0 → $1b in a year: The remarkable story of Handshake's refounding
Garrett Lord · Co-founder & CEO, Handshake
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.
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.
The most quotable moments from Garrett Lord
“I couldn't spell reinforcement learning when I started this business.”
“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.”
“There will be human data for as long as humans are needed in the economy.”
“There’s a big difference between what the MBAs say and what the researchers say.”
“I think the future of a lot of employees in enterprises actually looks more akin to being a Waymo driver in your job.”
“I spend 0% of my time celebrating any of our success.”