YouSaid · the spoken record

Garrett Lord

lines on the record: 71
first: 2025-08-24
most recent: 2025-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Hiring is like the number one problem we have right now to meet the demand. So if you're a talented and interested in learning more about Handshake, if you want to work on our consumer product, if you want to work on our employer product, cool PLG issues or the state-of-the-art consumer social experience, like reach out, or you want to work on the AI business, we'd love to talk to you.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean, sign up for Handshake if you want to message me on there. It's the easiest way to reach me so you just find me Garrett Lord at handshake and you find me on Twitter or Love Axe. Huge Hax guy, you can email me at Garrett at joinhandshake.com. And R double T. And how can you be helpful? Like, we are trying to hire so many people. We have offices in New York and in San Francisco, in London and Berlin. If you have friends that are passionate about this, you want them to know or you're interested in learning more, please reach out. We'd love to talk to you. Hiring.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's Garrett Lord? Like, is he really here to pitch you software for your Chris Enter and made the start of the meeting with the Chris Enter like really stimulating and exciting because they were like, you showered in our pool, you drove here? Yeah, we drove here from Michigan, you know, like, and so I think that showed a level of commitment that was exciting for them.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a tough one. I mean, I almost got arrested at Princeton because, I mean, I guess for entrepreneurs that are traveling around all the time, we're sleeping out of our car. We had this Ford Focus. We put 20, 30,000 miles on it, sleeping the back of McDonald's parking lots. They're well lit and had good Wi-Fi back in the day. And instead of staying in a hotel, way to freshen up ahead of your meeting is like every university has a pool and the pool is almost always, it is always hopeful. We never had a situation where it's always open for people to swim in the morning, like fitness, faculty, students, and every pool. What do they have? They have a shower. So you could go to any pool at any university in the country and you can get a free shower and freshen up. So the Princeton campus security did not appreciate me showering as a non-student, but I think it meaningfully helped us because the Princeton campus security called the Career Service Center director was selling to being like.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that like lead method of chance, like leave it all out in the field, you know, grow up in a really hardworking family and had worked really hard to provide make it happen for us. And it's like just give it your all. Leave nothing to chance.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a sucker for Peter Tiel zero to one. I read it and I started the company and watched Peter Teals startup school class at Stanford. He taught back in the days where there wasn't everything written on the internet about how to start companies and like just think he was the coolest. Love Shoe Doged me of starting a company. Hard things about hard things, obviously, but these are all quite common books.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did check. That's incredible. The long term reader, I'm just like so curious and love up your interviews. But it's like. Just focus on doing something like a meaning that really helps people. And I think with AI, there's going to be so many opportunities to improve the way people learn. I just really passionate about trying to make handshake a platform that is not only an incredible business, but it's also something that really helps solve a societal problem that matters. Be my one shot out here. If anyone wants advice on how to do that or wants to reach out, I'm like happy to chat.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing I always love like talking, I'm really passionate about people starting companies and helping them do so. And like, I just think in this moment right now with AI, like, for young entrepreneurs that listen to read this podcast, because I've been a reader since 2020, we looked”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just talking to it's amazing. It's amazing. I just had a baby on, or my wife had a baby on Sunday and VoiceMode has been incredible. I mean, every night at, you know, every two hours, it's like I have more questions. Voice mode's been huge. So shot out voice mode. And yeah, so the type of data is going to collect a lot or change a lot. I think synthetic data has a role to play and like in verifiable domains, but like what would consistently hear from companies is like, you know, their synthetic data is not going to dominate. Like it's not going to be like there's billions and billions and billions of dollars of value to extract as a company over the next decade and following the frontier of AI development.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, like it's just the type of data we're going to need is going to evolve. It's going to be CAD files. It's going to be. Scientific tool use data as they are trying to automate scientific discoveries and drug discovery. It's going to be esoteric operating systems that exist on scientific tools. It's going to be, so I love this trajectory and stitching together step by step instruction following there will need the type of data we're going to need is going to evolve a lot. We haven't even talked about like multimodal and video and text and audio. Audio is a huge demand for audio data right now. So the type of data is going to evolve.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it makes the experience way better for students. So it's just like we have to meet the moment. We still have the stamina and the excitement and the passion internally in our core and in the new business to like go charge after this. And that's a lot of the message we've been sharing internally is like it's time to amp it up. It's time to like, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be positioned as well and like we are going to need the moment as a team.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's my story. Like, I went to community college, a pavement went through school. I went to a no-name school in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan. I worked at Palantir as an intern. I totally changed my life. And like I started handshake because I wanted to make it easier for anyone regardless of who you knew, what your parents did, what school you went to find a great opportunity. And I think AI step function improvement in matching. And I think that our human data business is really serving as like the foundation for improving meshing. Like a lot of things that we're doing in the human data business are being integrated to our core business. I think that's going to improve outcomes for employers, save them in the aggregate, like billions of dollars over time.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An AI interviewer that's collecting skills and actually asking about your experiences, doing a work simulation, experiences that help employers find the best candidates. I mean, I don't know the last time you've done this, but like a hiring manager process, like reviewing 200 resumes, are you kidding me? I'm going to sit there and review 200 resumes, like not a chance five years from now, right? Students manually making cover, like not a chance, right? So there will need to be a marketplace that wins in connecting, you know, supply and demand and talent with opportunity. And we think and get psyched about the opportunity for impact here.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Handshake should be a business does billions of dollars of revenue as a public company. We should be able to continue to, I mean, and it also helps our core business. The longer term opportunity that we see. It's connecting, it's building the best job mashing marketplace on the internet. It's like it's probably one of the largest problems in the world, like labor supply matching. Where people spend most of their time and energy just hours of their life. They spend it at work, the process of like. Searching for a job, applying to a job is going to be completely reinvented with AI. We've been leading the charge there”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Silicon Valley, you can join it. The ownership too has also been huge. Owning this outcome and like we have, we have this model like leave nothing a 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. I've never seen anything like it. I don't ever feel anything like this in business again where there's unlimited demand and it's just our ability to execute against it. And so we had this motto like leave nothing in a chance. How do you make sure that three months are not six months route? You have like no regrets. Like get on the plane to go talk to a customer, like make the late night push, check the data six times over again. Like ship the extra feature that helps. And really a huge celebratory culture too, like calling people out across, it's very flat, right? So there really isn't this principle of there's so many people putting up points, like directly calling out the people that are putting up points and creating.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know you love your old team. I know you love what you're doing. Like, will you join us in Hinchake AI? And they completely forgoed their historical responsibilities and came over. That became really critical with engineering when things started to scale and topple and like, you know, we're growing so quickly, we took some of our top senior engineers who are very entrepreneurial and principal engineers, staff level engineers like parachuted them in. And that's been awesome to be able to like, we have been awesome to ask some of the most talented people in the core business like hey, do you want to come over here and do this? And sometimes they say no. Like they're like, I don't want to work, you know, most of the weekends. I don't want to be on the number of 2 a.m., 3 a.m. nights week down in this business. It's, I mean, it's quite regular. Like people sometimes don't want to commit to that, but we've been up front. Like here, here are the expectations for this team. It's a, you know, it's an insane pace if you want to be a part of one of the fastest growing businesses in”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We hired an incredible engineering leader like Avery, who we focused on hiring a lot of entrepreneurs. We have a lot of entrepreneurs, people that have started companies inside the company, or pardon me, people that started companies before. Like that was huge. A lot of familiarity with hiring talent that have like only worked at early stage companies before that feel super comfortable with ambiguity. We were also way more upfront around this is going to be chaotic. just like owning that narrative like in front of all hands at the core company owning it directly with the team We have a separate all hands. We have separate onboarding. We have a separate recruiting team. Like, you know, everyone was essentially, you know, I had some connection points, but mostly separate. And I think that was like absolutely critical. We took some of the top people. I mean, we have great people in the core business. We took some great people from the core business and basically said, sorry, like.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I just really believe it's separating everything, like separate engineering teams, separate design team, separate accounts and operations team, separate finance team. Like early on, everything was separate. People only had one job and one job only, and I was making Hinchey guy successful. We had a couple integration points more of it. I have an incredible executive team on the core part of the business, and now there's becoming more and more involvement, but like, you know, I our executives that have built Handshake for a long time like ran the core business and I focused 80 plus percent of my time and attention on just this.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an early stage company. The compensation was also different too and based on like hurdles in this new business. So people felt like owners creating the new co. And yeah, it's like it's still extremely nimble, very, very flat, you know, just because you want run one function doesn't mean you're the directly responsible individual on a project. 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. When I built Handshake, we resisted this operating cadence for a long time, like this weekly, monthly, quarterly operating cadence with Handshake AI. We've been way more focused on operating with data and metrics and rigor from an early stage. This is a gentleman named Sahel on our team who's been doing an incredible job with that. Shout out Sahel. Shout out Young.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had to say no to a lot of things. And then you also had a lot of people in the core part of the business that. Rightfully so, but like there's just checks and balances that there's a lot of people that try to get involved. Everyone wants to say, not everyone, this is stretch, but it's easy to say no, right? It's easy to be like, I can't privatize that this week or this month. I have an existing set of priorities. So, you know, I essentially, with the exception of a few things, like everyone just came straight into this new orc that I built. Everyone did not have any responsibilities in the existing part of the business. It was extremely clear who was like the directly responsible individual across each area of the new co. And now we've got deeper coupling and integration points across the rest of the business, but like we sat in a separate part of the office. Everyone's in the office five days a week, a lot of weekends. Here's a totally different expectation in hiring talent too where it's like, hey, this is a 20.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a cybersecurity company. We had like one buyer and just like one product, and it was just like, you know, we had to, in a marketplace, you have to serve three different sides, you know, from your time at Airbnb. And so one of my warnings in spinning up these three different businesses in starting Henshake was like, you know, I was pretty hands-on. So like, you know, everyone reported directly to me. I really did not try to be like, I really send a lot of music. I'm not trying to be the boss. I'm just trying to be like another smart guy in the room. Like I hired, I was just, we've hired an incredible team of people that have spent a lot of time in the space and have been big leaders at a lot of the human data companies in the space. And so everyone saw very clearly the structural of the energies that we had. And a lot of the focus was on making sure that we could deliver high quality data to one customer before we expanded to anyone else.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I Kind of followed a lot more of my intuition around this doing this. I mean, the story of Handshake was we had to sign up 1,600 universities. I had to learn how to be like the best, we are the fastest growing higher education company in history. So we signed up to 1600 schools. Then we had to build an employer business where we had to figure out how to sell the 100%, all these 4,500 companies use it, like 70% of it pay for it. So I had to worry about upmarket sales to like Goldman Sachs and General Motors and Google and the biggest companies in the world, which is totally different than selling universities. And then we had to learn how to build like an incredible student kind of social network. What is the best feed look like? What does group messaging look like? So we had, I felt a little bit of familiarity in this kind of zero to ones, hopefully, marketplaces are like many zero to ones. Sometimes I dream that we just like, I actually don't dream, but I make a joke that like I just wish we were.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, wonder who it is, depending on which Ben Farque get different answers working with the number one lab and have just, you know, now we're working with Zaver on the Frontier Labs. And the number one thing we're trying to do is just focus on like scaling up. I mean, we've gone from four or five people working on MIST to 75 plus people working on it. We're trying to, I think we had like 12 people start last Monday. It's like we are so bottlenecked on just meeting this opportunity because in this market there's essentially like unlimited demand. Like if you can produce high quality volumes of data, you most likely will be able to sell whenever you produce. And so on our side, we're really focused on making sure that we pick the right longer term strategy, making sure that we don't grow too fast as.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hired like three expert firms Alpha sites and like GLG and sort of doing a bunch of calls with the latest researchers because we had resources. One of the cool things about being a larger company is like we have financial, you know, our core business has $200 million error. So it's like, you know, we. We had resources to be able to accelerate the learning curve here. And then we started working with arguably like the number one lab about five months ago.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tactically, we were working with many of the middleman companies doing work. We started to see the demand, as I talked about earlier. We started to see direct outreach from the frontier labs reaching out to us trying to cut out the middleman in their pursuit of getting higher quality data. And we started to put together the dots on we could build a way better experience for our fellows. We could serve them directly to the labs and build a direct custom relationship with the labs and basically cut out the middleman and provide better experience to the labs, provide better experience to our fellows, and provided a better experience long term to our million companies in the network. And you might think about just like upskilling and reskilling what's going to happen there. So we want the enter the space. We started in really December exploring and learning more about it on like expert calls and hammering down, you know.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that's what they expect from us, like they know Handshake, their school pies handshake. We need to treat, we care about treating these people well, but like the universities would not tolerate our partnership with these fellows unless we treat them well. See, you put them into this process where our LTVs and repeat engage you rate and retention rate on different projects is really high. And so these structural advantages are quite significant when you contrast like a leading provider that has like 200 individual contributing recruiters and are spending tens of millions of dollars a month on performance marketing. So that's, I think, why we've seen so much success.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In machine learning, right? And they go from our projects to their projects. And so there's a huge customer acquisition. I mean, it's a basic, you know, you are going deep on your podcast just to talk about it. It's like, you really have a couple things that matter. You have a cost to customer acquisition, right? Your CAC, and then you have your LTV, like the lifetime value of a user. And an LTV is calculated pretty simply in this business. Like it is based on the retention of a person and how many projects they can participate in. If you treat people really well, you train them really well, right? Like, well, A, we have no customer acquisition cost because we partner with 1,600 universities, power 92% of the top 500 schools in the country. We power almost every institution and community college in the country. We have no customer acquisition cost to acquire the people. We have a ton of brand and trust with them built up so they convert at really, really high rates. And then if you treat them really well and”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A feed of here's how people are learning like you come into actual individual cohort with like peers that look like you and have your similar background you're being taught on how to interact and there's like a trial and error and we have an instructional design team so you can do it then you're put on the projects where building like you know there's certain swim lanes where we're actually pre-building data and selling that data to all the labs so we could do this thing where you know we produce one unit of data ourselves we pay for it almost like a movie production we pay for a unit of data and then we you know we make sure it's very high quality we we run our own post training on it and then we produce a bunch of specifications of the data and we actually sell that individual package of data to like many different labs and so that you get put on a project like that once you're doing a really really good job on our projects oftentimes that will put you on customer projects where you know we the only want of the best people”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And then they put him onto an experience that is treating them like they're drawing boundary boxes around stop signs in the Philippines. The frontier tax accountants don't want to be treated like low-cost international labor, right? And I don't think anyone enjoys that process. And so, you know, the ability to build an experience that's rooted in community that's rooted in like high quality training. Like if you're getting your PhD at MIT chances are you're just not being taught well enough on how to use the tools. Not you can't break the models. It's just like, you know, the other platforms, they're spending thousands of dollars to acquire an individual user and they're put right into a project with no training. So we just started from day one at building like this expert. We believe there'd be a deep network effect here that's very connected to our core business of starting jump starting or restarting your career. And like, you know, you come in, you build a profile, you see the community, there's groups.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unsustainable. They're like 200 people on LinkedIn sending individual messages to acquire these people because there's no brand, there's no trust. They spend, you know, they're spending tens of millions of dollars a month on performance advertising, Google ads.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of you, I care about building a really high quality business and having good gross margin and high quality growth. The ecosystem here is like one of the leading players has like 200 recruiters.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think also as your company grows in size and headcount and maturity, it's also hard to incubate something new inside of a business. Like it's hard to, you know, it's hard in so many ways, right? Like the way that you build zero to one and find product market fit and scale a team very quickly is very different than the way that you run a more mature business that has been around for 10 years with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. I've really had a ton of fun and been of passion in like running it back again for the second time inside the business. And then, yeah, we have this massive strategic advantage, which is like no customer acquisition costs. And we have like much higher conversion rates and retention than like any of the other platforms by a large margin because we have such consumer affinity.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That network does about 200 million, and this will do about 200 million. So that's we have like 600-ish super passionate teammates that work on the core business, which is, you know, I would separate these. These aren't two businesses. I think it's like, it's one business, but what is that business? It's the number, if you're a young person in America that's graduated in the last. Five, six, seven, eight years. You probably had a handshake on your phone. You like definitely know what handshake is. It's a verb with young people in America. It's a verb with people that are in college and their PhD or master's program. And it is, I call it an unconnected graph, meaning like you don't need to, you know, LinkedIn's.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started doing it over Christmas and New Year's. That's when I started like flying around my family kind of thought it was a little wild that I was on planes trying to chase different leaders, but we built an incredible team of people that came from the human data world and really started building out our platform in January and then started really monetizing the relationships about five months ago. Fast forward to today we're working with seven of the frontier labs basically every lab that's doing that's doing work and building the best large language models. And the team has exploded and revenue's exploded and it's been really an incredible ride kind of like running back a new company inside of a company for the second time over again.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advancing AI. And there will need to be a place that everyone in the world could go to to monetize their skills and their knowledge as these labs are focused on improving in all these multidisciplinary outcomes. And yeah, we entered the business in”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like any great marketplace, we started sending them to these different platforms and started to really realize that from hearing from our users that the experience was really frustrating. Training was very transactional. The payments were very amorphous how you could get paid. There was an immense amount of drop off in the process to actual project like completion on these other platforms. So we started to think the company was making tens of millions of dollars from helping these other platforms. And we started to realize what really kicked it off was like hearing also from the Frontier Labs, like they started to reach out to us and sort of go direct and trying to like almost kind of caught out the middleman. And we started to realize, well, you know, we could really serve our fellows, our PhDs, our experts. We could treat them. We just believe they're second. There will need to be a platform and experts versus platform in the pursuit of ASI.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's been a pretty natural extension from helping people jumpstart, restart, or start their career. monetizing your skills in this new employment ecosystem is going to look very different in the future. And we want to zoom into how we discovered it. Because we have such a large access to this audience. And as the world shifted from generalists to experts, one of the largest expert network in the world, we have more PhDs, 500,000 of them use Handshake than any other platform. We have 3 million master students who are in school or alumni. And so we started to see all the, what I would call like middleman companies reaching out to us saying, can we recruit your PhDs and master's students?”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Academic performance and what they've done in school. And so we're able to really target people really effectively and get to scale and volume of high quality data faster than anyone else. And I think that competitive advantage of access to an audience is really resonating the marketplace.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, there are many, many small players in the space, some mid sized players in the space, and they're basically running TikTok ads, running Instagram ads, paying money for Google search display ads, YouTube ads. And they will be like, can you get me 200 physics PhDs? What do they do? They only can do one thing. They like, you know, they have 100 recruiters on staff. They all get on LinkedIn. They all send messages. They spend a couple million bucks on performance advertising campaigns. Somebody's scrolling their Instagram feed that's a physics PhD of which you can't target them that well. And they like see, you know, come train a model. It's like, I've never heard of this brand before. The huge advantage that we've had and why we've resonated so fast the marketplace is like we've built a decade of trust with 18 million people and they trust us and we built a ton of brand affinity and they use handshake and they have an active profile and we have a ton of information on their active.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Cruz, the whole scale team out of respect for what they built. There's many great companies operating in the space. I think to the core of your question, it's like, I think if you were building the most, if you viewed your research team and your model building team and the experiments they're running to be really the cornerstone of how you're improving, you probably wouldn't want The latest research of what you're trying to work on being invested in by a peer. I mean, this is just generally what we hear in this space. And so we have seen an incredible.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally speaking, anytime that you're interacting with a model and you're asking it to do really advanced things and it's not performing your expectations, like somewhere there's probably an expert that is the top mind in that domain working directly for the best researchers in the world at the Frontier Labs, trying to understand and go through the scientific iteration process of how to make that better. The assumption there is that like they already have the entirety of human knowledge that's written and recorded. And so for as long as there are problems in solving any problem with AI, any human problem, there will need to be humans in the loop helping advance that. And like models don't generalize. I mean, obviously the field will advance a lot and the type of data they'll collect a lot will evolve a lot. But it's pretty exciting at the frontier.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, just to hit on that, like what we're hearing from our thousands of fellows. Like they're in the classroom. They're actually producing research. We're talking about PhDs at the top institutions in the country. And like they can make like 100, 150, $200 an hour in their area, in their field of expertise. It's pretty sweet. Like you can make like 25 bucks an hour being a teacher's assistant. Or you can actually make $150 an hour breaking the latest models. And like you're learning, what we're hearing from our fellows is like they're bringing a lot of those insights into the classroom to help them be more effective at teaching. More importantly, they're starting to learn how to leverage these tools to actually advance their area of research. So they believe that these tools can help them advance their area of research by helping them be more effective with their time. And so it is quite cool to get kind of paid to learn a skill.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you remember, I sold him and predates me, but like, you used to put Google search on as a skill on your resume, right? Like you're good at Googling, right? Because you grew up with Google. It's like, I think being AI native and having your Iron Man sued on and understanding how to leverage these tools is like young people are at a huge advantage.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can get on and like they can build their own videos, pretty strong creative assets, post across multiple social media platforms, run all of their own analytics. They don't need a data science degree to be able to do that. And that's an example, or like take an intern in our company. He had his first PR up, I think like the afternoon he started, right? Like you were a PM. Like you realized how challenged that would have been historically your dev environment set up and like figure out where to add value. You just took a bug and squashed it. And so I'm really a believer this is just like enabling human beings to be even more productive and create more impact. And yeah, like of course hundreds of millions of jobs will become the jobs will evolve. Like people will become display stuff to upscale and rescale. And I think handshake is a huge role to play in helping knowledge workers evolve.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm brought in the camp of like GDP growth over universal basic income. I like very much believe that this is going to improve and accelerate every human's ability to like create an impact in the economy and the world. And that we're hearing from there's like a million companies that use handshake. Like we have 100 100% of the Fortune 500 uses handshake. So we basically power the vast majority of how young people find jobs. And a lot of people are kind of hyperbolic at saying that all young people won't have jobs. And like that's not what we're hearing from our employers. We're hearing is like they collect social media marketing. Like before you needed like somebody that could do Photoshop and take pictures and have created videos and you need somebody that understood like marketing analytics platforms to track your posting on different social media forms. It's like now one person, one like young, talented AI native iron man suit enabled young person.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the workplace, you know, it's the pursuit of these labs to make sure that they're trying to collect the data to help add as much value in that process for humans as possible.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think maybe a funny joke is like all the MBAs think this is all just going to go away. It's like, and I think for as long as models are improving, humans will be needed in this process. And when you talk to the lead scientists and researchers at these labs, it's like the data types will evolve and what they're trying to capture and collect. There will be humans needed in the space for the next decade until we reach full ASI. So yeah, I mean, you think about like a lot of them I always struggle to do basic trajectories right now. So right now people are very focused on academic domains and I think they'll continue to be focused on academical academic domains, but they'll also be far, far more demand for professional domains as well across basically every trajectory or step-by-step kind of problem that a knowledge worker solves.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Preference ranked. I mean, we're kind of doing all of the above. We don't do the audio that we produce rubrics, which are used in auto evals. Yeah.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite a bit of technology we built on our side to assess each unit of data. We have our own post training teams. We're renting our own GPUs. And we're trying to make sure that we can sit directly with these researchers and help share what we're seeing with the data that we're creating and how it could improve the model, how they could best train with it. So hopefully that helps.”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you ensure that high quality? Well, for us, say in physics, we just reach out to students at Stanford and Berkeley and MIT. And the top GPA at the best physics schools in the country. And so our ability to get to scale or volumes of data without it to produce very high quality data is something they care deeply about. And then the other thing I'd say model builders care about is speed. Because they have all these hypotheses and they're constantly testing different pipelines. And so you might have like three or four bets going at once. And then as soon as one is actually showing a game, imagine you're a researcher, you know, your scientific prosecutors once running the game, then you're trying to grow that pipeline and grow that piece of data that's actually improving it. And you're maybe ditching two or three other projects you had that weren't showing improvements. So your ability to quickly turn around for them in a period of days and then get to high volumes of data that are high quality is the normal one thing they care about. And so there's”
2025-08-24 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source