Garrett Lord
Garrett Lord is co-founder and CEO of Handshake, which started as a career network for college students and new grads but recently discovered something extraordinary: they were sitting on the world’s largest network of academic experts—exactly what frontier AI labs desperately needed. With 500,000 PhDs and 3 million advanced degree holders creating training data, in just eight months they’ve built a new business that hit $50 million in revenue in its first four months and is on track to blow past $100M in the first 12 months.
AI & Technology Skills
AI strategy is shifting from generalist data labeling to expert-led post-training to improve model reasoning in specialized domains.
"The models have gotten so good that the generalists are no longer needed. What they really need is experts, experts across every area that the models are focused on."
A sustainable moat in AI data products is proprietary access to a trusted, high-intent audience rather than relying on performance marketing.
"We like to say the only moat in human data is access to an audience. Basically, there are many, many small players in this space... they're basically running TikTok ads... The huge advantage that we'v..."
Modern LLM performance gains are primarily driven by post-training (fine-tuning and RLHF) rather than just increasing the volume of pre-training data.
"There's really two primary functions. There's a pre-training and a post-training process... most of the gains now coming from the post-training side of the house. And what post-training is, is it's au..."
Improving model reasoning requires 'trajectory' data—capturing the step-by-step process of solving a problem rather than just the final answer.
"In order to improve a reasoning model you need to actually have the step-by-step instructions... they really focus on the steps to get there. Say there's 10 steps in a math problem, step 6 through 10..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
When launching a high-growth initiative within a mature company, culture must be built separately with clear expectations of chaos and high intensity.
"We were also way more upfront around this is going to be chaotic. Just owning that narrative in front of all hands at the core company, owning it directly with the team. We have a separate all hands,..."
A 'leave nothing to chance' culture drives the extreme execution necessary to capture once-in-a-lifetime market opportunities.
"We have this motto to leave nothing to chance. For a while there we drew the number of days in the year on the whiteboard and it was like, there will never be a time like this... How do you make sure..."
Leadership Skills
Effective cross-functional execution relies on assigning Direct Responsible Individuals (DRIs) based on capability rather than functional hierarchy.
"We pick the best person who's most capable of driving an initiative forward, regardless of the function to be the DRI. We're a lot more metrics-oriented."
Product Management Skills
Rapidly scaling a new business requires a rigorous, data-driven operating cadence from the very beginning.
"With Handshake AI, we've been way more focused on operating with data, and metrics, and rigor from an early stage. There's a gentleman named Sahil on our team who's been doing an incredible job with t..."
The core problem for AI labs is the 'trilemma' of needing high-quality data at massive volumes with extreme speed.
"They really care about, to zoom out, they care about three things. They care about quality first and foremost... And then, the other huge problems you have is volume... And then, the other thing I wou..."