Becoming a Unicorn Doesn't Happen By Chance w/ Dini Mehta (fmr CRO, Lattice)
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You're looking for your next job. The last one didn't go so well. You got to get this one right. And you found one. But how do you know if it's good? And how do you know you can help? That's an important riddle. And today we bring in my friend, Dini Mehta, the founding Sierra of Lattice.

She saw that this company wasn't exactly growing in its infancy, but she came across Jack Altman, Sam's brother, who's one of the most brilliant founders she met. So she had to assess it to figure out if she could grow it and then executed a playbook so that years later, it's a $3 billion company. How'd she do it? That's the real we're going to unpack today. I'm Mark Roberge, and this is the Science of Scaling.

Can you take us back to how you even heard about the company? Yeah, I'll take us back to 2018. I was at a company called Drawbridge, which was in the marketing technology space. I'd just come off of this big run, and it was my first time scaling to global sales, running. I was there fairly early, pre-revenue to $100 million plus, and I was looking for my next adventure.

And most of my background up until that point was selling to marketers. And so I had sold advertising, then the ad tech journey. Then I went to MarTech and I was looking for something different.

You know, the default path for me would have been to go to another marketing technology company because I knew a lot of marketers. I'd sold to that for over a decade, seen sort of how the market evolved. But I wanted to do something different because I was becoming one of those leaders that would say things like, that can't be done. And I was like, it's time. It's time to go push myself into a new environment. I wanted to go to a place where I could experiment in how sales orgs are built from the ground up.

I had sort of made a lot of mistakes, had a lot of lessons that I'd learned from my prior management roles. And I wanted to see if I could go someplace and apply those and do it differently. And so I heard about this company Lattice through Diversa. And I remember first thinking, I'm like, oh, it's performance reviews. Like, okay, it doesn't sound that exciting. Like,

you know, selling HR tech performance reviews. Like, I don't know. But I was like, fine, I'll take a call. This was also, they were early. This was, Lattice was about a couple million in revenue. And so much earlier than, you know, I was managing a team of 70 folks and all of a sudden you're like, go series A again. So I was like, do I want to do that again? So I was sort of skeptical. And then I met Jack and he just, my first meeting with him, he kind of drew me in.

He talked about why he started the company. He talked about what he's trying to build. And what struck me was it didn't feel like, it just felt like I was talking to a friend who's super smart, super ambitious, and seems kind. Like it's sort of everything checked. And I was like, you know, you can get smart out of those three attributes, smart, kind, ambitious. You can get two easily. Finding all three is hard. Hey folks, just Mark here. You know what I think is really cool?

about Denny's reflections here is all too often when we're going to find our next executive, we're too selfish. We look at what we want. Someone that's scaled up from one to a hundred, you know, someone who's sold in 10 years in our industry, someone who has experience with ABM and we don't pay attention to like what makes sense for the candidate. And so like, we're seeing the other side of this. Like Denny's accomplished a lot and she has a particular perspective

for her next role. Jack did such a good job of appreciating that and seeing that there was a fit, not just for what Denny could do for Lattice, but what Lattice could do for Denny in her career. I think that's quite instructive to executive leadership recruiting. Let's get back to her.

So that first meeting almost threw me off because I was going in skeptical and thinking, I don't know if this is for me, but sure, I'll have a conversation. And then very quickly, I was like, there's something here I have to at least explore. So tell us about that exploration, man. That's a great story. And you're right. You can't find that three for three often. You're hearing about it from the recruiter.

It doesn't really pique your interest that much. You meet Jack, you're like, oh my gosh, this would be amazing to work with them. But under the hood, it's not exactly cooking. You know, it's not, it's not, the product's great, but it doesn't grow much. And that's our job. And so how did you assess that you were willing to take that risk on and that you could actually help?

So I met with a lot of the team. So the first thing was like the, you know, it wasn't just Jack, the early team he'd assembled were all very sharp. You could tell their big ambitions moving fast. And so I was like very impressed with the team he'd assembled. That was like a big part of the equation.

Two, I remember I just wrote up 20 questions on a Google Doc. And I was like, Jack, I have a lot of questions. And I'm just going to send you this list. You tell me who can get me answers to this. And another thing that struck me was like in two hours, he was like responding to those questions. We were going back and forth in comments on this Google Doc. And very quickly, I saw his, you know, he's very transparent, telling me all the problems that we've got to solve, all the good things in the business.

And I realized that the brand was strong. We had good logos. The product was solid. So I looked at the demo of the product and I was like, okay, this is definitely a better product than what exists. And I'd used some of the competitors in my past roles as an employee. And so I was like, I've seen the competition. There's definitely a better product. The team was solid.

And then the third piece was there's a lot of top of funnel demand. And so growth had stalled, but we were seeing top of the funnel demand and marketing engine was working. And so we're like, there's something here. We haven't figured out why we're not converting this demand, but clearly there's something special cooking here. Yeah.

And then, you know, listening to thinking, you know, talking to Jack about how he's thinking about the future of the company. Where do we see this thing going? Like, how do we build a hundred million dollar business? We're just performance reviews today. Like, how does that turn into hundreds of millions of dollars? And he was always thinking about that versus, you know, a lot of times early days, you're just stuck on the next quarter in the next year versus Jack to his credit was very strategic and

But also you could tell he's very open to feedback, which is like, I want to hire great people and then let them run the show. Like I'll let you. So I got the sense that he would let me experiment, let me sort of fail and run the org as I saw fit. But also he had the ability to think long-term, think strategically, coupled with the fact that good product and solid momentum top of the funnel. There's so much to unpack there because, you know, I feel like

executives stress out about this. They don't know how to know if this is going to be good. And you're very thoughtful about this. So there's so much to unpack. Can you remember some of those top 20, like what were some of the two, like the top three to five of those 20 questions?

you was like growth rate, I mean all the things you would expect in a QBR, which was top of the funnel, how many leads are you seeing? How are you segmenting? What's the quota on the team? How many people are hitting quota? What's the conversion rate between MQL to SQL to SAL? What else do we have? Well, that's great. And- Also some like

Even some qualitative questions around, you know, what are the verticals that you're seeing today? Where do you see the future verticals? You know, he just, the fact that we also got a sense for how we would work together, because in that going back and forth on that doc, we were very, it almost felt like we were working together. It didn't feel like an interview. And that really helped both of us get a sense for what would this feel like, even though that wasn't the intention. It's funny that, yeah.

When I speak to folks in career change mode, they're always just like, ah, you know, my first one was great. I got burned in the last two. I need to go work for a great CEO, a great leader. So that was one thing you said was you felt like Jack would empower you. How did you know that through the interview process?

I mean, we just, we spent enough time together and then even asking his directs, like what's his management style and how would he, how would he, you know, how does he work with you? What type of support does he provide? How much freedom do you have? How do you make decisions? And we, you know, Jack and I talked about that too. Like how would we make decisions short-term, long-term? And so I got a sense that he's, he can be hands-on.

but he prefers to hire people that'll sort of run the show in their own org. And so he would empower me if I earned the right to do so. And that was exciting because I wanted to, I was ready for that next jump where I could come in and experiment and do things slightly differently, even if it doesn't work. Yeah. As a candidate, we give references to the hiring company.

But do you ask for references for them, especially your boss? Look at what she's doing. She's going out and talking to the team. She's not just evaluating the head of product and the head of HR and the current head of marketing, et cetera. She's asking about her boss, Jack. What is it like to work for him? How does he lead? How does he delegate? Does he empower me? Like I said, every sales leader I meet is like, I just want to work for a great leader.

But do they do the proper diligence to figure that out? Denny's given us a great playbook on how to do that. Let's get back to her. But don't have the fear of like, I can't change stuff or I have to run everything past my manager. You also said the team was great. You know, you met Jack, but then you met the team and you felt a lot of confidence in that. I think it's great how you were doing these, almost a reference check on Jack and how he worked. But like,

How did you assess the team? And do you alter that by function? I don't know who was there, like head of product, head of engineering, head of HR, finance, customer success. Do you change that based on who you're talking to?

Yeah, I mean, it's in so much of this is for me, at least instinct space, because I've tried doing the spreadsheet. Even when I'm looking for a role or even when I'm like assessing someone, well, that's that's helpful to look at, like all the attributes that I care about. But ultimately, like it's my instincts that guide me, which is like, am I getting things?

am I more energized after I've spent time with this person or am I less energized? And so much of that is like our chemistry of like, I'm asking questions. Do they know the answers? Are they self-aware enough around what are things that are working well? What are the things that aren't working well? How would it feel to partner with this person? And so I met with a co-founder,

And I met with our COO who'd come from Zenefits, met with the go-to-market leadership team, head of CS, head of ops, the head of sales at that point. And so I got a good sense for the team and the whole interview process very much felt like we were just working on the problems in the business. Yeah.

Which is like, I was asking questions, you know, they were sort of sharing what's working, what isn't working. How do I come in and solve it? Yeah, this self-aware component. This is something that I've been thinking about this week. Keeps coming up. Are they aware of what they know and don't know? And when they're aware of what they don't know, do they know who to ask or how to get that answer? How to fill that gap? Hmm.

I'm starting to see a pattern that that is correlated with people who eventually succeed. That's cool. And Dini is certainly diligent and not just Jack, but the entire team on this attribute. Let's get back to her. And it didn't, you know, it just sort of felt very natural and organic throughout every conversation. And you could tell the thing I felt with Jack was true across the team he had assembled.

Like everyone was super ambitious. I mean, to the point where when I joined, we wouldn't celebrate our milestones. Like that was the thing that I had to like force the company to do, which is like, I know we don't want to celebrate 10 million, but it's a big deal to get to 10 million. Like, can we just acknowledge this moment? Like I get that we're focused on a hundred, but you know, we got from three to 10 and that's a big deal. So anyway, that's like a funny side anecdote, but I think

the sort of uniformity of what I felt around the values of each of the folks I met and the excellence in their craft. Like everyone was very passionate about Lattice and passionate about their role in what they can do. Less, you know, the sort of things you sometimes pick up on, like there's like

sales pointing fingers at marketing or, you know, the go-to-market pointing fingers at product. Like that didn't exist. It was very much like almost like too good to be true. And that stayed throughout my tenure there where people would almost in every interview ask us, like, is this real? Like, what am I missing? Why did that happen? Why culturally did that evolve? Looking back, because you got to live in there for a while. Why do you think it happened?

I think it comes down to the strong alignment across all levels around our values and our mission. Our mission was to make work meaningful. And it'd be very ironic

for us to not have a company that sort of lived up to that mission. And so our values were super important, how we hired people. Folks felt very passionately about what we were representing in market and how Lattice as a product could help you transform your culture, become more high performing. And so I think we attracted a certain type of employee

And then we did a really good job of staying aligned across all levels on what's most important. Like we wanted to build a big business. We were ambitious. We wanted to build a high performing team, but we wanted to do it in a way that's people first. I think a lot of times folks think those things are at odds. But, you know, and going in, that was like a hypothesis for mine. It was like, can you do both? Can you win, but also win?

build a great team where people are collaborating and want to be there year after year. And now coming out of that experience, I know it's possible when you've got alignment across all levels. So obviously there was enough there. You had a very high bar and it met that bar. So now let's guide us on that first quarter, that first year. What did you see and how did you accelerate this thing?

Yeah. So when I joined, sort of growth had been flat for two to three months, and that's why they'd hired me, which is come in and help us figure out how to start scaling. I came in, looked at sort of what we were doing. We were doing too much. That was the first sort of observation I had. We had a self-service funnel. We had sales-led motion. So we were doing PLG, plus we had this sales-led motion and, you know,

Obviously, we wanted to scale the PLG thing because that was popular. But when we actually looked at the data, we saw that the folks that were buying the product on their own, churning at a higher rate, had lower activation and lower usage. And if you think about it, the product that we represent, you see the most value out of it when the whole company uses it versus one or two managers buy it for their team.

And so that was one of my first observations, like, oh, we're doing too much. We didn't have ICP defined. We were sort of, you know, we would talk to really large hundreds of thousands of employee companies, but also talk to a 30 person company. They came inbound. Everything was inbound. And so a lot of that was my first time working with a high velocity inbound company.

I came from enterprise sales, mostly doing outbound. And so I was like, wow, awesome, inbound. But then you realize that there's, you know, it's like sort of the grass is greener on the other side. Because when I was in an outbound org, I was like, wow, I wish I had inbound. Come to this org and you're like, there's...

There's a lot of noise you've got to figure out and you've got to figure out where to focus because it's easy to get stretched in 18 different directions. Dinny is avoiding one of the most common potholes in go-to-market execution. And I call it the inappropriate cut and paste. What does that mean? You have 10 years of experience in sales now. Most of your experience is in a particular methodology.

and you simply implement it at your next company. The way you pay your salespeople, the way your sales process works, the customer you choose to target, the way you define value, the way you generate demand. Most go-to-market leaders are just diverting back to what they did in the past and not appreciating what's appropriate for this context. Denny's doing such a good job. She has experience in enterprise, but she recognizes that is not the short-term lattice opportunity.

Let's get back to her and figure out how she did that.

So yeah, the first observation was we're doing too much. Let's talk about that PLG piece. I think that is still important as to assess whether or not it works for you. Because like, okay, fine. It sounds like you sort of stopped it because it was easy to assess that like the sales-led growth acquired customers were performing better than the PLG. Were you paranoid that someone was going to come in underneath you?

Because it sounds like you went into a sales growth mode and it's like, let's get everyone on it. Let's sell to the top and do sort of a top-down rollout. And were you paranoid that some of these more use case type performance reviews was going to be able to use that PLG motion and disrupt you from below?

Yeah, that was consistently the conversation. And we'd done that to the competitors that created that category. And so we were like, we don't want someone else to come in and do what we just sort of done in this market. And so one of the phrases we said was protect the base while crawl up market, which is we don't want to abandon the base that got us here, but we know that PLG isn't the

the classic PLG self-serve model isn't for us. And so how do we use product signals to get really almost automated in our sales assist model emotion while also building out capacity? And so the first three months, actually, the revenue started going down, which was sort of nerve-wracking as a new leader. Especially the revenue leader. Yes.

So basically, you come in, the data is signaling it's sales-led growth, not PLG, but you don't turn it off. You said that you move upstream. Did you eventually turn it off? Yeah. I mean, I think one was our CTO rightfully was like, we can only invest in one of these things. Where do we want to invest? So we have limited bandwidth on the edge side. So where do we want to focus as a business? Two...

I also knew from my past, like one of the mistakes I'd made in my prior role was assuming the things like moving up market or becoming sales-led or going international is like a go-to-market effort. And then you eventually bring in engineering. I've known that like that's a company-wide effort and you need everyone focused on it for you to be successful in that approach. And so those two, we knew that we wanted to crawl up market.

and start to build an outbound motion. Plus we have limited bandwidth on the inside. So it forced our decision. This is a beautiful example of why starting with PLG is a big advantage, even if ultimately it doesn't work out. When you're starting out, if there is a chance that PLG will be the optimal distribution for at least a portion of your business, you got to do it and you got to do it early.

Because if you don't, you'll always be looking over your shoulder worried that someone is going to do that and come up from below. And so you just go and try and that's what they did and they scaled. And then they realized it doesn't work. The purchase of Lattice is a company-wide purchase that's probably better from a top down. Great. Someone else wants to try PLG, go ahead.

And the reason why that wasn't a waste of time is if you try PLG and it doesn't work, number one, you've de-risked yourself from a PLG competitor. And number two, you end up with a really easy to use product to wrap sales like growth around. And that worked beautifully here at Lattice. Great example. Let's get back to Denny.

One of the things that gave me conviction was, you know, one of the early first three months, I went and talked to 15 HR personas, like some clients, some just friendlies in the space, learning more about their clients.

their job, their day. How do they think about it? What are the KPIs? Why do they do this job? What do they love about it? What do they hate about it? As I sort of started talking to them, one of the other realizations was HR folks, they're so busy. They want help. They want human help. They don't want an automated thing that they can buy online. If they had the option of buy on your own versus talk to a human that'll help you get set up, they'll pick

talk to a human and help you get set up. It's amazing that you went out and talked to the persona yourself. I mean, you knew you wanted to do something new and different. You wanted that intellectual stimulation.

And you didn't just like rely on the team to tell you about the persona. You went out and talked to them. Why? Why was that? And couldn't you have just sat there and be like, listen, that's kind of head of products job. Let me just pick their bang and they'll tell me what's up. Honestly, I did it because initially I remember our first, this is again, like we were thinking about positioning. How do we talk about the value of Lattice?

And coming from selling to marketers, I was strained to think in ROI. And so I was like, here's ROI messaging that we can position for every time an employee walks out, this attrition costs you X dollar amount. You want to solve it. Here's Lattice. Fully failed. And I think that sort of doing that quick transition

quick experiment feeling and realizing I don't know anything. So even though my intent going into this role was to learn, you know, you all you get caught up in like, oh, I can, there's so many fires, I just have to start executing and acting on it. But then that sort of realization was, I don't know enough about this space, about this persona. And I've got to go do the diligence on my own because

Because without that, I'm not going to fully internalize what it means to build a sales process for this persona, build a team that's going to be able to sell to this persona. And so, you know, it was valuable time of going and, you know, shadowing some of our some of these HR leaders for half a day. And they were kind enough to let me.

And we didn't talk about Lattice at all. It was no talk about product, no talk about Lattice, just purely learning about how do they pick this profession? What is it about it that's awesome? What sucks? She's not listening to sales calls. She's not evaluating close rates. She's talking to buyers because that is the underlying foundation for any go-to-market system is it has to sit on the buyer journey.

And the buyer journey is written in a way as if the buyer did not even know your product existed. What are the top five problems or opportunities that your buyers are talking about in their role today? What are the top five categories on how to solve that they're considering? Within your category, what are the top driving factors around their decision? Once they've made a decision, how are you going to measure success of that initiative? That is not written specifically

anything to do with lattice. It's everything to do with how the buyer buys. That is our job in sales is not to push and hawk products. Our job in sales is to help the buyer buy. And that's what Dini is focused on in the early phases of her research. Let's get back to her. It was a great learning experience and I would recommend everyone. Now, every time I join a company, I'm going to spend time in the first 30 days doing this. Maybe not 15, but at least 10, at least five.

Okay. So we've got a really good sense of how you came in and learned all this. And you've talked a lot about starting with the customer, but now you need to go back and codify all this. You had all this institutional knowledge of what this HR person was like, and how did you establish the foundation or playbook or whatever that would get the next 30 hires to do it in the way you wanted to do it? Yeah. The early days was first we had to decide what was going to be...

Should we segment the team? I came from a world of regional segmentation. So it's like the first question was, okay, we're adding a bunch of capacity. We've got leads. Should we segment? That was the first question. We decided on not doing a regional segmentation and a light employee size based segmentation.

to start with. That was the first thing we codified and said, here's the folks that are going to be in SMB. Here's the folks that are going to be in mid-market. We only had two segments then because we went from like round robin to like basic two segments where now we can start hiring people in those two segments.

Two, we said, okay, what is our ideal customer profile? Because right now we're talking to really large organizations that basically want us to build a custom performance management solution for them and take 30% of our roadmap. Or like really small companies that are like seven people that probably don't need a tool like ours. They could just use spreadsheets. And so we decided on what does the ideal customer profile look like? And we looked at our existing base of customers

and said, who are the folks that are seeing the most value out of the product today? And not where we're seeing the leads, but truly like where is the customer seeing value? And use that to come back and said, here's the vertical, here's the company size, and here's the geos and the type of titles that we see that are going to be the best fit for Lattice today. So like what was the ICP definition, if you could remember that time?

Yeah. The first definition was zero to 100 was SMB for us and 100 to 250 quote unquote was mid-market or enterprise, like two segments for them. And then over time we continued to crawl up. We were resegmenting almost every quarter of the first two years and then we segmented annually after that. And so we went up, eventually our segments were zero to 250 for SMB, 250 to 1,000 for mid-market and 1,000 to 3,000 for enterprise.

Yeah, and that's a huge point, Denny. And also, people normally talk about qualifying matrices as another part of the playbook that you would codify. Can you speak to how you thought about those? Yeah. I mean, early on, and this was an evolving thing.

But we found that there's certain signals, like the HR tech stack that they were using was a strong signal in terms of whether Lattice was a good fit. To identify intent and timing, we saw that the employee count change up or down was a signal that they would think about investing in a tool like Lattice. If you're growing really fast, you need something to codify your culture, to establish how you do

people management practices. If things are going down, you're really thinking about performance management. So that might be an element. Glassdoor ratings was a signal, both if it's climbing or if it's declining. So our BDR team used these things. And then eventually we found a way in our ops team to bring in these signals as how we did account scoring on the backend. And the third one was new HR leader. So typically a new HR leader comes in,

And for the first three months, they'll evaluate the stack. And then another one was when HR reported to the CEO directly, which signaled that they were a people-first org. And so they were more willing to invest in a tool like Lattice and they cared about... And our positioning would be different around feedback and one-on-ones versus just performance management and performance reviews.

Well, Denny, like I'm not surprised to hear and see where this thing ended up. I mean, what a ride. And thank you so much. I mean, everyone has to find that next unicorn. And this process of evaluating and the first couple of years of execution clearly set the foundation for doing it. Congratulations. And thank you so much for coming on the show to Drop Knowledge. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me. Super fun. Thank you.

All right, that does it for me, folks. I'd like to thank our showrunner, Matthew Brown. Editing support comes from Pizza Shark Productions. Of course, I want to thank HubSpot for Startups and the HubSpot Podcast Network for keeping the audio on. And by the way, I'm a huge fan of feedback. And so get this, if you're listening on Spotify right now, check your phone, see that Q&A field. That's a direct line to me and our show. So let us know what you think. All right, I'll see you next week.