At a Christmas party in December 2024, Garrett Lord met a researcher who told him about the challenges with model training. This researcher was working at a frontier AI lab. Two weeks later, Garrett’s company Handshake was recruiting STEM PhDs for that same lab. Fifteen months after that, Handshake AI had gone from zero to a billion dollars in gross annualized revenue, run by a founder who jokes he couldn’t spell reinforcement learning when he started.
Before that Christmas party, Garrett’s company Handshake was already huge. A decade of building had made it the career network for an entire generation: 18 million students and alumni, 1,600 schools, almost every company in the Fortune 500, and a valuation well north of $3 billion. Most founders would spend the next ten years protecting that. Instead, over the course of 2025, Garrett refounded the company around a business that was barely a year old. He moved his strongest people over, took a fully remote workforce to five days a week in office, watched around 100 people leave, and codified a value called Olympic Pace.
In this conversation, Garrett walks through the why and how of that transformation. How he incubated a new business inside a profitable one, and what he told his execs and board. Why he triages problems with red, yellow, green, and why he hasn’t upgraded a single exec. What the bear case on human data misses. And how he holds it together at home with a 10-month-old, a second baby on the way, and family going through health problems.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts
Garrett Lord is the co-founder and CEO of Handshake, the career network he started in 2014 with Scott Ringwelski and Ben Christensen while studying computer science at Michigan Technological University. Handshake connects 18 million students and alumni across 1,600 schools with employers including almost every company in the Fortune 500, and was valued at $3.5 billion after its $200 million Series F in 2022. In 2025, Lord launched Handshake AI, which recruits students, alumni, and professionals from the network to produce post-training data, evaluations, and reinforcement learning environments for frontier AI labs; the business went from zero to $1 billion in gross revenue in about 15 months and has acquired eight companies. Handshake also runs upskilling and enterprise evaluation businesses on the same network, with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Bangalore.
Where to find Garrett Lord:
Where to find Nakul Mandan:
Where to find Audacious Ventures:
In this conversation with Garrett Lord:
00:00 Who is Garrett Lord?
01:36 How did a Christmas party conversation spark Handshake AI?
11:59 How do you tell your execs and board you’re refounding the company?
18:18 What keeps A players motivated in the core business?
22:22 Olympic Pace: why did around 100 team members leave Handshake?
27:02 What broke first going zero to a billion in a year?
31:45 How do you protect quality when 85% of the company is new?
39:36 Why hasn’t Garrett upgraded a single exec?
49:00 What does the bear case on human data get wrong?
53:30 How do you make accounting verifiable enough for reinforcement learning?
1:00:08 Will enterprises leave the labs for open source?
1:07:13 What does all this mean for knowledge workers?
1:08:51 The inner game: how is Garrett holding it all together?
1:14:22 What’s the mission in this new chapter?
1:18:27 Will vertical AI apps survive the frontier labs?
1:21:23 Quickfire: red flags, overrated advice, jobs of the future
Garrett’s sharpest lines from this conversation:
On how much AI knowledge Garrett has learned from scratch:
“I couldn’t spell reinforcement learning when I started this business.”
On Olympic Pace:
“If you just compound and stack day after day after day and give it your best, great things will happen. That’s been the story of my life and the story of this business.”
On how long human data lasts:
“There will be human data for as long as humans are needed in the economy.”
On who understands this market:
“There’s a big difference between what the MBAs say and what the researchers say.”
On the future of enterprise work:
“I think the future of a lot of employees in enterprises actually looks more akin to being a Waymo driver in your job.”
On no rearview mirror:
“I spend 0% of my time celebrating any of our success.”
