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

**Garrett Lord** (0:00)
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 not, six months from now, you have no regrets? Get on the plane to go talk to a customer. Make the late night push. Check the data six times over again.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:15)
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.

**Garrett Lord** (0:24)
We're the largest expert network in the world. We have this massive strategic advantage, which is like no cost for acquisition costs. The only moat in human data is access to an audience.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:33)
You guys come in after the models train to tweak the weights based on additional data that you create.

**Garrett Lord** (0:38)
The models have gotten so good that the generalists are no longer needed. What they really need is experts.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:43)
There's this tension between all these students training models to become smarter, and then there's that they will have harder time potentially finding jobs.

**Garrett Lord** (0:51)
That's not what we're hearing from our employers. This is just enabling human beings to be even more productive. You used to put Google search on a skill on your estimate, because you grew up with Google. Being like AI native, young people are at a huge advantage.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:05)
Today, my guest is Garrett Lord. Garrett is the co-founder and CEO of Handshake, which is one of the most interesting and incredible AI success stories that you probably haven't heard of. Handshake has been around for over 10 years. They're essentially linked in for college students. It's a place for students to connect with companies to find a job. They are the platform of choice for every single Fortune 500 company, over 1500 colleges, over 20 million students and alumni, and over 1 million companies use them to hire graduates. At the start of this year, Garrett and his team realized that their huge proprietary network of students, 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. So they launched a new business from to 1 in January.
4 months later, they hit 50 million ARR. They're now on pace to blow past 100 million ARR within just 12 months. They'll exceed the revenue that they're making with their decade-old business in under 2 years. This is a truly incredible and rare story, and one that I think a lot of teams can learn from, because AI is creating a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of potential disruption. And this is an amazing story where the company basically disrupted themselves. This episode is packed with insights, including a primer on what the heck are people actually doing when they're labeling and creating data to train models. A huge thank you to Garrett for making time for this. His wife just had a baby this week. He's also in the middle of scaling this insane new business. So thank you, Garrett. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Lovable, Replet, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Flow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chat, PRD and Moment. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Garrett Lord. This episode is brought to you by CodeRabbit, the AI code review platform, transforming how engineering teams ship faster with AI without sacrificing code quality. Code reviews are critical but time-consuming. CodeRabbit acts as your AI co-pilot, providing instant code review comments and potential impacts of every pull request. Beyond just flagging issues, CodeRabbit provides one-click fixed suggestions and lets you define custom code quality rules using AST grep patterns, catching subtle issues that traditional static analysis tools might miss. CodeRabbit also provides free AI code reviews directly in the IDE. It's available in VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 10 million PRs installed on 1 million repositories and is used by over 70,000 open source projects. Get CodeRabbit for free for an entire year at coderabbit.ai using code LENNY. That's coderabbit.ai This episode is brought to you by Orcus, the company behind Open Source Conductor, the orchestration platform powering modern enterprise apps and agentic workflows. Legacy automation tools can't keep pace. Siloed low-code platforms, outdated process management, and disconnected API tooling fall short in today's event-driven, AI-powered, agentic landscape. Orcus changes this. With Orcus Conductor, you gain an agentic orchestration layer that seamlessly connects humans, AI agents, APIs, microservices, and data pipelines in real time at enterprise scale. Visual and code-first development, built-in compliance, observability, and rock-solid reliability ensure workflows evolve dynamically with your needs. It's not just about automating tasks. It's orchestrating autonomous agents and complex workflows to deliver smarter outcomes faster. Whether modernizing legacy systems or scaling next-gen AI-driven apps, Orcus accelerates your journey from idea to production. Learn more and start building at orcus.io/lenny. That's O-R-K-E-S dot I-O slash Lenny.