Samantha L. Wheeler, MBA

"If you just compound and stack day after day after day and give it your best, great things will happen. That's been the story of my life and the story of this business." @GarrettLord. Founder & CEO of @joinHandshake. At a Christmas party in December 2024, Garrett met a researcher from a frontier AI lab who told him about the challenges of model training. Two weeks later, Garrett's company Handshake was recruiting STEM PhDs for that same lab. Fifteen months after that, Handshake AI had gone from zero to a billion dollars in gross annualized revenue, and now is the human data engine behind the frontier labs. This conversation is a dissection of the most audacious reinvention in tech. Knuckle Up ↓ -- 00:00 Who is Garrett Lord? 01:36 How did a Christmas party conversation spark Handshake AI? 11:59 How do you tell your execs and board you're refounding the company? 18:18 What keeps A players motivated in the core business? 22:22 Olympic Pace: why did around 100 team members leave Handshake? 27:02 What broke first going zero to a billion in a year? 31:45 How do you protect quality when 85% of the company is new? 39:36 Why hasn't Garrett upgraded a single exec? 49:00 What does the bear case on human data get wrong? 53:30 How do you make accounting verifiable enough for reinforcement learning? 1:00:08 Will enterprises leave the labs for open source? 1:07:13 What does all this mean for knowledge workers? 1:08:51 The inner game: how is Garrett holding it all together? 1:14:22 What's the mission in this new chapter? 1:18:27 Will vertical AI apps survive the frontier labs? 1:21:23 Quickfire: red flags, overrated advice, jobs of the future