Grit13 Jan 2025

#225 CEO Lattice, Sarah Franklin: Trailblazer

Guest: Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice

As the CEO of a growing company, Lattice’s Sarah Franklin has learned that one of her most important contributions is taking a leap of faith. “You have to have the courage to be the first one to do it,” she says,” and to show that it can be done, and to pave the way so that then your team feels trust.”

Sarah cautions, though, that sometimes courage is deciding to stop and go a different direction. As agentic AI becomes more common, the people building companies like Lattice should look to the “cautionary tales” of how social media and mobile phones have changed society, she says.

“We can have the courage to say, what are the outcomes that we want to prevent? Or what are the outcomes that we want to make sure happen? This all takes, courage, because it’s all unknown.”

Chapters:

(01:14) - Schooling in Mexico
(04:09) - Raising brave children
(10:28) - Sarah’s upbringing
(13:29) - The pursuit of money
(16:23) - Measuring success
(19:28) - Learnings, not regrets
(22:55) - Make an impact
(26:44) - Pitching Trailhead
(32:56) - Elevating a B2B company
(35:27) - How to colonize Mars
(38:39) - Marketing, the Salesforce way
(44:21) - Dolphining and truth-tellers
(50:56) - Renewed purpose
(56:30) - The challenges of being CEO
(01:00:18) - Pave the way
(01:03:25) - “Humanizing AI”
(01:06:57) - Handling controversy
(01:11:04) - Who Lattice is hiring and what “grit” means to Sarah

Mentioned in this episode: FaceTime, Salesforce, Marc Benioff, Mahatma Gandhi, Instagram, the Fortune 500, Java, Jerry Maguire, National Parks, Nike, Michael Jordan, Apple and “Think Different,” Sara Varni, Scott Holden, Andy Kofoid, Databricks, Datadog, Behind the Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft, Elon Musk, Amazon AWS, George Hu, Mike Rosenbaum, Cheryl Feldman, Zac Otero, Guidewire Software, AI agents, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and LinkedIn.

Links:

Connect with Sarah

Connect with Joubin

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

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