ‘great job’ and makes us feel appreciated. Systems like Lattice give a process for how we connect and interact and make sure that I know that I am cared for by our manager as a professional and a person.” COVID had created what he called a tailwind. The remote work transition had made explicit what was previously implicit, that connection and feedback and career development didn’t happen automatically and required intentional infrastructure.
15% Layoffs, Leadership Transitions, and the HRIS Bet
The reversal came in January 2023. Lattice laid off 15% of its workforce, over 100 people. The company’s revenue had grown five times since the start of the pandemic, but costs had grown faster, in anticipation of continued pandemic-era growth rates that had not materialized as the labor market cooled.
The same week, the company was also named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. Both things were true simultaneously.
In May 2022, Eric Koslow had stepped down as CTO to start another company, remaining on the board. In December 2023, Jack Altman stepped down as CEO, saying he wanted to “return to his first love: the earliest stages of company-building.” He transitioned to Executive Chairman. He also co-founded OpenStore, a company that acquires and scales Shopify brands, during this period.
Sarah Franklin became CEO in January 2024, bringing a background as a senior executive at Salesforce, where she had run major product lines and built deep experience in enterprise software. Her appointment signaled the next phase: Lattice was entering a larger market and needed enterprise go-to-market capabilities to match.
The major product bet announced in late 2023 was Lattice HRIS: a full human resource information system to complement the performance and engagement suite. The thesis was that mid-market companies were managing their people across a fractured HR stack, using one system for employee records, another for performance management, another for compensation, and another for payroll. By adding a native HRIS, Lattice could become the central system of record for everything people-related, rather than one important product that had to integrate with the system of record owned by someone else.
The mid-market gap Altman identified was real: below a certain company size, all-in-one platforms like Gusto and BambooHR serve well. Above a certain size, Workday and SAP SuccessFactors are the answer. In between, the options are messier and more expensive to integrate. Lattice was aiming at that gap.
The AI Employees Controversy
In July 2024, Lattice made a move that became one of the more discussed missteps in HR tech of the year.
Under CEO Sarah Franklin, on July 9, Lattice announced that it would allow customers to create official employee records in Lattice for AI agents, what the company called “digital workers.” The idea was that companies deploying AI models for actual work, like an AI sales assistant or a code generation agent, could give those agents personnel files, assign them managers, set goals for them, and track their performance through Lattice’s platform. Franklin described it as treating AI responsibly by holding it accountable through the same systems used for human employees.
The backlash was immediate and severe. Critics argued the announcement was tone-deaf, coming one and a half years after Lattice had laid off 15% of its human workforce. The language of “making history” by treating AI agents like employees landed poorly with workers already worried about job displacement. “Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees,” wrote one AI company executive in a widely shared LinkedIn comment.
Three days later, on July 12, Lattice reversed course. The digital workers feature would not be pursued. Franklin acknowledged it had been a “big misunderstanding” while maintaining that the underlying question of how HR should govern AI usage in the workplace remained important and was “HR’s moment.”
What the episode revealed was the tension that every HR tech company is navigating: AI is clearly changing work, HR platforms need to address that change, and the specific framing matters enormously. The underlying impulse, giving companies a systematic way to think about AI agents deployed alongside human workers, was arguably forward-looking. The execution and messaging landed in a way that resonated badly with the audience most concerned about AI displacing them.
$127 Million in Revenue and What Comes Next
By 2024, Lattice reported approximately $127 million in revenue, up from $91 million in 2023. The customer base sits around 3,700 to 5,000 companies depending on the measure, including Slack, Gusto, Webflow, Intercom, Ramp, and NPR. The company employs roughly 537-600 people.
The HRIS product, Lattice’s most ambitious product expansion, is its defining near-term bet. If mid-market companies adopt a Lattice HRIS alongside the performance management and engagement suite, the company becomes stickier and more central to how those companies operate. If the HRIS gains traction slowly or fails to differentiate from established competitors like BambooHR, Rippling, and Gusto, Lattice remains a very good point solution for performance management while the larger market opportunity goes elsewhere.
The company Jack Altman and Eric Koslow started because Teespring’s culture cracked under growth pressure has become the software that tens of thousands of managers use to give structured feedback, track goals, run 1:1 meetings, and conduct performance reviews. The core insight, that culture at scale doesn’t happen by accident and requires intentional infrastructure, turned out to be a durable and large market.
The OKRs that sat on a shelf are now tracked in Lattice. The annual reviews that companies knew were broken now run on a continuous cadence through the same platform. What Altman called the earliest stages of company-building are where he’s working now, at another company, backed by the $3 billion validation that the problem he identified in 2015 was worth solving.
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