Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

What you’ll learn:

1. How Handshake found an opportunity to leverage their proprietary network of experts to launch a data-labeling business that’s on track to blow past $100 million ARR in 12 months

2. Why AI models need human experts (e.g. physics PhDs) to improve, and what this “data labeling” actually involves

3. Inside the actual work: what a biology PhD does for 8 hours that makes GPT-5 smarter

4. The playbook for building a startup inside a startup: separate teams, separate offices, separate everything

5. Why the shift from “generalist” to “expert” data labeling created a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity

6. Why AI won’t eliminate entry-level jobs—it’s creating “Iron Man suits” that make junior employees 10x more productive

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Brought to you by:

CodeRabbit—Cut code review time and bugs in half. Instantly: https://coderabbit.link/lenny

Orkes—The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows: https://www.orkes.io/

Claude.ai—The AI for problem solvers and enterprise: http://claude.ai/

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Transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-handshake-garrett-lord

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My biggest takeaways (for paid newsletter subscribers): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/171410958/my-biggest-takeaways-from-this-conversation

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Where to find Garrett Lord:

• X: https://x.com/garrettlord

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettlord/

• Email: [email protected]

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Garrett Lord

(05:00) Understanding data labeling and its importance

(13:08) The role of experts in AI model training

(15:35) The future of AI and human collaboration

(24:17) Why AI won’t eliminate entry-level jobs

(27:58) The continuous improvement of AI models

(33:05) The emergence of Handshake’s new business model

(37:07) Incubating new ideas in established companies

(40:42) Handshake's competitive advantage

(45:43) Scaling up and meeting market demand

(48:38) Overcoming challenges and adapting

(53:08) The importance of separate teams and ownership

(57:26) The future of job matching with AI

(01:00:30) The biggest bottlenecks to advancing models further

(01:02:37) Lightning round and final thoughts

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Referenced:

• GPQA: https://github.com/idavidrein/gpqa

• Handshake: https://joinhandshake.com/

• OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/kevin-weil-open-ai

• Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons

• Goldman Sachs: https://www.goldmansachs.com/

• General Motors: https://www.gm.com/

• Google: https://about.google/

• Sahil Bhaiwala on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahil-bhaiwala-459b0354/

• Francisco “Paco” Guzman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guzmanhe/

• Avery Yip on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/averyyip/

• Game of Thrones on HBO: https://www.hbomax.com/shows/game-of-thrones/4f6b4985-2dc9-4ab6-ac79-d60f0860b0ac

• SNOO: https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-smart-bassinet

• Careers at Handshake: https://joinhandshake.com/careers/

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Recommended books:

• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers―Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship: https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	There will never be a time like this. I've never seen anything like it. I doubt I'll ever feel anything like this in business again, where there's unlimited demand. How do you make sure that three months or now, six months for all you have like no regrets? Get on the plane to go talk to a customer. Make the late night push. Check the data six times over again. Your company creates new data to continue advancing the intelligence of models. This is a business that you built on top of a business you've already had.
0:24.5	We're the largest expert network in the world.
0:26.4	We have this massive strategic advantage, which is like no customer acquisition costs.
0:30.3	The only moat in human data is access to an audience.
0:32.7	You guys come in after the models train to tweak the weights based on additional data that you create.
0:38.5	The models have gotten so good that the generalists are no longer needed.
0:41.9	What they really need is experts.
0:43.9	There's this tension between all these students training models to become smarter.
0:48.3	And then there's that they will have harder time potentially finding jobs.
0:51.9	That's not what we're hearing from our employers.
0:53.8	This is
0:54.1	just enabling human beings to be even more productive. You used to put a Google search on a skill
0:59.0	on your resume because you grew up with Google being like AI native. Young people are at a huge
1:03.0	advantage. Today my guest is Garrett Lord. Garrett is the co-founder and CEO of Handshake, which is
1:10.6	one of the most interesting
1:12.0	and incredible AI success stories that you probably haven't heard of. Handshake has been around
1:17.0	for over 10 years. They're essentially linked in for college students. It's a place for students
1:21.7	to connect with companies to find a job. They are the platform of choice for every single
1:26.4	Fortune 500 company, over 1,500 colleges,
1:29.3	over 20 million students and alumni, and over 1 million companies use them to hire graduates.
1:34.3	At the start of this year, Garrett and his team realized that their huge proprietary network of students,
1:39.3	including tens of thousands of PhDs and master students, is extremely valuable to AI labs to help them create and label high quality training data.
	...

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