Zero to $50M in 4 months. $100M+ in 12 months. That's the story of how @JoinHandshake discovered they were sitting on AI's most valuable resource: 20 million students and experts. For a decade, @GarrettLord built a career network for students and PhDs. A great business, growing well. Then AI happened. Last Christmas, Garrett realized his network of 500,000 PhDs and 3 million master's is exactly what frontier AI labs desperately needed to train their models. He flew around the country during the holidays, talked to lab leaders, and launched a new business inside his existing company. Eight months in, they now work with all 7 major frontier AI labs and have become one of the fastest-growing businesses in Silicon Valley history. In our conversation, Garrett shares: 🔸 How Handshake found this opportunity 🔸 Why AI models need human experts (e.g. physics PhDs) to improve 🔸 What this “data labeling” actually involves 🔸 Inside the actual work: what a biology PhD does for 8 hours that makes GPT-5 smarter 🔸 The playbook for building a startup inside a startup: separate teams, separate offices, separate everything 🔸 Why the shift from “generalist” to “expert” data labeling created a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity 🔸 Why AI won’t eliminate entry-level jobs—it’s creating “Iron Man suits” that make junior employees 10x more productive Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @coderabbitai — Cut code review time and bugs in half. Instantly: 🏆 @orkesio — The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows: 🏆 @AnthropicAI — The AI for problem solvers and enterprise: