Garrett Lord
Co-founder and CEO of Handshake, the career platform for college students and recent graduates. Handshake has 18 million users including 500,000 PhDs and 3 million master’s students, partnerships with over 1,600 universities, and adoption by 100% of the Fortune 500. The platform has been described as “LinkedIn for college students” and is used as a verb by young professionals in the US.
In early 2025, Garrett launched Handshake AI — a data labelling and post-training data business for frontier AI labs — reaching $50 million ARR in four months and on track to exceed $100 million ARR within the first year. Background: grew up in a working-class family; attended community college before transferring to a university in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; interned at Palantir, which he describes as transformative. Started Handshake to democratise career access regardless of pedigree or network.
Known for the “leave nothing to chance” operating philosophy and for sleeping in the back of a Ford Focus while driving campus to campus to sign up universities.