- Lattice serves 5,000+ companies including Reddit, Coinbase, and Calm, with $127 million in revenue in 2024 and a $3 billion valuation.
- Jack Altman co-founded Lattice in 2016 with Eric Koslow after both experienced the chaos of hypergrowth at Teespring.
- Altman stepped down as CEO in January 2024 to launch Alt Capital, raising $275 million for his second fund in a single week.
- In February 2026, Benchmark hired Altman as its fifth general partner, capping a rapid rise from operator to investor.
Lattice runs performance reviews, OKRs, employee engagement surveys, and compensation management for over 5,000 companies worldwide. Reddit uses it. So does Coinbase, Webflow, Calm, and NPR. In 2024, the platform generated $127 million in revenue — up from $91 million the year before. Its HRIS product, launched in late 2024, saw 250% customer growth within months.
The man who built it, Jack Altman, no longer runs the company day to day. He handed the CEO role to Sarah Franklin in January 2024, moved to executive chairman, and then did something few unicorn founders do at 35: he walked away from the corner office to start investing full time. By February 2026, he was a general partner at Benchmark — one of the most elite venture firms in Silicon Valley. To understand how he got there, you have to go back to Missouri.
Ten-Dollar Buy-Ins and a Brother Named Sam
Jack Altman grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis in the 1990s — a place he later described as “pretty idyllic, very bubbled.” His older brother Sam would go on to co-found OpenAI and become one of the most recognized names in technology. But in the mid-2000s, the Altman household was defined by something more modest: a poker craze sweeping through Missouri high schools, with ten-dollar buy-ins and kitchen-table tournaments.
The brothers were close, competitive, and wired differently. Sam dropped out of Stanford to build Loopt. Jack took a more conventional path — he enrolled at Princeton University, studied economics, and graduated in 2011 without a clear plan for what came next.
”I ended up at Princeton because I visited and it looked great. It kind of just happened.” — Jack Altman
Wall Street, Hydrazine, and the Road to Teespring
After Princeton, Altman moved to New York and took a job as a financial analyst at Gleacher & Company. It didn’t last. By May 2012, he and Sam had co-founded Hydrazine Capital — a $21 million venture fund seeded largely by the $5 million Sam pocketed from selling Loopt, with most of the rest coming from Peter Thiel.
The early portfolio was impressive: Opendoor, Instacart, Pinterest, Gusto, Patreon. But Jack wasn’t content writing checks. He wanted to build. In 2013, he left Hydrazine to join Teespring as VP of business development. What followed was a masterclass in startup velocity — and its consequences. Teespring grew from a few million dollars in annual revenue to over $100 million in less than two years. The headcount exploded from 10 to 500.
Altman watched the seams rip in real time. Goals misaligned. Performance reviews were an afterthought. Managers had no tools to develop their teams. The company grew faster than its people systems could support.
The Frustration That Built a $3 Billion Company
In the fall of 2015, Altman was 26. He and Eric Koslow — Teespring’s former lead engineer and one of its earliest hires — decided to build something new. Their first idea was a pharmacy benefit management platform. It went nowhere. Neither of them cared about pharmacy benefits.
What they did care about was the thing that had frustrated them most at Teespring: managing people at scale without proper tools. Every company they talked to had the same problem. Performance reviews lived in Google Docs. Goal-setting was ad hoc. Employee engagement was measured by gut feeling.
”A people-centric company is basically stemming from the acknowledgement that the way to have a great business is to have happy, engaged, high-performing employees.” — Jack Altman
They applied to Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch with a simple pitch: a modern platform for performance management. They got in.
From YC Demo Day to Unicorn in Five Years
Lattice launched out of YC in May 2016 with a $2.3 million seed round from an all-star cap table: Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, Slack Fund, Marc Benioff, Alexis Ohanian, and Elad Gil. The product started with performance reviews and quickly expanded into OKRs, employee engagement, compensation management, and analytics.
Growth was methodical. By 2019, Lattice had raised $15 million more and counted hundreds of companies as customers. Then the pandemic hit — and suddenly, every HR team on Earth needed digital tools to manage remote workers. Lattice was ready. ARR grew over 110% year-over-year in 2021. In March of that year, a $60 million Series E led by Tiger Global Management pushed the valuation to $1 billion.
Altman wasn’t done. In January 2022, Lattice closed a $175 million Series F that tripled the valuation to $3 billion. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Tiger Global and Thrive Capital. Total funding: $332 million.
5,000 Companies, $127 Million in Revenue, and a New CEO
By 2024, Lattice had grown to 5,000 customers and $127 million in annual revenue. The platform had evolved from a performance review tool into a full people management suite — HRIS, payroll, onboarding, and in 2025, an AI agent for HR that automates routine tasks. The company Altman and Koslow built in a Y Combinator office now competed with legacy giants like Workday and BambooHR.
But Altman had started feeling the pull of something else. He had spent nearly a decade as a founder-CEO. The company was scaling. The team was strong. And he missed the energy of early-stage building — the phase where everything is uncertain and every decision matters disproportionately.
”The way I operated then would’ve been wrong at six. The way you operate really has to change dramatically.” — Jack Altman
In January 2024, he stepped down as CEO, promoted Sarah Franklin, and launched Alt Capital — a solo venture firm focused on early-stage companies. He raised $150 million for Fund I. Six months later, he closed Fund II at $275 million. It took him one week.
From Operator to Benchmark Partner: What Comes Next
Altman’s investor career accelerated faster than anyone expected. Alt Capital backed around 20 companies from its first fund, including David AI and Owner.com. The portfolio caught attention. In February 2026, Benchmark — the firm behind Uber, Snap, and eBay — hired him as its fifth general partner. He brought his investment team with him and retained his board seats from Alt Capital.
It is a rare trajectory. Most founders who exit their companies take a year off, maybe advise a few startups, and slowly drift into advisory roles. Altman went from running a $3 billion company to becoming a general partner at one of venture capital’s most storied firms in just two years. He is 36 years old.
His brother Sam runs OpenAI. Jack built the platform that helps companies manage the humans AI is reshaping. The Altman family now sits at two of the most consequential intersections in modern business — and neither brother shows signs of slowing down.
