🎧🍌 Sleeping in McDonald's Parking Lots to $250M+ Revenue: How Handshake Beat LinkedIn with Gen Z
Inside its fast growing AI data labeling business, how to build a skunkworks AI team, scrappy ways to get early customers, scaling a three-sided marketplace, how AI will change hiring and careers
Handshake came out of nowhere this year to be a serious player in the AI data labeling race. And it’s because they spent the past decade grinding.
They built the best job network for college students and young grads, boasting more Gen Z users than LinkedIn!
Handshake Co-founder and CEO Garrett Lord talks through how they built a Seal Team Six to build a new AI data labeling business to help the frontier labs, plus we get into the early days of building Handshake into what is today a $250m+ revenue business.
We talk sending handwritten letters to early customers, driving across the US to meet them in-person, sleeping in McDonald's parking lots before sneaking into career fairs, living off his dad’s retirement account and credit cards, crashing on couches for seven months when raising their Seed round, and taking a U-Haul across the country from Michigan Tech to Silicon Valley. It’s truly one of the scrappier startup origin stories you’ll ever hear.
Thanks to Jeff Richards on Handshake’s board, James Alcorn at Lightspeed, Slice Founder Ilir Sela, and Handshake Co-founder Ben Christensen for helping brainstorm topics for Garrett.
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Timestamps to jump in:
3:44 More Gen Z than LinkedIn
7:11 Helping frontier labs label AI data
14:43 Masters and PhD students flock to Handshake
16:52 Why Handshake will win in AI data labeling
19:24 Growing to $250m+ Revenue
21:56 KPIs in recruiting marketplace
24:45 How AI will change careers
33:57 How to build a Seal Team Six AI team
37:06 Interning at Los Alamos
40:00 Breaking into Silicon Valley from Michigan
44:19 Helping friends get jobs at Palantir
48:13 Driving across the US sleeping in McDonald’s parking lots
54:52 Funding early days with his dad’s retirement account
57:37 Handwriting letters to get the first six customers
1:03:06 Early product failures and iterations
1:11:01 Fundraising, crashing on couches for seven months
1:17:07 Finally closing a Seed round
1:20:05 Moving from Michigan to SF with no money
1:23:38 Importance of sequencing new features
1:29:10 Handshake’s exec recruiting process
1:32:01 Building a company with your best friends
Referenced:
Check out Handshake
Careers at Handshake
Gumloop (I still need to try this)
Peter Thiel Startup School
Paul Graham’s blog
Find Garrett on X / Twitter and LinkedIn.
👉 Stream on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Garrett, welcome to the show.
Garrett Lord:
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, this is going to be fun. I feel like you have a lot of interesting stuff that's going on right now, but also a lot of interesting things historically too. It's been a journey. But just real quick, for people who do not know what Handshake is, can you just explain real quick?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. We are the leading network that young people in America and in Germany and in France and in the UK find internships and jobs and navigate from college to career. And so that means, if you think about the product, it's short-form video. There's a feed, there's groups, there's messaging, there's profiles. There's a whole kind of social network around helping people learn from other near peers, get inspired, discover and explore different job roles, find their first internship, find their first job, find their second job, find their third job. It's the largest place in America where people are finding their first job. And there's a million companies that use Handshake. We're a bit over a million companies, including almost every big company. We have 100% of the Fortune 500 that actively uses Handshake and we are proud partners of 1,600+ universities in the country and community colleges. The way that I think about the business is as a three-sided network. So there's a million companies, 1,600+ universities, and there's about 18 million students and alumni that use Handshake as their way to kind of navigate this world of work.
Turner Novak:
It kind of sounds like "LinkedIn for Gen Z" based on everything you just said. As an investor, you get that pitch all the time like, "Oh, we're building LinkedIn for Gen Z." It sounds like you actually did.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. And more people use Handshake in our demographic than use LinkedIn.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. For sure. And I think one of the other ways to think about it is it's an unconnected graph. So LinkedIn is very focused on who you know, what you've done. But if you think about young people in America, it's like ...
Turner Novak:
We haven't done much yet.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. How do you look cool on the network when you have only ever mowed lawns like I did, right? The trick there is you pitch it as you're an entrepreneur and you went out there and hustled ...
Turner Novak:
Acquired customers and bootstrapped.
Garrett Lord:
And nowadays, you can type into ChatGPT and make yourself a gossip. But that was not background, right? So it's unconnected. It's all about discovery and exploration, getting inspired, learning from peers. And if you think about the way that information is locked up, historically it was like if you went to UPenn, you knew a ton about finance. If you went to Stanford, you knew a ton about software and sharing and startups. I mean, you went to school in West Michigan, right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, we both grew up in Michigan.
Garrett Lord:
Totally. It's like how many people do you know that were dropping out of school to work at Y Combinator companies? Zero.
Turner Novak:
I actively tried as hard as I could to graduate, took tons of student loans. I had three jobs. I worked 40 hours a week, three jobs while I took 18 credits one year in school just to pay for school.
Garrett Lord:
Same here, man.
Turner Novak:
And not have loans, which I didn't end up having. But yeah, it's unheard of.
Garrett Lord:
Totally. Yeah. I mean, that's very similar to my story. I mean, I grew up in an amazing life, not complaining about it, but grew up in my working class family in Michigan, went to community college for two years, paying it through school, saving up. It's much cheaper to do credit dollars at a community college. Get into your ...
Turner Novak:
Which is crazy. The price college is nuts.
Garrett Lord:
Totally. And then transferred up to Michigan Tech. And that was really the impetus for starting Handshake was just trying to unlock this information and access and level the playing field no matter what your parents did, what school you went to.
Turner Novak:
I think the interesting thing right now that's going on, you guys started a new business recently that seems like it's kind of really taken off. What is sort of the state of kind of what's going on right now at Handshake?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. If you take a step back, to maybe just simply answer the question, we're helping frontier labs hire experts to help them with human data necessary to advance their models.
Turner Novak:
What's a frontier lab for somebody who's just coming into this cold?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I would say it's any one of the main LOM providers that you would use. We work with six of them so we work with basically every one that's building the modern LOMs that you're using. And if we just take a step back, the reason we entered this business is it is connected to the Handshake story and connected to where our labs are going. So historically, a lot of the gains that were made for all the LOM tools that we use came from pre-training, right? So that was sucking up more information than anyone else had on the internet. So that was sucking down books and every blog post and every article on the entire internet, every YouTube video, every Reddit post. And a lot of the gains were made in improving these models from improvements in pre-train.
Turner Novak:
And this was just all the information you could put in to stick in a model that it then used to do things with.
Garrett Lord:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
And in the knowledge base.
Garrett Lord:
And then about 18 months ago or really around, yeah, 18, 24 months ago, the gains started being made and these model companies on the post-train side of the house. And the post train side of the house is really the models essentially in essence sucked up every piece of public information anywhere in the world already to their model. And so they have the corpus of every possible piece of content. And so in order to make gains, they needed new content, new data. Then specifically, the type of data that they needed historically was journalists. It was preference ranking, so did you post A or post B more? And the industry really was fueled on taking advantage of smart international talent. As the models got better and better and better. The models are almost today ... They're good enough where they don't need generalists. What they mean is they need experts.
Experts, you think about experts as PhDs or master's students or lawyers or doctors or tax consultants that are really at the top of their game in a particular field. And what they're doing, these model companies, they need experts to provide data to improve their models. And Handshake, we entered this business about 18 months ago providing a lot of the players in the space with experts. On the network, we have 500,000 PhDs, we have three million master's students. And if you think about academia, the definition of a PhD essentially is proving a novel or net new piece of information or contribution to a particular field. The definition of a PhD is basically to be at the frontier of knowledge.
Turner Novak:
So basically, you know the entire universe of things that can be known and you're piecing them together or trying to discover new things and push knowledge forward.
Garrett Lord:
That's how you get your PhD, right? In physics and astrophysics, something that nobody's ever done before. As peer reviewed by trusted academics, you contributed a new piece of knowledge to that domain. And because we have 500,000 PhDs and three million master's students in basically every area of academia, the labs and other players in the space started coming to us and saying, "Can you help us hire these experts?"
Turner Novak:
And before when someone did that, when they came to someone in one of the labeling companies, they would have to say, "Yes, we can help you. Let's go find those people and let's go acquire them and bring them onto our network."
Garrett Lord:
So you think about it. If you were a PhD in physics 12 months ago, 18 months ago, you're getting ads on Instagram. You're getting ads that are following you and retargeting you all over the web. You're getting cold emails.
Turner Novak:
Were you really? It was that bad?
Garrett Lord:
For sure.
Turner Novak:
Really? Interesting.
Garrett Lord:
There's such insatiable demand for this. Every one of the labs is spending over a billion dollars a year at the highest level on human data. And acquiring these academics and experts, it's hard fought. You're acquiring them historically across multiple channels. Where Handshake had a really big advantage is because we built this network over the last 10 years and have partnerships with 1,600 universities, 92% of the top 500 schools use it, we have direct trusted relationships with hundreds of thousands of experts. And so after sending these people on a network to other players, we really started to realize a couple things. One, people were having a really disjointed and frustrating experience. People were not getting paid on time. There wasn't clear instruction. Imagine it's new all in gig-style work.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's kind of like the gig economy for knowledge work almost in that.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. But you were treating the gig work as if it was an Uber driver and you were being very transactional with them. And we're talking about MIT PhDs, Stanford or Berkeley PhDs.
Turner Novak:
These guys are taking us to Mars.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. It's like these people, they expect to be treated as experts. And so we started hearing frustrations from these users, we started hearing frustrations from academic labs, and we really started to realize, "Well, there's so much demand out there for these experts. How can we leverage our network and the trust we built off to build a better experience that's experts-first?" And that's led us to this longer-term vision of building the global, experts-first marketplace that helps people make $60, $80, $100, $125 an hour with their skills. And also, connecting this journey from not just getting paid gig work, but connecting the job search journey, connecting it to your career story. So we believe in a long-term future where Handshake can leverage our business and human data and we're arguing this today. It's in the AI interview tools we're building, some of the Agentech recruiting tools we're building to leapfrog and build the best matching marketplace on the internet. And if you think about job search on the internet today, you have a deed. It's like a transaction search box.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's like a black and white website basically.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. Well, literally you have to go in there and be like, "Okay, I'm 25. I'm a marketer. Marketing," and you press search and it's 80,000 jobs. It's like, "Don't want to work with a big company, don't want to work with a small company. What are skills I have? Do I work in performance marketing, social media marketing?" So we are already today leveraging a lot of this matching engine and fine-tuning model we're building to improve our marketplace. And we think that if we just take this next 10 years though, there's a totally different set of roles that will need to exist in the economy. Many jobs will be displaced and people will need to be up-skilled and re-skilled. Many people will need to be articulating, "What skills do I actually have?" And it's better than just putting on a resume. It's actually doing a work simulation where we actually prove this out.
So the human data business, in kind of summary, we're able to pass on all these customer acquisition costs that other vendors have to acquire the experts. We're able to pass it on to better training, better communities for the PhDs. We're able to pass on the savings to the labs themselves by improving the retention or passing a cheaper pay rate over to them because we don't have these huge structural costs of acquiring people.
Turner Novak:
It's interesting too it's kind of happening at a time right now in the market where college kids are having a little bit of a harder time getting jobs. If you look at the data, recent college grads have higher unemployment rates than later in career. Maybe that's always the case, but it's hard to get a job sometimes when you're getting that first job. So it's interesting that it's happening then. And then I think you've mentioned this in the past too, it's at a time where a lot of schools are losing federal funding or state funding where there might be a PhD either program or their project or their thesis that isn't getting funded so it's another way for them to make money.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. I mean, if you take a look at what we're hearing from our fellows, we call them fellows on the network, it's a pretty cool opportunity to make money. You can be a teaching assistant.
Turner Novak:
You said $100 an hour? That's insane.
Garrett Lord:
Totally. I mean, you can be a teaching assistant making $30 an hour or you can be actually applying your unique area of expertise that you're doing your PhD in and contributing that knowledge to the frontier of AI. And you're also learning incredible skills around prompt engineering, spotting hallucinations, really understanding what the models are good at and not good at. And what we hear from a lot of our fellows is this helps them in their actual core research. This helps them build professional skills. This helps them instruct and teach students more effectively because they're able to be more knowledgeable on the frontier of what models they're good and make $80+ an hour.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
So it's really a win-win-win across the board.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because when I was in college, I did seven different internships just throughout the years. And one of the reasons I kept doing new ones was because I found one and I was like, "Oh. Instead of making $10, I can make $15 an hour." I think my last one that I did for the last 18 months I was making $23 an hour or something. That's insane. In Michigan, as a college kid, that's decent money. That helps you pay for school. So $100, I mean, I wouldn't have even moved on. I would've just kept doing that forever.
Garrett Lord:
I was working at a micro-center mowing lawns, valeting cars.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. Getting a Midwest grip.
Turner Novak:
So I was talking to Ben, your co-founder, last night and he said ... I need to talk to you about how did you decide to do this? How did you have the conviction in the general process you use to say, "Okay, this is an opportunity and this is what we're going to go after"?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. Well, I think a lot of marketplaces, if you just take a backdrop from Amazon, you really get to sit at the middle of what's happening in the marketplace and pick your shots on where you can make an impact given your structural advantages. And what was very clear is we started to see an incredible amount of demand for PhDs and master's students and experts, people that are studying to be lawyers, people that are studying to be doctors, people that are studying to be consultants and getting their master's in tax accounting. So we started to see this and we also started to hear from our users that it was a frustrating experience.
As I mentioned earlier, they weren't getting paid on time, they weren't getting instructed properly, they weren't being treated as experts in their domain. And so because of that, we started to really realize that we had an opportunity to go direct and we could also, as I mentioned earlier, pass along this customer acquisition cost and the savings and kind of leapfrog all the competitors in the space. I think that the only durable advantage in human data, it's a very operationally intensive business. Over the long term, I mean, the only durable advantage is actually access to an audience. Otherwise, it's essentially a commoditized set of companies that are all just operating on their operational superiority and competing with one another for margin.
If you can improve retention, if you can build loyalty and actually treat these people the way they expect to be treated, you can pass along many, many benefits to the labs. You can produce higher quality data because you have access to better people and they're retained longer. You can produce data quicker because the turnaround time from activating them to actually participating in a project is much faster to care about speed. And they also care about volume. Those are the three things you hear about: speed, quality, and volume. And you can produce higher volumes of data because your ability to activate your retained audience is superior structurally to your other competitors. And so we've really seen that resonate in the market, hence why we're working with six of the AI labs, hence why we're growing so quickly. And I think what's also really cool is hearing the incredible stories from our fellows and it's a pretty unique opportunity.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. What's sort of the current state of the business? I've listened to some of the stuff you've done recently. It sounds like the numbers keep changing. Maybe this can be changed, this can be bigger by the time we publish, but what's kind of the current state of Handshake?
Garrett Lord:
The numbers keep on doubling currently. This last month with the industry news, there's been an incredible amount of demands. Our team has grown from zero to hundreds of people that work on this business. The revenue will grow as a combined entity to be far over $250 million, $275 million this year. I think that that forecast will just continue to raise at an alarming rate. Every month, we have set out and basically said, "What is the most aggressive hiring plan that we should build against?" and every month we've been wrong. So we started ...
Turner Novak:
On the upside?
Garrett Lord:
We've been wrong and it's been far bigger. Right now ,we have more demand that we can fulfill. We just turned down a $15 million project yesterday. We are turning away work because we want to make sure that we follow through on our brand promise in the space which is treating fellows super well, never over-committing to labs and producing the highest quality data and being transparent around what we can actually take on. So much of this industry, it was a little bit ... We think it's really important to do what we say we're going to do, kind of under-promise and over-deliver. Yeah, extremely thrilled about the progress we're making as a business and this long-term opportunity is a race towards over a billion dollars of revenue in human data. I think what's often lost though when you think about the human data factory business is how this is connected to our actual core marketplace.
And so it's like, really, the long-term opportunity is building the place and platform that people turn to to up-skill and re-skill themselves in this new AI economy. It's helping higher education think through and evolve in the way that it prepares their students from college to career. I mean, we have 70% of the Fortune 100 that pays for the product. So they're coming to us and saying, "How do we up-skill our students? How do we up-skill our young grads inside the company? How do we think about the changing type of roles that will evolve and how we could better prepare our students?" So there's a lot of spend going across higher education from the employer side, from the labs, and I think it's using the human data business to advance all those efforts.
Turner Novak:
So if I'm building a recruiting business, what are the KPIs that kind of matter? Is it job listings? Is it number of interviews? Is it jobs placed? Not from a financial performance but a product and health of the marketplace, what are the things that actually matter?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, we have three north star goals inside the business. They've remained very consistent over time. I mean, a lot of the story of Handshake has been like sequencing. Right?
Turner Novak:
Like order of what you do?
Garrett Lord:
What you do, yeah. Sign up all the schools in the country, then it was building a big employer business, improving the commodities, and then the future is all about consumer, right? But those three north star goals are reflected in the company. The number one goal is engagement. We track DAU, we track MAU, we track day seven, day 30, day 90. We track all normal consumer metric, but engagement I'd say is the number one north star of the marketplace.
Turner Novak:
Do people turn though? You get a job and you're like, "Oh, I don't need Handshake anymore." How do you keep people around?
Garrett Lord:
There's so many alumni that use Handshake. The story's kind of as old as time in technology. It's like if you grow up with young people, take Apple products. Apple is super focused on getting their products engaged in elementary and middle schools, then they graduate and they go work at a top bulge bracket bank and they get handed a PC and they're like, "What the hell is this?" Right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
You think about Google really trying to have a way to invest in Google Docs across. So you go from high school and college with Google Docs and you go into a big bank and you're sharing around version V13 of an Excel model like, "What the hell is this?" So this idea of you capturing their heart and mind and their trust early in their journey, what we see is that when students come in freshman year, we were successful with them freshman year, sophomore year, junior, and senior years that they use Handshake after college.
So the highest level of vision we have is going bottoms-up against LinkedIn and taking people from 18 all the way into 30 and we're beating them at college. We're beating them with first job. And the long-term dream of Handshake is to build the global career discovery, exploration, knowledge worker platform to find jobs. And if you think about it, Indeed and LinkedIn, there's $20+ billion dollars a year to spend across both those platforms.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's not how you are.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. So there's a huge economic opportunity. Obviously, you build a business, but there's also a lot more equality that we can build in this process as well. And it shouldn't be solely on who you know or getting lucky or what school you go to, but it should be rooted in your actual skills.
Turner Novak:
So I know we've talked a little bit about AI and just the sort of business opportunity for Handshake and the product, but how do you think that ... I don't know. Is it going to be harder or easier to get jobs with AI? Are career paths going to change? I don't know how much you thought about that. But for someone listening to this, they might be trying to get their first job and they've seen the headlines of AI's removing 80% of jobs or whatever the crazy number is. How do you think about it at Handshake? Or from you personally, how do you think people's careers are going to change or the job market's going to change?
Garrett Lord:
We're at the benefit of working with a million plus employers. We hear from our employers, especially our large employers, is that it's these young people have an opportunity to almost bring themselves. It's like these digitally enabled Iron Man suit equips, AI native.
Turner Novak:
So he's super smart, just like they know all the tools.
Garrett Lord:
I was just talking to an engineer on our team yesterday, an intern works on mobile team, and his first PR up in two days. And he put all of our code base into Cursor and was like... he's a young crack software engineer. Right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
If you were trying to view this three years ago and you were coming without AI tools, it took much longer to ramp.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you have... Even if you go back 10 years, you'd have to read the entire code base.
Garrett Lord:
Totally.
Turner Novak:
You'd have to maybe learn new programming language or something on the job, yeah.
Garrett Lord:
Put up a PR, and get my dev environment working, right? So I mean, I remember at Palantir when I interned there, it was much... I had to get my first PR up in the first two days. So I think that young people in typical social media marketing, you're using Dall-E, you're building images, you're like experimenting with campaign analytics and uploading that all to GPT. You really have an opportunity, and I think young people are far better at this than old people.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
And so that's what we hear from companies. It's like, yes, certain job roles will go away over time, and I think that always happens in a technology shift and people will adapt, but the opportunity in many fields is to be the young AI equipped cracked employee that has the power of five employees working for them using these AI tools.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I've been trying to immerse myself in it more, but I think it's harder when you're... I'm 34, I've married, I have kids. It's just a little bit more difficult to immerse yourself in that than when you're in college. You're 19, you can spend all your time learning this stuff. So, yeah, I've been trying to... I think there's this one that's called Gumloop, it's like an automation, you can string different tasks together and run almost autonomous jobs that automatically recur and do things. That's how it's been explained to me. Sounds pretty cool. I got to figure this thing out.
Garrett Lord:
Totally.
Turner Novak:
But it's like, man, I need to have the time. I need to ask my wife. It's like, "Hey, can I spend six hours on Saturday and just do this?" So I feel like it's a taller ask when you're older.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So young people have the advantage. Do you have any advice then for somebody who is like 23, 22, 21, trying to get their very first job?
Garrett Lord:
It's the same advice that will remain quite consistent over time, which is first, use Handshake.
Turner Novak:
Great advice.
Garrett Lord:
I mean, for sure, there's so much to learn from upperclassmen and alumni, groups to join, people you can message, content you can digest. We've got so much content from how do I build a resume to how do I think about different employers in my industry to what's a day in life look like to what is actual skills I need in my job to what classes should I have taken in or be more successful? What cities are cool, right? So I think there's just so much out there that just demystifies this experience for students and a allows of them to discover and explore different paths.
I think getting involved on campus and trying to build experiences, professional experiences that allow you tell your story effectively is huge, right? I was in the IT Oxygen Enterprise on campus, right? I was in the Association of Computing Technology. Getting involved on campus and getting closer to alumni and employers, warning for peers is huge. Most of that content ends up falling back into Handshake. So if you're more passive and maybe a little bit concerned about your time on campus, you can just watch some short-form video or participate in groups and be a lurker. A lot of students are lurkers in the network, as you might imagine in a social media platform.
And then I really encourage people... I think also people don't realize how many jobs that you'll apply to in order to be successful. I think this idea that you're just going to apply to one or two or three jobs. We see in the numbers so that you have to apply to far more jobs in order to be successful, and that's okay. You're going to do bad job on certain interviews, stay confident, get inspired, be persistent and power through it.
Turner Novak:
I've kind of experienced this a little bit or picked up on this. Luckily I don't have to actually apply for jobs myself right now, but it sounds pretty brutal from what I've heard. It's like there's a job that gets posted on LinkedIn, and because of AI, there's just hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people that apply to it. It just makes it super easy to apply, and then it just makes it impossible on the employer side to stay on top of things because there's just so much competition.
Garrett Lord:
Hence why marketplaces exist on the internet, right? In the future world, that's the definition of marketplace, right, too much noise, right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
How do you find signals to match more effectively? And that's what we're really good at at Handshake. If you talk to young people in America, Handshake's like the preferred platform they're using. Their valuable time is more effective spent on Handshake than Indeed or LinkedIn.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Garrett Lord:
And that's because it's higher signal. We can drag out in the future, it's like, yeah, but in this world that we'll see it inevitably happen is a job seeker as an agent and a company has an agent and there's just more delays than ever, right? It's like agents talking to other agents, right? So what is the definition of a high quality marketplace? It's provided an opportunities to use signals and data to incentivize better outcomes on both sides of the marketplace.
Turner Novak:
So just beyond jobs, how do you think AI will impact marketplaces? So it just makes the supply demand discovery happen more efficiently?
Garrett Lord:
Well, do you think about how broken this is right now? We just talk about Indeed, it's like you should pull it up on your phone. I'm imagining-
Turner Novak:
I don't want to.
Garrett Lord:
Imagine you're a marketing major who's two years outside of school, and you're from Michigan, so let's look at General Motors, right?
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Garrett Lord:
That's like big three, right? So you're like a... You want to get a job, you're working at a tier three automotive distributor and you want to get a job at General Motors, right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
It's like what experience do you actually have to share? You went to Grand Valley State, right, so it's like you studied marketing at Grand Valley State.
Turner Novak:
I learned the five Ps in my marketing class. And I don't even remember what those stand for.
Garrett Lord:
Right? So it's like you don't know universal companies to apply to. Oftentimes you're trying to figure out what does it mean to be a product marketing manager, because you're already two years outside school. What's it mean to be a product marketing manager? What's it mean to be a performance marketer? What's it mean to be working marketing operations? What platforms do they use? What type of company is cool? Should I go to big company, small company? Should I leave the state of Michigan, right? You go onto Indeed and you tend to marketing and you just get, I said it earlier, but tens of thousands of jobs. It's totally broken.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
And so you think... I mean, that is so different than the consumer expectations that everyone has on other platforms. So in the future on Handshake, you imagine a world where you're talking to an agentic video AI interviewer who's collecting information and coaching you through this process. It's actually performing tasks, so doing work simulation that actually can prove skills.
I mean, it's just... I could get way more into it, but I think that what Handshake is heavily invested in is making this the best use of your time when you're trying to discover, explore or apply to jobs for your first job, second job, third job or your first internship.
And also, talk about the way the marketplace used to work at Grand Valley, GVSU, how many companies recruited at GVSU when you went there? Maybe single digit thousands, right? Fast-forward today, GVSU, Handshake's a proud partner of GVSU. Like there's probably over 300,000 companies that recruited the network.
So we're able to help people bridge across geographies. Maybe you're a small chiropractic clinic in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It's a real customer of ours.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
You log into the self-service product, you don't even know what's... you don't care what school you're recruiting from, you just want to find the right chiropractic student, right? So historically you had to go into a list and select each one of the schools, and now we're like-
Turner Novak:
Really?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. Now you're able to target students maybe that went to school in Michigan, that grew up in Wyoming. Maybe students want to move to the mountain west, right, and actually indicate interest. Indeed and LinkedIn are so far behind the ball, their matching for early careers. That's why people trust us.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. And it is kind of fascinating that if you and me were sitting here today talking about this and we were like, "Let's start a company," we probably couldn't just do this. You kind of need the groundwork all laid. You kind of spent the past decade plus building this all. Basically you're building this startup inside of a startup. You have some people, it's almost like, it sounds like a skunk works type of project. How do you balance it? You got it all started, but it sounds like... Have you approached all this?
Garrett Lord:
I don't know if a startups ever in balance, so balance might be a top word for us. But how do we figure it all out? I mean, A, the people in that worked at the Handshake are super committed. I think a really strong team that's build in our core business. Our core business is roughly like 600, 650 people globally. And we've really been successful, like operationalized in our core business and we have probably 200 plus people in go-to market, 200 plus engineers. We know the metrics that matter. We know how to plan annually, execute quarterly, balance the week and what you need to get done with the quarter, have a strong goal setting process. We have strong leaders across the business, and there's so many things that matter to our core business.
At some points this year we've had like $1 million a week in self-service revenue and there's a whole team laser focus on self-service revenue. There's a whole team laser focus on DAU. We run hundreds of events across the country with our marketing team. So I'd say over the last 10 years, we've really figured out how to operationalize our core business. And this new business that we started inside the Handshake AI really got started completely outside of that.
So I've been able to use some of my really strong executive's time and guidance and pinch hitting. But I built a totally separate team that basically just rolls up directly to me and is able to operate in a more like zero to one capacity than our existing core business, which it is a very different level of maturity.
Turner Novak:
So you'd recommend, if I'm trying to do something similar, it's not try to borrow people that are also working on the core business, it's actually your new dedicated thing? It's this new project?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. Don't think you can split. I think that's the general guidance from all founders, is they build a SEAL Team Six or pick your analogy, like your all-star team. They pull people from existing business. We have a set of all-stars in our core business too, but this is, everyone wakes up every single day, they only think about Handshake AI.
Over time, even right now, the team's grown to over 50 people. We're now starting to think about integration points across the product and really trying to be thoughtful around how can we connect the student experience? How can we connect the agentic AI interviewer? How can we connect our skills assessment, a work simulation into our core product offering and launching that across hundreds of thousands of companies? So there's now becoming do working groups or task forces that are focused on how to leverage the entirety of what we built to grow all the metrics we care about.
Turner Novak:
It's crazy. So I think the thing we should really talk about now is going back to the early days of Handshake, because I don't think any of this would be possible without all the early work you did in the first kind of decade of the business. So going back, we both grew up in Michigan.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Where'd you go to school?
Garrett Lord:
I went to Oakland Community College. I went to Birmingham Seaholm. Went to Covington. Went to Courton. So Covington to Seaholm, Seaholm to Oakland Community College, Oakland Community College, Michigan Tech, and then dropped out of Michigan Tech.
Turner Novak:
Oh, you didn't actually finish?
Garrett Lord:
Unfortunately not, no.
Turner Novak:
And then so what was that first job or internship that you got when you were at Michigan Tech? That first big one.
Garrett Lord:
First internship I got was at Los Alamos National Labs.
Turner Novak:
Is that related to NASA?
Garrett Lord:
It is connected to... It's actually on the DOE side, department of Energy, NASA's in different departments. Department of Energy, there's three labs. Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. At the time, they ran the fastest supercomputers in the entire world. I worked in a team called HPC5, which is high performance computing team five. High performance computing was focused, when we were doing in-memory InfiniBand benchmarking, essentially.
Turner Novak:
What does that mean?
Garrett Lord:
The team that I worked on, I mean if you think about the core goal of Los Alamos, and I think they might say it publicly differently or there might be a bit of a spin to it, but the core of Los Alamos job when I was there was to ensure that the nuclear stockpile was ready. And because you cannot test nuclear weapons, these large supercomputers were being used to do physics simulations around the readiness of the nuclear arsenal. The reason there's three labs is because Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, the president or the powers that be wanted an independent opinion across three labs and consensus would win, right? So labs were purpose built to basically, in case that were spies or any type of nefarious activity, there were supposed to be three objective opinions and consensus would win on what the stockpile is ready.
Turner Novak:
So if someone had infiltrated one of them and sabotaged-
Garrett Lord:
This is out of my pay grade.
Turner Novak:
It sounds like it. Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
I'm like, definitely, this is the core, right?
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Garrett Lord:
There are so many brilliant PhDs that working across many other areas of scientific research at this intersection of government interests. HBC5 was focused on new computing paradigms that could improve the performance of these large supercomputing clusters. And we're talking about over a magnitude, like hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of dollars spent on each one of the supercomputers spent one a day.
One of my buddies that worked there actually ended up becoming the co-founder at ICI, the guy that ran all the clusters over there. Andre runs all their computing infrastructure at the lab. So needless to say, these people are the best in the world at running the most sophisticated compute clusters of our time. And that internship just radically changed my life. I mean, it was an incredible opportunity to get exposure to... We grew up in Michigan. I'm not making fun of Michigan, but this was working with the smartest minds from the top PhD programs at MIT and Carnegie Mellon and Princeton and Stanford, and I got exposure to people that were extraordinarily driven and had had, really, incredible careers and internships.
And they were like, "Dude, you got to..." I was a pretty hardworking guy and pretty energetic. And they're like, you got to break out in Silicon Valley. Got to coordinate your startup. So I started researching startups and I really fell in love with Palantir. This was back when they were like...
Turner Novak:
Was this like 2012, 2011?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I think that's right around the timeline. Yeah. So I got my internship my sophomore year there. And I read this post by Shyam Sankar, the COO of, I think it's the president of Palantir. He was talking about how software engineers, nerds, equated if Lord of the Rings, you can still see the post on Quora, could make an impact on the world. And I was really attached to how can you be impact by being a software engineer. And they say it was the hardest internship to get, only the best of the best.
Turner Novak:
Was this Palantir that would say that?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. Palantir was like yea we’re so hard to get.
Turner Novak:
That's such great marketing. It's like, "We only hire the best." It attracts people.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, it was epic. And so I was dead set on working there. And I was applying and cold emailing.
Turner Novak:
How'd you get through?
Garrett Lord:
No response. No response. I got extraordinarily lucky. One of the recruiters had worked at Sandia National Laboratory and he knew how elite the program was at HBC5. Breaking into HBC5 was from Michigan Tech was also a total anomaly that I was able to break in there.
Turner Novak:
How'd you do that one?
Garrett Lord:
I followed the co-founder of xAI, Ross Nordeen, who had gotten the internship up the year before, and he had hustled his way in. He's extremely resourceful. So he'd hustled in and then I was a superstar freshman and was able to break in there too. So I went to work at Palantir. That was extremely life changing, flying out to D.C. they, just to tell somebody jokes, but they pick you up in a chauffeured car. And I never forget in telling my family about, A, they're flew me out and they picked me up in a chauffeur car, and I love this joke, but my dad's like, "Man, this is nerd shit you're doing's really working out. Like chauffeured car at the airport, it's insane."
Turner Novak:
It's like some FBI stuff.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I was like, "You used to ground me for being on the computer and I told you this will work, man."
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
And so I flew out there, I got the internship with Palantir and-
Turner Novak:
You wore a suit and tie to the interview, or something like that, you said?
Garrett Lord:
Oh, yeah, I didn't know what it was like.
Turner Novak:
No, it's okay. Actually, my first-
Garrett Lord:
I went to the store in Houghton and bought new clothes. I was so nervous. And I'm super grateful that they gave me an opportunity there. I mean the people I work with ended up pretty cool. Right next to our office was Matt Grimm who co-founded Anduril, Trae Stephens, who's co-founded Anduril as well and is a prolific partner at Founders Fund.
I get to work with incredibly... I mean I didn't work directly for them, I worked on projects for Matt Grimm. But the cool thing about Palantir is they took a bet on people. And if you did a great job, you could take on more and more. I also got to work on Team Rubicon, which is like a veteran organization. I actually went to hurricane, I think it was a Hurricane Sandy what it was. I lived out of a gymnasium with a bunch of military vets all while building software to help them do disaster response.
But the cool thing with Palantir was just learning that young people, talented people, could do anything. I got flown to Hurricane Sandy and they're like, "Figure it out." And I figured it out, right? And that was the whole ethos of Palantiring.
After that internship, I helped a bunch of my friends get internships there and full-time jobs. So Ross went to go work at Palantir, a couple other friends did from Michigan Tech and I became super frustrated with how unfair it really was and what school you went to and what jobs you get. And how so much of that process is kind of just connected to your family and the net worth of your family and the connections to your family or what city you grew up in or what city your school was in. And so I was like, "Well, maybe I could," and now all these Stanford kids starting companies at Palantir, maybe I could start a company at Michigan Tech. And we started building Handshake at nights, on weekends in the library with a group of friends. And 10 years later, it turns out, just like Palantir, you apply yourself for a long period of time, you can kind of reorient the world to way you want it to be.
Turner Novak:
So that was kind of like the early business model then, was like, okay, I'm realizing that I can make five grand, 10 grand referring friends to work at this tech company. There's a business here,` potentially, and then it kind of put you down this path.
Garrett Lord:
It is just so broken, right, the way that the tools that we use as students, to finding groups and jobs on some Facebook groups, talking to other intern in Silicon Valley. You learn more information like hackathons, different schools. Every campus we visited when we were trying to build this business had a different set of information that was helpful. But if you went to University of Michigan engineering program, you had more opportunities in Chicago than at Michigan Tech. So I thought that we can really build a product that makes this a lot better for all sides. And that's the story of marketplace, right, three sides, you have to make your employers successful, you have to make university successful, you have to make students successful.
Turner Novak:
So why couldn't you just go direct to students and just say, I'll help you get jobs"? Did you try that approach?
Garrett Lord:
We did try that approach. The reality is, and there's been 50 competitors over time that have tried this as well and they have all gone to zero. Every year, VC's like to invest in one or two others and they always go to zero. So I'd be excited to follow somebody that figures out I go D2C, like be amazing. And if you did do that, we're going to copy you and figure it out faster than you will. So I wouldn't raise any funding to try.
But the tough thing about building a marketplace is there's a chicken and egg problem, right? You need employers to recruit students, and you need students to recruit employers. It's a classic, normal marketplace challenge. And growing that marketplace to enough scale to change behavior at both sides is remarkably challenging in this industry.
We identified early on that universities, they have a whole team focused on how to help students navigate into career and to get prepared to meet companies. And those universities were using really intuit systems that powered that program. So we very early one we started building products for universities as the center of the marketplace. And in helping them, we get access to help all their students, and we get access to all the employers that recruit through that campus.
Turner Novak:
Was there a specific thing that wasn't good about the software? Was it just old software?
Garrett Lord:
It was bad, man. It was just... These old systems are just like... These are legacy, private equity, fifth owner backed, offshore software engineered over 10 years system of records. It was just textbook garbage software.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So then how did you first start getting connected to customers? Because I think for somebody who doesn't know, you talk about Michigan Tech, for somebody who doesn't know where that is, Michigan is in two peninsulas. So there's the bottom part, there's the top part. Michigan Tech is the most remote, furthest away from any other part of America in Michigan.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, it's true. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
It's literally almost-
Garrett Lord:
It's basically Canada, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I was going to say it's like in Canada, essentially.
Garrett Lord:
It's in Canada.
Turner Novak:
I think if you actually looked at latitude lines or whatever it actually might be... Is it north of the-
Garrett Lord:
Around Minnesota. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, yeah. So it's pretty much as far north as you can go without going to Alaska.
Garrett Lord:
350 inches of snowfall.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
You bring your hockey skates to class. You can play hockey.
Turner Novak:
Did you ever take a snowmobile to class?
Garrett Lord:
I didn't take a snowmobile, no. I did cross-country ski class.
Turner Novak:
Okay. I don't know if I mentioned it when we were recording, but my brother went to Michigan Tech. So I've been up there. It's a hike. We actually drove once when my brother graduated, my wife was pregnant driving up and it was us two in the very backseat of a car with mom, grandpa, grandparents, cousins, et cetera. It was-
Garrett Lord:
Eight hours?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it was about eight hours.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. It probably a hike from Ann Arbor.
Turner Novak:
Well, it was in December, because I think he was graduating in December, so it was snowing. So I think it was a 10-hour drive.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. It makes sense.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So how did you start talking to customers then, if you're completely isolated from the rest of the country, every other school?
Garrett Lord:
We had to drive to schools.
Turner Novak:
Because you sort of snuck into some career fairs, right? What was that whole story?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we realized pretty early on that in just reading on the internet, how you would watch the Peter Thiel startup school class at Stanford that might have come out in 2012, 2013 so he got top dollar customers.
Turner Novak:
Because you watch every episode of that, I think.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I did. Yeah. I read every Paul Graham blog post. Now there's been a democratization of information, but early Y Combinator days really ended up democratizing it. I ended up being rejected from YC. I don't know, we applied two, three times, got rejected every year. Still sad about it, but that's all right. But we read everything on the YC and all the blog posts and they just were prolific around talking to customers, knowing your customers better than anything else. You talked about how far Michigan Tech was away. We drove down literally, I mean, I don't know, dozens and dozens of dates. I went from a 4.0 GPA to basically almost failing out of school. I got to put on academic probation my freshman, or the first semester of my senior year and then ended up dropping out second semester because we were just on the road and we used to go to Central Michigan, Western Michigan, Milwaukee School of Engineering near Wisconsin, Madison.
Turner Novak:
These are all eight-hour drives, six-hour drives.
Garrett Lord:
But yeah, that was just in Michigan. But then we drive from Wake Forest, we drove to Princeton, we drove all the way down to Florida, we drove to Denver and we just visited schools.
Turner Novak:
How did you get into a career fair? Because I've gone to a career fair. I've actually gone as an employer once. They don't just let you in. How'd you get in?
Garrett Lord:
You sneak it.
Turner Novak:
Did you pretend to be a student?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You just say you're a student.
Turner Novak:
Have a-
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, have a badge, and you just come in when the employers are coming in.
Turner Novak:
You just pretend to have some resumes and wear a suit like you're a kid.
Garrett Lord:
And I remember grabbing passes. I have a lanyard, saw it in the trash. I mean you just sneak in.
Turner Novak:
You grabbed a lanyard out of the trash?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I mean, it's not that hard to sneak in a career fair.
Turner Novak:
Okay, fair.
Garrett Lord:
But yeah, we would talk to employers and at the career fairs we're huge forcing functions. You've got to learn from other students, you got to talk to employers. Oftentimes we'd talk to the university when they're, they're actually pretty busy during career fair week, so it was hard to speak to the university, you have to visit them off cycle, but it was through all those conversations that we really started to understand how to put together this marketplace. Because in order to launch at the first school, we had to have an entire employer product built. We had to have an entire student product built and we need to have enough functionality to replace the system they'd used for a decade. It was actually, we worked on this sophomore year, junior year, senior year, and then took us the first six months after school to sign up our first five customers.
Turner Novak:
You'd go up to a recruiter pretending to be a student and you'd get an interview.
Garrett Lord:
The best was at Michigan Tech because I was like, I had pretty legit resume. I had 4.0 GPA.
Turner Novak:
So everyone wanted to talk to you.
Garrett Lord:
Double majoring. At one point I think I still remember this, I know it's a little weird, but I had 18 interviews. You're going around campus with Daniel, zero blocks in between, late to the interview and then you just flip the script, tell them about yourself. Actually, no, you tell me about yourself. How do you recruit from students? How'd you pick Michigan? To what systems do you use? How do you think about the cost to acquire each student? How do you think about the efficacy of events and ROI? How do you run your target school strategy and would you mind talking to me again? I mean I was built a lot more important than that. Can I talk to you again about this?
I remember spending money hosting a cocktail hour in my first event. I don't even know if a drink back then, but we're at the Keweenaw Brewing Company. Keweenaw Brewing Company outside of Michigan Tech career fair inviting recruiters to come, and I remember being super disappointed because we had to buy out the venue and basically nobody showed up, so.
Turner Novak:
Wow.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, mostly our events are more successful now, but yeah, at one point you do everything.
Turner Novak:
And what were you doing? You were flying around the country staying in fancy hotels.
Garrett Lord:
Made enough money to have-
Turner Novak:
So what'd you do?
Garrett Lord:
I mean, we were driving to schools, we just had to have a car. We had this sandwich title Ford Focus that my dad helped buy because my Jeep kept on breaking down. My co-founder Ben and I would just drive to New Jersey, drive to Denver, drive down and we would sleep at the back of, it's pretty, back then nowadays Starbucks is the ideal place to work from. The internet's the best in Starbucks, but back then it was McDonald's. Nationwide broadband, all the McDonald's locations. You just sleep in the back of the parking lot and you had great Wi-Fi and a couple police knocks.
You get a tap cat from a flashlight tonight, "What the hell are you doing here?"
And you're like, "Well, we're students and we're driving to universities solve this software." You never get trouble from cops when you're earnestly trying to sell career service center software.
Turner Novak:
They're like, "Okay, get out of here."
Garrett Lord:
They're like, "Okay, you'll be gone by tomorrow morning, right?" Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So then how did you fund all this stuff? Because you didn't have any customers, didn't sound like you had a lot of money. Were you still referring friends to Palantir? How were you paying for everything?
Garrett Lord:
We rented $700 of house and I think there was, by the time we left, there were probably eight or nine people that were living with us. It would be a stretch to call a free bedroom. Somebody lived underneath the staircase. There were two people in my room. I think it was eight or nine people that lived in this house and then all my close friends basically took I think big, 15 grand, 18 grand, 20 grand.
Turner Novak:
A year?
Garrett Lord:
A year. And the way to be funded that was my dad. He was like crazy man.
Turner Novak:
Because he worked in construction, right?
Garrett Lord:
He worked really hard for, worked extraordinarily hard my entire life to be able to provide for our family. He's a pretty risk on guy. He just really was like, "I've never seen you be such a psycho about busy all these universities. It takes eight hours to drive to me and you're driving to me sleeping at my house and on the way down to North Carolina amidst your schoolwork and what's going on? You're bringing Ben your co-founder."
And we would just drive, we'd see people like aunts, my uncles, our friends, friends of his houses. He just saw me become completely fixated on this problem and he also got to follow some success. Some of the schools said they were interested in the software and employers were interested in the software. He was friends with people at General Motors that were like, "Oh, campus recruiting is such a pain." And so yeah, he basically funded us with all of his retirement money, which is.
Turner Novak:
Kind of insane when you've really stepped back that he was-
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, super insane. I mean this isn't like, this isn't, yeah. Extremely insane for a working class family.
Turner Novak:
Did he refinance the mortgage too?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I think he sold off a piece of property that he wanted to build a home on. That was a long-term investment of his. He refinanced his house and pulled out money and he was a definition of risk-on.
Turner Novak:
Does your dad have equity in the business?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, my dad's done very well. He's now part of a country club that drives a Range Rover, so.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Garrett Lord:
Big turnaround from a 15-year-old rusted out F-150, in a red F-150 and then a white F-150 and he would clean it on the weekends, but yeah, big, he's pretty proud.
Turner Novak:
So then how did you get these schools to actually sign up? What was the process of convincing them to talk to you once you'd got to the career fairs you were in front of? How did you convince them to even take you seriously?
Garrett Lord:
Well, they didn't take us seriously for a long time. I mean a couple of fun entrepreneurs, it's like everyone, they basically just wouldn't respond to our emails and take it seriously. Couple tactics work like, A, cold calling was super effective.
Turner Novak:
Actually calling.
Garrett Lord:
Actually calling, but what was most effective was probably the most successful thing we ever did early on was sending a box to each university with a mug from each career service center director's alma mater. So if you went to Michigan, it'd be a Go Blue mug. Then we wrote a handwritten note and the handwritten note was like you're a hockey fan, we're hockey fans. You go to church on Sundays, huge churchgoers.
Turner Novak:
Just anything you could pull from.
Garrett Lord:
You say you love vacationing in Florida on Facebook, actually I have family in Florida, a big Florida guys. Just ridiculous letters.
Turner Novak:
Ben told me last night that you would actually pay people on Craigslist to write these because your handwriting was so bad.
Garrett Lord:
Boy, there was also many letters we had to write.
Turner Novak:
Okay,
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, my handwriting was bad, A, and B, we probably sent a hundred of these letters and these letters are dense. We hired good people on Craigslist, they looked really sappy. It was 12 point font, cursive. It was great.
Turner Novak:
Handwritten novels, like full page letter.
Garrett Lord:
You all up the box, a mug on top, be like, "What the hell is this mug?" And they had underneath handwritten letter, we got to read the letter and underneath that was a at midnight printed out the school computer's manila envelope, you remember the manila envelope which you would turn score, there's a clear cover on cop, you could punch it in the three hole punches? It's like turning in homework projects, it's clear on the top and underneath was in a picture of us. We had our photographer friend take pictures in the media lab, so it was like Max in the back. We bought track jackets from Palantir because we thought that was so cool, super professional.
Turner Novak:
Those European Adidas type get-ups?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, it was ridiculous. It said Stryder Corp. The product was called Trajectory, but students couldn't consistently spell trajectory so we renamed it Handshake. These boxes were a hit. People were like, "Send me this crazy box, I'll meet with you."
We're like, "We're not going to meet with them."
I'm like, "WebEx," and we just get the car and drive. I mean we must have put 23,000 miles in this car over a summer and we signed up five schools and that was
Turner Novak:
Out of how many? How many did you have to talk to, drive to?
Garrett Lord:
I don't know how many we drove to. I mean, we were definitely up hundreds of schools. Not hundreds, maybe 100 to 200 tools we're talking to, we got five to sign up. It was also a funny dance because you built this rapport as an entrepreneur of, okay, this kid's clearly smart, he's very earnest and it's trying really hard, but he's also just graduated, not graduated. He's also 21, 22 years old.
Turner Novak:
He's younger than the people that you are helping get jobs as he's trying to sell you his product.
Garrett Lord:
That was really tough because basically you had this credibility gap. So getting a first five schools sign out was almost like a dance. Who's going to do this first? Because if I can say for those people did then I won't get fired if it doesn't work. But we managed Sarah Otto, Eastern Michigan University, loved me and loved Ben, my co-founder even more, and she and Michael I think at Hillsdale University. There were two people that were just like, "We're in," and then three others fell into place. It was like Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Hillsdale College. I think her name was Anne at Aquinas and that was it.
Turner Novak:
Did you ever talk to Lori Staggs at Grand Valley or Troy Farley?
Garrett Lord:
I know Troy Farley.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I know.
Garrett Lord:
Text Troy Farley right now, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Oh nice, yeah. I haven't talked to Troy in a long time, but I was-
Garrett Lord:
Troy really grinding my, you really, grinding was pretty good. He's a business guy. He was a business savvy. They ended signing up here too.
Turner Novak:
Okay, cool. I'm glad they did it because I probably missed it because this was.
Garrett Lord:
Wayne at Oakland University. I mean, I know all these people.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Garrett Lord:
I mean, you spend eight hours a meeting with somebody driving and you're reminiscing.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, exactly. You're visualizing the meeting. You're going to talk to them for 30 minutes, maybe an hour if you're lucky. It's like I got to know everything about this person. You almost have to visualize how the conversation's going to go and prepare what you're going to say in every situation and know how to control it to make it go the way you want in that kind of a case.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I mean the software was pretty impressive demoing it. The main thing we struggled with was that credibility because higher education was there risk averse. I mean we are the, as of our knowledge in the overall university, the fastest growing higher education company in history. We powered 92% of the schools in the country. In order to do that, it was really, you build up trust in this industry. We have a whole 50 person team that's focused on the relationships and executive briefings, the trust building tools for them based on their roadmap or what they want to see, but getting people to take the leap early on I think was the hardest part.
Turner Novak:
And so I know you mentioned Eastern Michigan was the first one. I know you had an issue with them when you went live. What happened?
Garrett Lord:
Oh, yeah. Well, anybody built software knows that demoing something in launch, the video production are two very different situations. I think my co-founder Ben called I told you the story, but yeah, it was like things demoed well from our now trial to be used, but then when you launched five schools and put 30,000, 40,000 employers, tens of thousands of students and 100 plus staff members on a platform all launching within the same two weeks, there were a lot of fires.
Turner Novak:
And you've never done a launch, so you were just going.
Garrett Lord:
We launched all three constituents all at once, all on a two-week period. And so we just... So grateful and thankful to those customers that believed in us and helped us. They opened up their offices, basically all of us as teammates went to work from their offices so we could sit over their shoulder and then probably the lowest sleep scores. This is pre-sleep score tracking, but lowest sleep scores-
Turner Novak:
It would've been pretty close to zero, yeah.
Garrett Lord:
Basically we were just always getting sick because it was just a couple years there where it's just like you're getting sick every other month because just not sleeping and grind through.
Turner Novak:
It's like the Ford deployed engineer model from Palantir. That's more popular now, but I guess not as many people were doing it back then.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I had a lot of pride in being a Forward Deployed engineer.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Is that you, because you did that basically when you were going to Hurricane Sandy you said?
Garrett Lord:
Totally.
Turner Novak:
Interesting, okay. You had an embarrassing email issue that happened too. I actually had an interesting email issue on my end. I'll tell you the story after you tell yours, but.
Garrett Lord:
Oh, really?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, no. So what happened with your email issue at the hackathon?
Garrett Lord:
Well, prior to launching the schools, we wanted to build more reputation with employers and with students so we could prove that we had done a couple things that was like when we went to Sarah at Eastern Michigan, we're like, "We've at least run this. You could trust us."
Turner Novak:
We know how to send emails.
Garrett Lord:
We went to the UC Berkeley hackathon called Cal Hacks. This isn't many, probably almost a decade ago in the earliest movement of hackathons. It was actually the first hack was that called M Hacks, guy named Dave Fontenot started that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, Dave's a legend.
Garrett Lord:
I know Dave well from literally being students together. We did M Hacks, which gave us so much credibility, Cal Hacks. We had an emailing issue where essentially amidst the career fair at, I don't know, 11:00, 12:00, 1:00 AM in the morning, we sent every single student individual hundreds of individual emails. We just had a queuing issue with our Mailgun API, which is how you send emails, and we had enough domain authority to send 300 emails.
Turner Novak:
And it would hit their main inbox.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, but not in a nice way where it's a thread, a separate individual email where it took you five minutes to archive. I didn't actually do this, but I thought about ducking and rolling underneath a table and just never leaving. It was super embarrassing.
Turner Novak:
Oh, because it was in the middle of the hackathon, everyone was there.
Garrett Lord:
It was in the middle of the hackathon, and everyone's like, "What? I mean respectfully, why is Handshake emailing me so much?" I mean there were upset, and these were different words being used, but we were luckily able to learn from that issue.
Turner Novak:
So maybe similar-
Garrett Lord:
One of the things that was kind of funny for developer was when you hit an API, it's now on their side. I remember calling that founder, co-founder Scott and Ben at, I don't know, wee hours in the evening being like, "So how many emails were sent and how many more are coming?"
Turner Novak:
They're still coming through.
Garrett Lord:
It's so funny, and he's like, "I actually don't know."
And I was like, "Well, can we pay to get an answer?"
And he's like, "Well, that would cost, we'd have to upgrade to the enterprise tier to be able to have phone support."
And I was like, "Well, don't think we have the money to do that. So if you had to estimate, how many?"
He was like, "Garrett, there could be hundreds of thousands of more emails coming. We don't know. We're going to find out at 8:00 AM ET." And so the emails ripped all night to everyone. I mean, people that were there at Berkeley, they'll remember it. It must have taken you 10 minutes to go through your inbox.
Turner Novak:
So how often were you getting emails, just every minute or every second?
Garrett Lord:
However fast that you could queue them up? We had enough domain authority to send them out and Mailgun just... Yeah, so it was embarrassing.
Turner Novak:
That's crazy. Mine maybe not quite as similar levels of embarrassing. So when I was in high school, me and my friends, I had a website I just learned to code on mess around. I just would find a PHP script, throw it up, make it work, experiment with it, whatever, move on. One of the things that I got in trouble with in high school was we'd always play games in class, and so I found this proxy that wasn't blocked by the school where you could just go to the site, type in any URL, and it would take you to it so people would use to play games, people would use to do other things, other nefarious things. I ended up getting in trouble for this. I got suspended for a day. They blocked the proxy.
The whole school knew that it was me who got everyone onto this. And then so one of the things I started doing was I'd just take the games that my friends liked, I'd rip them and just put them on my website, which wasn't blocked. So a lot of people started going to the website. One of the things that I had on the website was this PHP anonymous email bomber where you could send anyone an email from any address and say anything you want and you could send it as many times as you want.
Garrett Lord:
An alias.
Turner Novak:
This is kind of funny, I pranked a friend with it once and that was it, and it was just still on the site. Someone used it to send an email to a teacher from the principal saying that he was fired and sent it 70 times and said it came from our website. So it was sixth hour, end of the day, one day they called me and my friend out of the office and they're just like, "Why'd you do it? We know what you did."
And I actually didn't know what happened because me and my friend were like, "What is going on?" I remember sitting there, it did the thing where your head starts to shake almost.
Garrett Lord:
A bit of sweat.
Turner Novak:
Your eyes are just vibrating and you're just like, "What is going on?"
Because they're like, "You're expelled, you're not coming back," and they basically expelled us for a day.
We were able to prove the next day. We figured out what happened when we got home from friends what was actually going on. Then my friend's dad, he went into the logs of the website and somehow proved that we didn't do it. I actually don't know. I should probably ask, what did you figure out that prove you were innocent?
They asked us to come back. They're like, "We want you to start the computer club." They're trying to butter us up and make us happy again. But yeah, I had so many things like that in high school where I just, the MS-DOS box that pop up when you start Windows at some of those high school or college computers, you'd type something in and hack it and get in.
Garrett Lord:
Little fast drive, you go to the BIOS and you'd be like, "I need to launch Ubuntu off a flash drive," right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, me and my friends are always getting in trouble for that stuff.
Garrett Lord:
Well, nerdy kids.
Turner Novak:
Back to your story, so you were signing up all these different schools. How were you standing out against LinkedIn at the time? Because LinkedIn was kind of around. Were people using LinkedIn or they were using Indeed?
Garrett Lord:
For sure. I mean LinkedIn and Indeed were, but if you think about it when we get started, your first question on LinkedIn is, what's your job? I don't actually have a job. You build a profile and you build an Instagram profile back then it's like you look cool and you went on LinkedIn, you looked like a clown.
Turner Novak:
Dishwasher at the whatever.
Garrett Lord:
Having experience. So it was really failing to meet the audience that we were targeting and we believed that if we could engage people and go trust with them early, that they would stick with this over time and that's largely played out.
Turner Novak:
You didn't have a lot of customers. I know you were, there's a point your dad was, he gave you the money, was starting to get tapped out. You guys were running out of cash. So what did you do?
Garrett Lord:
The only thing an entrepreneur could do, try the doctors and dentists that my dad was friends with.
Turner Novak:
You were literally pitching doctors and dentists.
Garrett Lord:
Doctors and dentists in Michigan. I had a wealth manager. Mefstel Networks, phone sales leader, these were like big dogs Michigan, dude. My dad's camera, his networking. We're taking up a conference room and I'm pitching Handshake.
Turner Novak:
Did you get a little bit of money from the Michigan or not really?
Garrett Lord:
I mean, it was brutal trying to pitch doctors and dentists all like a three sided marketplace network that wanted to help students, university, employers. This was like, it is not going very well. And so flew to Silicon Valley and the whole team, I had these girls, you guys, there was one fun thing. It was like, it's no shave till we raised so my co-founders that they weren't going to shave and they all ran the business and I flew to Silicon Valley and was going to go out to the land of the brave where all the startups are and raise money.
Turner Novak:
And how'd it go?
Garrett Lord:
Not well. It took us, I don't know, six, seven months plus to raise money. Basically went through all the connections from Palantir.
Turner Novak:
So you were basically friends from Palantir like, "Hey, I'm trying to raise money, can you help me?"
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. And the problem was twofold. Well, one was everyone saying no, and two, I didn't have any place to live in Palo Alto.
Turner Novak:
What'd you do?
Garrett Lord:
I just was living on friends' couches. But it was a little awkward when you ping your intern buddies. You can stay in my couch a night, two nights, maybe you had three nights. Then it gets a little weird. Then you move to the next person and you're like three nights. And then when you start hitting the eighth run for the 10th rotation of three nights, then it moves to one night. So you start with three nights and everyone because everyone's gracious. Then you overstay your welcome and you move to two nights and you move to one night. So at some points you're... At the end, some people are just like, "No, this is a little bit weird."
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
They were nice about it. But one of my buddies, yeah, Alex Atala who ended up, I stayed at his place a bunch of times. Guy named Andrew who was a close friend for many years. You stay at their house, they were running a house. But yeah, you just... Was not easy. I think that's the story that a lot of people, they just assume everything was always great in a company like Handshake. It's even still really already Handshake, right? Take four years ago when we were run off a cliff and growth was decelerating and we had to do two layoffs. People that we trusted and liked working with at the company, we had to move on with them and try to do as best we could to support them, reduce head count. It's a total thing from the outside, everything just looks awesome, always.
It's pretty rabid going zero to hundreds of millions of dollars for revenue. It's pretty cool in the company right now, but at every point there's just immense hardship and you have to be very persistent and never quit and just keep on power through. Honestly, the consequences were really high. I had all these buddies that had turned down all these jobs, and my dad had worked extremely hard in construction to have this money and there wasn't really a viable backup plan for him and for us. We just had to keep on persevering.
Turner Novak:
How many people said no?
Garrett Lord:
Over 100, probably over 150. It ends up being helpful for you. You care so much about venture capitalist I see this pattern all the time. Like, "Oh my gosh, you're MBA with your two and 20, you're so business genius." Sorry to make fun of VC. I actually hope that clip goes viral. They get to make dozens and dozens of bets. They clip 502 million a year minima, they keep 20% of the profits and they just get the best of the portfolio of companies and most of them have never built successful businesses.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I understand. Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
I love VCs. I love our board members. I love a lot of VCs. I'm friends with a lot VCs, but as an entrepreneur getting the No, I think the core point I mentioned is that you care so much about what they think and all their feedback. And when they keep on telling you, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no," it really gets tough to have confidence. It really gets tough to maintain an independent view on the future. It really, I was, I don't know, 24, 23 years old and here I am, I can't get... The doctors and dentists say this is dumb in Michigan and then the smartest Stanford GSB, that's a big deal. You went to business school. You're saying no. And then the entrepreneurs are saying no. It is super tough to just power through. I think every great entrepreneur, almost every one of them may have that experience. Most of them do. Most of the VCs have empathy for it as well. But there was no choice but to make it work.
Turner Novak:
So how did you get through it?
Garrett Lord:
I don't know. The way I get through most things. 7:00 AM this morning at the Lions Creek Steps listening to Gucci Mane and Lil Wayne. Powering through three and a half hours of sleep last night. The way I get through most days. A work-out in the morning, some prayers, good music, close friends. Some tears, many tears along the way. That's how you get through most things.
Turner Novak:
And then I think you finally got someone to say yes. What happened there?
Garrett Lord:
Tony Schneider at True Ventures said yes super fast. It's amazing. He's like, "This is a good idea." More words than that. "You should meet the rest of my partners." Then I met the partners two more times. They're like, "We're in." We’ll lead a round at a $10 million pre-money valuation. And we'd like to put $2 million in the company." And then of course everyone else says yes.
So even though we had multiple term sheets, FOMO, a lot for FOMO. And the MBAs love it. And then we had multiple term sheets and we went with True. We ended up bringing in Lightspeed as well, who have been incredible and helpful to us. They split the seed round. And then the A was super hard as well. But then after the A, it was pre-empt, pre-empt. B, C, D, E, all multiple term sheets.
Turner Novak:
Was it that the spreadsheet looked good and you were growing? And if you have an MBA that looks good to you? Is that why it got easier?
Garrett Lord:
I think many of the questions that VCs asked were all the right questions. It was just risk. And it did sound crazy, to be fair. That's why I got rejected from YC so many times. You're going to sign up every school in the country? No company has ever done that before. You're going to sign them all up fast? No company has ever done that before.
And you have to sign up every school in the country fast. Then you have to make money from companies and companies at the time, there was that total addressable market story. It's like a small TAM. There isn't that much money spent on campus recruiting.
So I had to take an act one, believe in act one, which is crazy, and then believe in the act two, which you're going to make money from employers. And then in order to be a public, independent, fast-growing company, I have to believe that you're going to grow with people from 18 to 30. So it was crazy. And I think that is... Take all the crazy stories. You're going to build a bike that has a TV on it and there's going to be an instructor named Alex Toussaint that yells at you and track watts, with Midwest ladies?
Turner Novak:
Then you're going to start a, soon you're going to start a treadmill and all these other fitness products. Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. That sounds crazy, right? Or you're going to build... All the companies sound crazy. I think ours just sounded, had never been done before, really. So it makes sense why they said no. What ended up started happening is that we had de-risked, back to your question, we had de-risked these things. We had de-risked, we had signed up five schools and 16 schools. We had companies that have told us how much money they would be spending on Handshake. We added value for them. We started to have a ton of promotion from students liking the product. So as the company got more de-risked and the revenue started to rip, the term sheets poured in.
Turner Novak:
Nice. How much would a company pay? Just a big corporation like a Fortune 10 company? Are you paying a million dollars a year for recruiting stuff?
Garrett Lord:
Around a million is a good number. Some companies spend several million here. But for the biggest companies in the world, its about a million dollars a year.
Turner Novak:
I think after you raised the seed round, you actually moved from Michigan to Silicon Valley, right?
Garrett Lord:
Mm-hmm.
Turner Novak:
I know Ben was telling last night, that was a debate. What did you think through versus staying in Michigan versus moving here?
Garrett Lord:
He said it was a debate.
Turner Novak:
He said it was a discussion. You talked through it.
Garrett Lord:
I don't remember it being much of a discussion.
Turner Novak:
So it was just, "You have to move here."
Garrett Lord:
I guess you're right. Because we got money from a large Michigan family, prominent Michigan family, and they wanted us to stay in Detroit.
Turner Novak:
This was a part of the seed round?
Garrett Lord:
As a part of the seed round. Yeah. After we got term sheets from Silicon Valley VCs, there was large party in Michigan that was investing that was very interested and they wanted us to build in Michigan. I don't know. I can't poo poo on Michigan. Go Michigan.
Turner Novak:
I live in Michigan still. I’ve stayed in Michigan.
Garrett Lord:
Totally. I guess I would just, to which I would respond, yeah, it's pretty tough to build a prominent tech company in Michigan.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Garrett Lord:
I'm going to catch bullets if I go at Michigan any harder. But I thought it was evidently clear that if you wanted to really go for it and really make a huge impact on the world, that you lived in one place and one place only, and that was Silicon Valley.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So what'd you do?
Garrett Lord:
We called my cousin who was a bartender and said, "Dude, are you willing to quit your job where you have a lot of support tickets? Will you drive a U-Haul up to the upper peninsula of Michigan and move all of our stuff and desks and stuff?" And so he quit his job bartending in Detroit, rented a U-Haul, drove up to the upper peninsula of Michigan. We told True and Lightspeed, "Actually, I'm sorry I told you I have a lot of money because Paul Graham says you're supposed to say you have a lot of money, but we actually have no money. And we're actually running on one of our engineer's credit cards. Would you mind before we close a dock, wiring us 25 grand, 30 grand? Because we have to move across the country and we're out of money." And to which Lightspeed and True responded, "No problem." They wired us money, which is pretty awesome.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that is awesome.
Garrett Lord:
So we bought flights. My cousin packed up... All the fish had… I’m gonna get taken out for this part. But the fish had all died in the fish aquarium we had, unfortunately. We forgot to feed them when the people flew across the country. That was very depressing for my cousin. Get in a lot trouble for that. Packed up the house. He drove the U-Haul across the country and joined as our first support agents and head of, operations head we called him. His job was picking me up at airports when landed at 1:00 AM. Running all customer success. He also did all payroll. But yeah, we moved in this house in Palo Alto, which is also funny because this guy, you think you're sad that you're like, everyone else has hacker houses. "I'm going to have hacker house," and you apply to live at the house and you're like, "What do you do?" It's like, "Oh, it's just me and this mansion." You're 22. "How many other people live here?" "Oh, it's just me and my friend." It was actually the co-founder of LinkedIn's house.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Garrett Lord:
And he sure must have known that we were going to run a hacker house out of his house. But I was trying to be super coy about, well, I promise you there's not 25 people living in your house.
Turner Novak:
24.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. And so yeah, he let us live at his house and then we just call up our Michigan friends. My sister's super social and we hired out all her social friends who were good at talking to people-
Turner Novak:
To do sales and customer service and stuff?
Garrett Lord:
Customer success and sales.
Turner Novak:
Nice.
Garrett Lord:
A lot of her friends joined the team. We lived out of this house that was our... Los Altos.
Turner Novak:
And then what were some of the key product decisions that you think you've made over time? Whether early days or as you guys scaled up, anything you think you really nailed of this was just fundamental in the success?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, I think what we nailed that easily could have made this business not work was the sequencing of focus. And Feel very thankful for our early capital partners and believing in that sequencing because moving it from seed series A and seed series B, and we had never really made much money from employers, it was a laser focus on investing that capital into universities and into the student products, and now monetizing too early. And that took, we raised three to 10 to 20. That took 33 million dollars of capital.
Turner Novak:
To get the schools, to get majority of schools.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. And years and years and years. And we just stayed steadfast and focused on just the schools and making them happy and built the best product for that. That then ended up being the conduit to then be able to have this larger network with employers and students. And schools were okay with us making money on it in a way as long as it didn't take away from student opportunities. So I would say the prioritization was super unique and many marketplaces think about that. Other maybe intentional product decisions, it was always like students first. We always have never compromised on making decisions that are the best interest of job seekers and students at many times when it was very easy to do so. A lot of constraints around that. I believe stayed pretty steadfast on being laser focused on providing value to students and young employees.
I think this Handshake AI is then very intentional as well. And the way we're building the Handshake product platform, the LTH platform, the ARV platform, payments platforms is very much in the lens of, how do we leverage all these problems to build the best job marketplace matching platform on the web? And so the broader opportunity, as I mentioned earlier for Handshake is to be the place that people go to this new AI economy with the new evolving roles, to learn skills, to navigate their career. And I think there's a ton of work that we're putting in right now to automating. What is recruiting? Recruiting is sourcing, it's screening, it's scheduling. These are-
Turner Novak:
They're manual ish tasks.
Garrett Lord:
They're very rote tasks. I think it's extremely, the current state of reasoning models today can do the vast majority of what recruiters do every single day. And so it's building that, really, into a marketplace and a platform to help recruiters spend their time on better things or to automate a lot of the recruiting efforts. We're really focused on that.
Turner Novak:
So at this point, you mentioned a little bit earlier the different stages of the business. It's a sequence in a way so you've gotten to this point now where you can build a almost full stack job software. Just everything about it.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, but it's also about data. And then the more you have data around hiring outcomes, the more you have data around what interviews are good and not good, the more you have data around actual work simulation and being able to do, really understand what the skill taxonomy looks like and who has what skills, the more you have data, the more you can tune and improve these models and the better you can make the experience for all sides. At the highest level, hiring someone is extremely imperfect. And I don't know if I posted a job recently, but you're like, you have hundreds and hundreds of applicants. You're trying to find signal. And most people derive signal by, how does it work mentally? It's what school you went to, what job you've been a part of. It turns out you'd be pretty successful if you went to Grand Valley State University.
Turns out you can be pretty successful. Went to Michigan Tech. That wouldn't be the first two schools that come top of mind when you think about a venture capitalist or an entrepreneur. And so how do you help people understand what signal is in the applicant pool? And I think AI radically transforms company's ability to find a signaling device and really identify employees that will not only perform better, but stay longer. And that's what all companies care about. They basically want to understand what people are going to perform best over time. And they do that pretty simply. Most companies are a three by three.
It's potential on one side and performance on the other and performance review process. And they just want to understand the customer acquisition or the cost per hire costs. What channels produce the best employees from our organization over the long term? And if you can improve a company's ability to retain and acquire a better talent over the long term, they will pay you more money than anyone else on a per channel basis. And that is extremely connected to our core mission.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I think it's kind of underrated, employee retention. You might get this amazing on paper, looks like an incredible candidate and they leave after six months versus someone who stays 20 years and is a contributor and does the job well, maybe they'll perform.
Garrett Lord:
I don't think it needs 20 years. Just take a top bank. It's like they just want their employees to stay three years. People are leaving a year in. Take software engineering, at the whirlpool. They just want people to stay... So it's like these companies, what you really care about is retention and performance over a shorter duration than 20 years.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. One thing when I was talking to Jeff Richards on your board beforehand about this. He said, "Do you have a very intentional way that you hire key hires at Handshake? What's your process and just how do you make sure that the whole process runs smoothly?"
Garrett Lord:
The whole process, it looks somewhat traditional of a lot of companies. I think there's a couple of things we do that some companies do that I feel really is important for us, like working sessions. So actual, some people can have a good day, you can have a bad day. Some people are really good on their feet, some people are not so good on their feet. Some people... Interviews 30 minute, hour long interviews are super imperfect. What is the highest signal process that we've done and has worked so well for me over time, has improved my hit rate is a working session where you actually bring in the people that are working with this person. You give them a prompt, a case study and they have to produce materials and lead an executive conversation or a conversation about that topic with everyone else in the room.
And that is the best analogy to what it means to actually do work in a company. Not, "Can you tell me about yourself?" You can get some signal. And by the way, hiring is imperfect. I probably over all time maybe bat 60%, maybe generously 70% on hires. I've hired a ton of executives that haven't worked out. But I think since instrumenting this working session case study in true half-day onsite, people get a sense for who you are, what the culture is, what the rest of the executive team looks like, and it's really improved. And then I have a wonderful board. I really love using them as well and their areas of expertise to interview candidates.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay. And Jeff said that you do a ton of prep and you help the board members prep also. What do you do to help them be prepared Going into those interviews?
Garrett Lord:
We just write up all the pros, cons, strengths, weaknesses, sentiment on back channel, sentiment on fore channel references, how this candidate... These people are extremely busy and they're generous with their time. So you just want to make sure you maximize it. I like describing what I want them to vet.
Turner Novak:
So we need to figure, do you think this person really understands how to do product marketing in mid-market or enterprise or something super specific, please vet this for me?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, totally.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Garrett Lord:
Because I generally, we have a general good signal. It's like, yeah, I like focusing on them. We're focusing that on something that I want them to vet, which I think they're uniquely capable of vetting and they're really... There've been cases where they didn't want me to hire somebody. I did hire somebody and turns it out it didn't work. So I've learned to really lean on it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So I have one more question. One thing I noticed, all three co-founders of Handshake are still around.
Garrett Lord:
Oh, yeah.
Turner Novak:
That's not super common. People might think that that's a normal thing, but in most startups there is some attrition that happens with the founding team over time. It's like, how did you guys make it work that you're all still here?
Garrett Lord:
My co-founder is my best man at my wedding. We hang out. We're like brothers. I think the story that most companies is, and also, I think goes beyond even the co-founders. Just the early employees in Handshake. People put blood, sweat, and tears into building this business. And against all the odds when it wasn't working, believed in Handshake together. What has worked with the cofounders, we've been through so much together. The highs, the lows, the rollercoaster of owning this company. We really treat each other with, I think a lot of respect, care. By respect, I mean really care about each other as people.
I think also now when the business started to work, allowing people to work on what they want to work on, you get to, by having more resources and more money and more business success, you really can hire people to do things you don't want to do. It's like, really, how do you spend your time actually enjoying your role?
One of my co-founders I’ll say is one of the leading problem solvers in business. Ben. He took up some of the hardest problems in the entire company, rotating around. That's been exhausting for him because he's always doing the hardest thing. But I think he gets a lot of affirmation. He was my best man, the single best person I know in my life. Just incredible heart. I think most people at the company would say they like him more than even me. He's awesome. And my co-founder Scott is super brilliant as well. So we're really proud to still work with them, and hope, I think we can probably work together for the next decade.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, speaking of the next decade, what is the next decade at Handshake? Maybe you touched on it a little bit, but maybe succinctly wrapping up the convo here. What do you expect? What should we expect from you guys over the next decade?
Garrett Lord:
We want to take down Lincoln and D. We want to be the largest drop search network on the internet. And this huge catalyst of change of AI. And people need new skills and a place to jump start, restart their career. And we want to become the largest platform on the internet where people think about finding jobs and be the best place, best match in marketplace.
Turner Novak:
So if you want to find that out, where do they go? Handshake.com?
Garrett Lord:
Joinhandshake.com.
Turner Novak:
We'll throw a link in the description. Where else, should people follow you? Do you post online anywhere?
Garrett Lord:
Yeah. Follow me on Twitter, Garrett Lord. Follow me, yeah, on LinkedIn.
Turner Novak:
LinkedIn? Is there a Handshake profile? Do you post on Handshake?
Garrett Lord:
Yea I do post on Handshake.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Maybe I should have signed up. I'm literally not actually even a member.
Garrett Lord:
Yeah, you should sign up.
Turner Novak:
So it's kind of like LinkedIn.
Garrett Lord:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So should I sign up for Handshake and would it be helpful for me as an investor? Can I build a-
Garrett Lord:
I think you can build a huge brand.
Turner Novak:
You think?
Garrett Lord:
It's still early enough with the social currency, where you can become quite popular quite quickly.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. Because yeah, I always think about that. Because I started using TikTok back in 2019, 2020. I feel like I was one of the first VCs to start using it. I started making memes and stuff on Twitter pretty early with the podcast. It was like, I feel like I can really carve a lane here. So I'm always thinking about that. Maybe I should start. Maybe I should the first VC on Handshake.
Garrett Lord:
I love it.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Cool. Well, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it.
Garrett Lord:
Of course. Thanks for your time. Loved it.
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Do early adoption strategies really work? I jumped on the podcasting bandwagon in 2015. While I wouldn't say I'm famous, I did establish a niche audience and build solid connections early on. It seems timing can be everything! Makes me wonder what the optimal strategy is for mastering papa's freezeria. https://papasfreezeriagame.io