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

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 from now, six months around, 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. We're the largest expert network in the world. We have this massive strategic advantage, which is like no customer acquisition costs. The only moat in human data is access to an audience. You guys come in after the models train to tweak the weights based on additional data that you create. The models have gotten so good. That the generalists are no longer needed. What they really need is experts. There's this tension between all these students. Training models to become smarter. And then there's the they will have harder time potentially finding jobs. That's not what we're hearing from our employers. This is just enabling human beings to be even more productive. Young people are at a huge advantage. 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 ten years. They're essentially LinkedIn 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 one million companies use them to hire graduates. At the start of this year, Garrett and his team realize 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 zero to one in January. Four months later, they hit fifty million ARR. They're now on pace to blow past 100 million ARR within just twelve months. They'll exceed the revenue that they're making with their decade old business in under two 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.

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