You've got to have some North Star vision of your product.

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 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 it calls are hard.

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 tradeoffs, first as the co-founder and CEO of Ladis,

and now as an investor through Alt Capital.

In this speed-run conversation, Jack shares lessons on product market fit, customer feedback, hiring, fundraising, and what separates companies that find momentum from those that stall.

Let's talk about Jack Altman.

Started off investment banking.

Then you were an early startup employee, a T-spring. Then you built lattice,

unicorn company. Then you started a fund, $275 million first fund. Three kids, a really popular

podcasts. Yeah. What's next? Energy drink, or are you going to start training for

MMA fighting? I don't know. I might just come do speed run all the time. What's kind of talk about

this part of your life that you're in now. What's, what's lighting you up? What's firing you up?

It's just caffeine? It's a lot of caffeine. Yeah, the little kids

make, 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 too 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 and I just like embrace the changes. But at the moment, I'm loving investing, and that's, that's what I've

been doing for the last two years now. And then, you know, in terms of your journey, so when I met you

were at T-Spring and you were the VP of business development, had you been a VP of anything at that

point? No. I had never managed anybody. When I joined T-Spring, it was like 10,

10 people or 12 people, and over two years, it became like 300 people, as you saw. And that was

...