Garrett Lord went all in on Handshake AI — now it’s at nearly $1B

How did a career platform become a nearly $1B AI business?

In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Jeff Richards sits down with Garrett Lord, the co-founder and CEO of Handshake — the career network connecting 22 million young professionals to every Fortune 500 company and powering 92% of higher education in America. Garrett left Palantir with a contrarian conviction borrowed from Peter Thiel: that access to opportunity shouldn't depend on which school you attended or who your parents knew. A decade later, that conviction has produced something nobody saw coming — an AI business that went from zero to a nearly $1B run rate less than 18 months, built on the counterintuitive principle that matching people to careers demands more human judgment, not less.

Join us as we explore:

1. The Zero-to-$500M Sprint: How Handshake's AI business exploded from nothing to a $500M+ run rate in eight months — and what Fortune 500 companies were desperate for that made the opportunity impossible to ignore.
2. Why AI Needs Humans More: The case for reinforcement learning and "unverifiable tasks" — why building AI that matches people to careers requires more human trainers, not fewer, and what that means for the future of hiring.
3. The Partner Principle: How becoming a husband and father transformed Garrett's leadership — and why he believes the most important decision a CEO makes has nothing to do with the business.

Produced by Breaking Glass Studio.

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Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0

Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094