The CEO of US unicorn Lattice has announced plans to significantly increase its UK presence.
The tech giant is the number one AI-powered people platform and has 5,000 customers worldwide.
Lattice currently has around 200 customers in the UK, including Bolt, GoCardless, Guinness World Records, Tide, Monzo and Airwallex.
@businesscloud.co.ukIt’s Web Summit Day Two! Lots of big moves for the boys in blue today, as BusinessCloud embarks on day two of the flagship event Highlights included interviews with Sarah Franklin and Arvind Jain, the KPMG Global Tech Innovator Final and insight into a 15-year-old tech star #WebSummit #tech #uktech #business♬ original sound – BusinessCloud
They’re currently serviced by a 40-strong London office but CEO Sarah Franklin told BusinessCloud that the plan was to grow its customer base significantly.
Speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon, she said: “The UK is incredibly important. It is a financial hub, a global hub. It is a country and community that is forward thinking with great people.
“Our goal is to just grow. It’s our access to all of EMEA. The UK is the hub for having our global business.”
In a far-ranging interview, Frankin said people shouldn’t be ‘paralysed’ by a fear of AI; guarded against the dangers of ‘doomscrolling’ on social media; and warned against the obsession people have with the valuation of tech companies.
Lattice was founded in 2016 by Jack Altman – brother of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI – and Eric Koslow.
Franklin became chief executive in January 2024 after spending 16 years at Salesforce.
The 50-year-old has spent half of her life scaling businesses after first getting a degree in chemical engineering and biochemistry.
“I wanted to be a doctor,” she revealed. “I really wanted to do stem cell research. I was really bad at chemistry but was much more better at maths and computers.”
She made her name at Salesforce, rising up through the ranks from a marketer to president and CMO with a staff of 3,500.
One of Salesforce’s co-founders, Mark Benioff, in now an investor in Lattice.
In describing her leadership style she said: “I’m me. I’m transparent. I’m a little crazy.”
Lattice is at the cutting-edge of AI and Franklin said it was vital businesses continued to invest in people and not just their AI.
“We have AI to really be there to give people superpowers to help us have better understanding, have better clarity, have better communication between ourselves as humans,” she told BusinessCloud.
“People are paralysed by the fear (of AI), by the uncertainty and by the doubt, and they’re afraid for their job security.
Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice, on stage at Web Summit
“They’re uncertain about whether it’s safe, and they’re doubtful if it’s going to deliver on the promise.
“Those are fair worries because it’s new and it’s unknown, and there is no precedence but what we cannot do at this moment is be paralysed, because it is real.
“What we have to look at it is more an urgent call to action, where everybody needs to learn and experiment and really just have the courage to go forward.”
Franklin said people’s experience with social media and mobile phones were examples of why a degree of caution was needed with AI.
How can AI hurt us?
“I look at cautionary tales of social media and mobile phones,” she said. “We focused on how it could be helpful. We didn’t ask how it could be hurtful. How it could make us an addicted generation to our devices or an anxious generation with FOMO.
“How can it (AI) hurt us? It’s new. We don’t know and we have to ask these questions, not how can it help, but also, how can it hurt?
“By having that balance, that’s how we can keep ourselves clear-eyed. One of our values at Lattice is being clear-eyed to face our fears and to ask these questions.
“How can this hurt us? It can risk our safety if we don’t have it secure, if we’re giving it access to our systems to be able to act autonomously, to talk to our customers, to talk to our employees, to update our data and our back-end systems.
“We don’t yet understand everything it’s capable of so we have to give ourselves time to pause and ask these questions and not just be excited by the opportunity.”
Franklin doesn’t just speak as the CEO of a tech unicorn but as the mother of two daughters aged 21 and 11.
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Phones are banned at the dinner table in favour of real conversations.
She revealed: “At dinner time we have a simple thing we do, which is to ask: What’s your favourite part of the day? What’s your least favourite part of the day? And then your second favourite part?
“Some people call it high/ low. I have affirmations that I say to my girls every day. I say: Who’s smart? Who’s strong? Who’s healthy? Who’s brave? Obviously, the answer is supposed to be them.
“And then I ask them what do they want to do and ensure that they know that they can be anything they dream.
“And these are the conversations that are important in building courage. We need courage in the world we’re in today.”
Beware doomscrolling
Franklin hates ‘doomscrolling’, where people spend hours online consuming negative content.
“It’s time that’s spent on nothing,” she said. “People worry about brain rot from AI, I worry about brain rot from social media and learning is one of the most incredibly powerful human things that we can do.
“We have a limited amount of time on this planet. How we spend our time is the most important human thing that we need to decide every day.
“Spending your time doing nothing is not helping the world. It’s not helping yourself. It’s not helping your goals.”
Franklin is one of life’s optimists. She said her leadership style was a bit ‘crazy’ so I asked her what she meant.
“My ideas,” she answered. “My willingness to try things, my wanting to believe that we can do incredible things and not be stopped by beliefs that we can’t.”
She marked her 50th birthday in August by running 50kms. “I didn’t think I could do it, but I did,” she said
“One of my favourite books is ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ (by Mitch Albom),” she said. “He talks about all these things about life, love, marriage, and there’s a quote in there that says ‘part of me is every age’ and I can’t wait to my next birthday, because I just will continue learning more.
“I love goals. I love sharing with my team what my goals are and whether I’m achieving them or not achieving them. That’s important. Sometimes we fail, but we don’t stop trying.”
In 2023 I wrote an article headlined: “Where are the UK’s female unicorn bosses?”
It was prompted by the fact that the UK’s eight newest unicorns all had male CEOs.
The situation is a little better in the US but Franklin is still very much in the minority as a female CEO of a tech unicorn.
If I had to describe what makes her different to male unicorn CEOs it would be her openness and willingness to talk about her feelings, evidenced by the love she has for her late teacher mother.
Inspired by her mum
Also called Sarah – but widely known as Sally – she died on her daughter’s 49th birthday at the age of 77 and continues to have a significant influence on her life.
“There’s things that she would ask me, like, if I left the door open she would ask me ‘if I lived in a barn’, or if something bad happened, she’d say ‘that’s where the crooked crumbles’,” she recalled.
“But she’d always say, ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’. And I did that when I was twirling batons, or whether I was doing swim team, but everything was to just keep trying.
“We just celebrated Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and it’s a beautiful celebration. It’s from the Aztec. It’s about celebrating the dead and remembering them.
“She was the person that when I would go home to Virginia, I couldn’t get out of a grocery store within an hour, because everybody would come and say: ‘Miss Sally, you were my teacher, you changed my life.’ She would talk forever.”
Sarah Franklin, CEO of tech unicorn Lattice, which has been valued at $3bn
It’s apparent she has inherited many of her mother’s traits.
I asked if she saw herself as a role model to her own daughters. “I see myself as a teacher, and that my job is to instil the confidence and courage so that they can believe that they can achieve anything they dream,” she answered. “They’re not limited by small thinking or the norms of society today.”
Franklin is a CEO on a mission. “I don’t let myself get distracted or intimidated by anyone else,” she said. “We have a plan and we want to accomplish it.
“The plan is that we’re building a new way to work, and we want every job for every person in the world to feel meaningful, which means that you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing and how you’re doing at it.”
Frothy valuations
One of the things she won’t allow herself to get distracted by is ‘frothy’ valuations.
“I think it’s short-term thinking,” she said. “I think that we have an incredible technology right now. You look in the past, where you see things that changed our world with PC, cloud, mobile phones.
“If you look at Google, for example, their stock ticker over time was a little bit flat for a while. And then, I mean, if you look at any one period of time, it might not look that good, or sometimes went down, but over a period of decades.
“We have transformational technology at our fingertips right now with AI, and so maybe it’s frothy now, maybe there’s some ups and downs, but from a long-term thinking, we have to think about how can this transform society?
“How can this make a new way to work for people, where people have more understanding, better communication, and we can unlock human potential?
“You talk about going to the moon, I say this often. We have technology that can put people on the moon, but we can’t sustain them at scale yet on the moon, so we don’t send them there on mass.
“It’s similar with AI right now. We have this incredible technology, but we need to be really responsible and diligent about how fast we accelerate into our work and into our lives to make sure that we don’t cause more harm than good, and that we can sustain people at scale in this new way of work.”
- Chris Maguire is the executive editor of BusinessCloud. He can be contacted at Chris.Maguire@BusinessCloud.co.uk