The Expert Network Behind Handshake AI’s Model Training w/ Garrett Lord & Mamoon Hamid

I really think Handshake can make a big impact on the world. There's 1,600 universities in the country that use it, which is 92% of the top 500 universities in the country. If you ask any one of the large frontier models questions, too oftentimes these models are not getting the answers correct. These models have kind of sucked up the entire corpus of the internet, and so what they need is they need experts. Handshake has one of the largest networks of experts that are captive and trust Handshake, probably 90+% of people doing work have already graduated. You're just connecting like these dots. I want to learn more about AI in my area of research and actually apply it. What's cooler than getting paid like $125 an hour to like learn complex prompt engineering, what models are really good at, where they hallucinate and fail in different situations? We're really unlocking, I think, a lot of addressable opportunities around the business by participating at the forefront of like what labs are doing. At some points in the journey, it's easy to become like disenfranchised with like how hard it is to build a company. But if you just stack up as many hard days as you can, amazing things happen over the long-term building of a company.

Welcome to Grit. I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we have Garrett Lord, co-founder and CEO of Handshake, and my partner and guest, Mamoon Hamid. From Michigan Tech to building a $3.5 billion company, Garrett has scaled Handshake into the career network for a new generation. We talk about distribution, durability, and how AI has exploded inside their organization. Enjoy the episode. The first time I ever swam in that water was with you.

Yeah.

And after that, I, I mean, you were not like, I was like, oh, this guy's, I can't believe he's not cold. Like I thought I was going to, I thought my forehead was going to implode after we went swimming. And, uh, I told myself I'm never doing that again. And then, well, thanks, James.

That's pretty awesome. Congrats on finishing it.

Thanks.

You did a run and a bike too?

Run and a bike. Started with the swim.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Next year. Yeah. I'm in.

Are you?

Yeah.

I mean, will you do it? You think you can get Sho Abe too?

I think we can get Sho Abe. I think we can get a bunch of guys.

Yeah.

Escape from Alcatraz?

Yeah.

I'm down.

So maybe KP, like, uh, founder of it?

Yeah. I'm in.

I'm in. I know he does high altitude running in the mountains. So I think you're set up.

Totally. We said the only thing I'm gonna struggle with is a baby. Gotta get baby out of the way and get through the first couple months, which I'm really excited about. 3 weeks out now.

From the baby?

Yeah. So, but baby boy, which is pretty fun.

Congrats.

Thank you.

How do you feel?

But I think there'll be, you know, by next summer, you know, how do you feel this year? I feel, I feel super excited for this next chapter in life. Married an amazing woman and feel super happy and it's just exciting to like, you know, have, have build a family.

This is kind of a weird question, but do you think about like, all right, like business is going crazy right now. Like you're barely, like, I imagine your time is already quite constrained. Do you think about that?

I think you make, I think you just like learn how to evolve and you make time for what you want to make time for, right? Like you learn how to fit it, fit in what's important to you. And so like for me, like being a father and being a great husband and being like, it's like, I think really important to me. And I think I'll hopefully I'll learn and people laugh when I say this, but hopefully I'll learn how to like adapt and like get to a new mode. Um, work's exciting and work will always be there. It feels like there's always fall asleep. There's more you can do. And it's like, It's about prioritizing your time.

Do you, Mamoon Hamid, do you feel like, I mean, you have several kids, obviously.

4.

4 kids.

To be exact.

4 kids.

Yeah.

And everybody says, oh, you just become more efficient. Your time is more valuable and you use your time more effectively than you did before. Do you buy that?

Absolutely. I am so much more prioritized in life, hyper-efficient. You cut all the crap. Garbage out of your time. And because what you want to focus on is your work. We obviously all love our work, right?

And your family.

And I think the third thing that you have to kind of fit in is stay healthy for your work and your family. And so there's a hyper-prioritization that happens also for, hey, what's the most important thing for Handshake? Thinking about how would I help Garrett prioritize because I'm in this like dad mode of prioritizing my life like every day. And so I just found I've got so much better at work once I had like the third kid, which really pushed a lot more prioritization. And then fourth kid, you're just like, you know, you have to go into ninja mode around prioritization. So yeah, I think it's been the best thing ever to actually have kids and bring true priority to your life.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Makes you also realize like what we did before we had kids.

Yeah.

Like you think of—

Like how were you spending your time?

Like, Juben, how are you spending your time on weekends?

I was just thinking that.

Right?

Yeah, for sure. Not with kids. Yeah, not with kids.

One of the coolest memories I have of you, I remember pretty fondly, is like we're at this obviously very impressive, you know, investor conference and, you know, you're back to back meeting different people. We said hi and, you know, you're getting pulled over to different tables and then Lunchtime rolls around, you can have lunch, work lunch, and then all 4 kids come out and they're like pool attire, you know, with like the, you know, the, the buoys around their arms and you're like, I'm going to do a little family hour and a half. Saw your kids and then I saw you working all night. So it's like, it's cool. You know, you figure out how to, that was really cute though. All 4 kids head to the pool.

Yeah. And especially when you can blend in your work with your family, which that event was amazing at, allowed us to bring in both. Uh, yeah, that's, that's a. It's a beautiful distraction. Totally. Or just like takes your mind away to like, and you see, I can't wait to see you interact with your, your baby boy.

Yeah.

Because I know you'll be an incredible dad. But just seeing folks interact with their kids is actually really special, especially founders. Some of my founders that I work with have had kids recently, and one of them had like 3 back to back. And it's so adorable to see like Lil Baby's and the dad interaction. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing.

You love it.

Like, this is the most surprising thing about this show. 250 whatever episodes in, there's only 2 themes that I've ever found across every guest, basically, sans maybe 1 or 2 exceptions. The first is not surprising, which is grit. Like, typically people that sit in your chair just have a unique ability to overcome hardship better than most. And the second is a strong partner at home. Like, to this theme around, like, kids and your partner at home, almost without exception, like, 98.5% of guests are, like, obsessed with their partner. Obsessed. Like, more than, more than the rest of us. And that was very surprising to me because, like, when I was growing up, examples of people that were successful, like, that I looked up to, all ruined their home lives. In pursuit of their career. And I have found almost the exact contrary in this show, which is like there's almost this well of a superpower that seems to come from home. Maybe it's kids, maybe it's your partner that like gives you this tether to reality that I think is really— I don't know, obviously it seems to be really important for, for founders.

Well said. I have a— I feel thankful every day. I have an amazing wife and I have grown so much, uh, partnering with her in life. So yeah, I totally agree. I think a lot of the people that I always look up to too, people I really look up to in life, like, you know, they always pass on a couple pieces of like wisdom. It seems like it's like, I wish I got married earlier. I wish I had more kids. Like, you know, it's the people that have made a big impact in the world and they're in like awesome marriages, but they're like adult children and you look up and you're like, I don't know, that's what I view as a very successful life. Making an impact and, and being in like a really happy and healthy partnership. So yeah, I'm excited for this chapter.

You know, I get to catch up with Garrett a lot, obviously, but whenever we're having our one-on-one, I think that the first question you always ask me, how's the family? How are the kids? And I can't wait to have kids. I can't wait to be married. And this is like way before you met Jess. And this is like, you know, when, like, when you're in your early 20s, like literally. And, uh, that was, I always found it very cute.

Yeah.

And amazing. And it, but it would, you would express your excitement, uh, towards the point in life you're about to enter when, you know, just got married a year ago and, um, baby boy coming. Uh, but it was, it would always strike me that it, it was not common to get that question from a young, early 20s founder is how's your family? I can't wait to get there. I can't wait to learn from you about how to, you know, raise kids and be married. But it was a common theme. Has been a common theme.

Totally.

That's awesome. Speaking of kids, can I show you guys a picture? Can I show you guys a picture?

Oh, wow. You found that picture. Look at that. Yeah.

Where's the camera?

Yeah.

I mean, are you—

Scott, Ben, and me.

Yeah.

And Austin, our intern on the left. Yeah.

You and I look pretty similar at that age. Are you?

How old were you in that?

That we, that was when we were, we built those headshots and, uh, and we had a friend tie our ties because we wanted to, you know, we were trying to look highly credible to these universities who would like insistently like not take our meetings. And so we thought it would be really helpful to be able to like, you know, have like professional collateral and like, you know, vanilla envelopes that we would send them. So we had our friend who's a photographer, Kevin. Go in and go into the school building and take those pictures. And we bought those track jackets. Remember those? Those are the identical track jackets as Palantir had back in the day. The Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer, baby. That was like hardcore Silicon Valley. So I thought, you know, I was 24 or 23. I thought that was like, you know, that just exuded engineering excellence and credibility. It's, uh, yeah, it's goofy.

This is awesome.

Yeah.

Double pleated khaki pants.

Yeah.

Yellow tie. Love it.

Yeah. Matching yellow ties here between— this is— I mean, this is all time. This is you and your co-founders.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's probably, yeah, like 20— that's when we were seniors in college trying to get our first 5 customers.

You were younger than 23 there.

Yeah, I was.

Yeah.

Right. You're like 20.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're 20 years old or something. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And were you living in Michigan at this time?

Yeah, we were, uh, we were still going to Michigan Tech. We rented this like, it was in the upper peninsula of Michigan. It's like Houghton, you know, middle of nowhere. It's like closer to Canada than America. 350 inches of snowfall, Michigan Tech. And like, uh, we'd worked out of this like $700 a month house. Uh, a bunch of us, uh, working on Handshake.

And you had already done your internship at Palantir.

Yep. We, uh, yep. I'd done, I did Los Alamos, then Palantir, two summers at Palantir. Um, and then had an offer to join Palantir and decided to take the big risk of like going all in on Handshake and no safety net and went for it.

Can you talk about the insight from Palantir that maybe spawned Handshake?

Yeah, it was a series of just like, just total resets in my understanding of like what you could do in the working world. I mean, I, I grew up in a working class family in Michigan, like not complaining about it. Life was, life was great, but Uh, you know, I went to community college for 2 years, paid my way through taking general education classes to save up and to pay my way through college. Went up to Michigan Tech and then I got an internship at HPC-5 at Los Alamos building like, you know, doing InfiniBand memory benchmarking like way back in the day. My, the guy that was my like good friend in college became the co-founder of XAI, Ross Nordin, and like we both went to Palantir together. So like really smart kids on campus, Michigan Tech. So cool. Yeah.

So you worked on InfiniBand before it was cool.

Yeah. Before it was cool. Yeah. And, uh, and then I got, all the kids said like, you gotta go out Silicon Valley. You know, they would all go on to these great schools, Stanford and Princeton, MIT. And so I dreamed of working at Palantir and I got, you know, just tried to break down that door and got super lucky with recruiter that knew this High Performance Computing 5 was a pretty legit internship and got me an interview in Washington, D.C. at Palantir. And, you know, it was hilarious. It was like I got flown out. My dad's like, whoa, like getting blown out for anything big time. I was like, yeah, they had a chauffeur, like a Cadillac, picking me up at the airport. You know, it says Mr. Lord. Yeah, my dad's like, this is big time, dude. Like, this nerd shit's working out. So I never forget that. And I was like, because I've never been in a chauffeur before. And, uh, and then I, I got these.

Your dad's awesome, by the way. I love—

he was so—

Mr. Lord, he's so amazing.

And so I got the internship and I met kids. First I did cool things like work on like National Center for Missioning Exported Children and like worked, they flew me out to Hurricane Sandy to work with Team Rubicon. It's like, they were like, you're a smart, you know, nerdy, forward-deployed engineer. Like we have this philanthropic partnership, like go live with a bunch of like vets in a literally a school they took over. So you just got really inspired around this. Like you could build anything. Like I've worked with a ton of people that were like starting companies and dropping out of school that went to like Stanford and raising money. From venture capitalists. And I was like, raising money? Like, this is not lawn mowing or leaf collection or like snowplow building. This business, like, you're raising $2 or $3 million from VCs. So I was like, uh, and I helped a bunch of my friends get internships at Palantir, and they would pay you money, $5,000, $10,000 for referral bonuses. Like, Mr. Lord also was like, you know, from going from student loans to paying for all of school, referring my nerdy friends to Palantir. It's like, man, Silicon Valley is crazy. $5,000 to refer one of your friends? That's nuts. So I was like, maybe I could start a business like the Stanford kids did. That, uh, right around the time my sister graduated, she was always cooler than me, like totally killed it in high school and college, and then she couldn't find a job. She kind of really became insecure about that. Like I had these smart friends at Michigan Tech where the coolest job you'd get was working at like Target and like installing routers and like, you know, you remember Purdue, right? Like there just isn't the type of economic opportunity that you saw at the GSB and or I think you went to HBS, but you see at these better schools. Uh, and so I was like, maybe we could start a product that helps level the playing field. And, uh, that was like, that was the dream. And, you know, it's come a long way towards that. Now most students in America find their first job on Handshake. There's 18 million people that use it. There's a million companies on the network. We partner with like 1,600 universities across the country. So, uh, still with that same kind of core ethos. So like, how do you help people start, jumpstart, restart their career? And it's really expanded into like, how do you help also people manage their career like 18 to 30? And find that second and third job and like route between different careers and pick up new skills. So yeah.

Is your dad, is he still?

Still in Michigan. Yeah.

What is like, what does he think now?

Uh, he's super proud.

Has he, has it now set in like, oh, like this is like my son is doing huge things, like making it.

He's like, he loves, loves. I send him like the board materials.

I think he's deep into it actually.

He's deep.

He's deep into it too. Gary Vaynerchuk.

Yeah. He'll like send me like notes. You know, after, you know, I send him the board materials and different reports. He's like, I didn't know that. He's giving me like points of his points of view. Yeah. He's, uh, he's, he's super invested and involved and like just loves also this AI stuff we're doing. It's just like so fascinated about what's happening. He's really curious. He was always curious. Yeah.

So, um, and he stayed in Michigan.

Yep. Stayed in Michigan.

You ever try and get him out here?

I do. He, uh, he loves, I mean, he still is like loves his building projects and staying busy. Um, he's traveling more now. I'm really, I don't know, like for him, I don't know if you, if you just in Michigan, you're just used to working, right? So it's like this idea that you're like traveling around all the time and visiting different places. He's like still probably invested in his work.

I want to talk about the AI stuff in a second, but like, does it set in for you? Like, do you have, like, when you look at yourself in the mirror, do you have any self-actualization? Like, are you like, oh yeah, I'm like this. Big-time CEO now? Like, are you like insecure? Like, I got more to do? Like, how do you, how do you look at yourself at this point now?

I really just try to remember like my roots and where I grew up and try to keep myself, try to be super humble and approachable. Like, my friends are still the same friends for the last 10 years, like still do the same thing on the weekends. Yeah, I have like you know, 4 sets of skis now. I used to like have to save up for a year and a half to buy one set of skis. But like, you know, there's that cool quote, like, you know, just, just try to stay true to yourself. And like, I'm constantly being pretty constantly reminded. I have like a couple of things in my office. Like I have a picture of my dad's like old pickup truck, you know, like I have a brick. Oh, this is a brick from, you know, back when we first got our fundraising, our seed round, like one of the companies went out of business and they like gave away all their furniture and in the office was like this brick and I like have the brick in my office to remember like, you know, how far we've come. So you just, you know, try to stay grounded.

Where does the grit come from? Because, you know, you famously lived in your car for I don't know how many months, maybe a year as you started Handshake.

Yeah.

Where did that motivation and drive come from?

The real story for the drive came from was, um, I had this crazy idea to start Handshake. A bunch of my friends believed in me in school and we started working on it like nonstop for like 2 years. Um, we would, you know, this is back in the days when like Paul Graham was like just writing like essays for Y Combinator and I'd read all those. I watched like Peter Thiel, like startup school, like Stanford, you know, and talk to, like, talk and talk to your customers. So we used to drive around there, we bring up the cars, like, you know, Paul Graham says you got to talk to customers, like, we'll talk to all of our customers. And like, nobody will take our meetings. So we're just gonna drive down and show up at their office. Because the best part about a career center is like, it's a physical office and people go there 5 days a week. And if you show up and you're 22 and excited and you're wearing that jacket, yeah, they're gonna talk to you.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I used to drive down this like old Jeep from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to like all the schools in Michigan and Ohio and Chicago and Wisconsin and like sleep on relatives' couches and friends' parents' couches. And my dad saw me become like really obsessed with, you know, being like the Silicon Valley kids, like start their own company and want to start his own company. And so, uh, and he worked, you know, extraordinarily hard to provide for our family growing up. Like, yeah, um, it was, you know, it was very philanthropic with his time and like very involved. In trying to create opportunities for me and my sister. And he had written basically, he invested in Handshake and he essentially, you know, over the fullness of like getting started, like basically spent like every dollar he had saved up for his retirement on Handshake. You know, pretty, pretty risk on. And that was a, like a huge sense of responsibility. It was like, My friends had turned down world-class opportunities to make like, you know, $15,000 a year, live in a house with us in Upper Peninsula, Michigan. You know, my dad had given us all of, you know, the limited dollars that he did have, invest in the company. And there wasn't really like an opportunity. You couldn't, I couldn't fail. Like, you know, the failure was not an option. Failure was not an option. And I feel really fortunate my two co-founders and like the early team that we had built were like, my two co-founders took my dad investing in this company like extraordinarily seriously too. I mean, you know, it's not easy. Like, you know, we drove all the way down to like Wake Forest, you know, and like sleeping in the back of this Ford Focus in like McDonald's parking lots and like police are like, you know, you're getting knocked, they call it, you know, by the flashlight. And yeah, I mean, it ended up, we ended up signing up 5 schools. and those 5 schools then turned into 60 schools and, you know, we moved out to Silicon Valley. But, uh, I think failure was not an option. Yeah, it was, uh, it was too, too important almost. Also, to bring it to life too, I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with this. It's like, I think you put like a really heavy burden on yourself, you know, and, and, uh, a lot of times, you know, it's pretty unhealthy. But, and, and it, yeah, I like to say like it sometimes it gets a lot easier, right? But you know, you've been on our board through hard times, right? Like there are some chapters in your business where it's just, really, really hard.

Yeah. What is the energy source for that motor?

I mean, I think if you just zoom out, like, we're a lot of people at Handshake, myself, it's just like living a dream. This is so radically cooler than anything else I could have ever imagined in life to like have this exposure and opportunity and teammates and funding and customers in this cool time of technology. Like, I don't know. I think, um, you just, uh, the source and the motor, like, I just, we, I think we have, I think I've been really inspired recently too that like if you just, at some points in the journey, it's easy to become like disenfranchised with like how hard it is to build a company. But if you just stack up, you're working as hard as you possibly can every single day and every single day, like some days are 100, you know, most days are not 100, right? You're like, give a 60%, you give 80%, like you didn't get enough sleep, it's an 85. You just stack up putting together as many hard days as you can, like amazing things happen over the long term, you know, building of a company. Um, and so I think this motor, at least on my side, I like, I, I really think Handshake can make a big impact on the world, on a lot of people's lives. I think it can make a, you know, we're in a really unique spot of owning, you know, this marketplace of companies, universities, and students. And I think there's You know, what we'd like to do is build like the largest job search discovery exploration platform on the internet. And like, you know, it makes no sense that Indeed does like $9 billion revenue and it's just like a transactional search box, you know, and you still log into LinkedIn today and the first question is like, what's your job? It's like, actually don't have a job. I'm a college student. Right. So we, we think there's a lot of opportunity to level the playing field for hundreds of millions of people around the world, hopefully in the fullness of time.

I have goosebumps on my arm. Garrett, the story of Handshake since the beginning, I always thought it was crazy. And then as of 6 months ago, I'm like, oh my God, it's crazy all over again.

It's getting pretty cool.

It's pretty crazy. And can I maybe give my own quick timeline? And then I'd just love to listen to you talk about if there's anything I'm wrong about.

The real turning point was at the Kleiner Perkins holiday party. I don't know if you remember it. I don't know if connect those dots. I'll tell you in a minute. I met a researcher at the Kleiner Perkins. You know, the whole purpose of going to that party was, you know, you got to catch up with people and say hi to people. I ditched my wife and hung out with one person the entire time.

This is like December of 2024.

And I spoke to a researcher at the number one lab. And I just wouldn't let him go. I just talked to him for like 4 hours. His wife came over. I'm like, I'm sorry, lady. Like, you got to back away. Like, I got to keep on asking this guy questions. But that was a huge moment for me because then I got, I got hellbent on— I kind of figured out—

well, and what— so maybe just go ahead, like, that— what was the thing that you were hellbent on? Like, what was the thing that, that caught your interest with him?

Yeah, well, what was interesting is, um, uh, you know, maybe, uh, 18 months ago, many of these companies that produce data for the foundational model companies started coming to us being like, do you have master's students and do you have PhD students? And do you have bachelor students that are in like audio engineering, for example? And we did. I mean, Handshake has, you know, 18 million young people that use their product, including 500,000 PhDs and 3 million master's students. So we started serving them to these, what I would call like middleman companies, brand names that you know of today. And, uh, what we started really hearing kind of was, was interesting. Like, A, like labs started to reach out to us. The Frontier Labs started to reach out to us asking for this talent. many of the PhDs and master's students were saying they were like frustrated by the experience as it related to like, you know, not getting trained effectively, not getting paid on time, not like, not retaining with the core product experience. Um, and putting all the pieces together, we had, I started to hear this. In November, I went to the Kleiner holiday party and I spoke with a researcher at one of the frontier labs who worked with some of these other players. And he just spilled the beans. Like he told me, he kind of explained exactly how the labs were evolving, what type of Frontier data they would want to use. He was blown away that we had so many people leveraging the network and he was like, well, why don't you enter this business yourself? And so, uh, I remember calling you over like Christmas and New Year's. Uh, it was really, we decided on our side that we wanted to turn off the access, uh, to these other players in the space and we wanted to go direct to the labs with what we believe in the human kind of data business is like the only defensible advantage you have in that business is like access to an audience.

Yeah.

You have essentially like, you know, operational horsepower and the ability to generate high volumes of data quickly. Um, but really the primary challenge that, that we have a strategic advantage around is like zero customer acquisition costs and a ton of institutional trust built up over a decade with millions and millions of people. And so Yeah.

Oh, so for example, OpenAI or whatever, one of these labs would come to you and their model is spitting out some algorithm, something around some scientific discovery, and they need somebody to look at that and basically train it and say, is this right? Is this wrong? They need somebody with a specific set of expertise to basically look at whatever that model is producing within a given domain. And then ask the expert.

Yeah. What's big, like, has great, very simple story, which is like, you know, people talk about agents all the time, right? Like agents requires an ability to follow step-by-step instructions or, you know, fundamental idea behind agents is you understand like reasoning and the reasoning choices need to be correct. So if you ask any one of the large frontier models questions and you ask it to break down its thinking of its step-by-step instructions, Uh, too oftentimes these models are not getting the answers correct. Um, so when you think about a model, it's like you have compute, you have algorithms, and you have like data. Those are like the 3 things that matter with models. Everyone's applying a ton of compute, everyone's constantly evolving algorithms, and people are obviously chasing after one another in terms of algorithmic prowess. And then you have data, and data is what really fuels the gains on what are called the post-training side of the house. Post-training is human data. And, uh, what we do is, uh, you know, the world's evolved from like generalists where you were predominantly leveraging like inter— international skilled lower cost labor, taking advantage of an arbitrage between that to now these models have kind of sucked up the entirety of the entire corpus of the internet and every book and video. They've also sucked up and they've gotten good enough where like generalists are no longer needed. The models are actually better than generalists. And so what they need is they need experts. They need experts in accounting and law and medicine. They need experts in coding. They need experts in STEM domains like physics, math, chemistry. Um, and, uh, designing a network that's focused on experts and treating those experts well and making it an amazing community experience with high retention where people can, you know, we're connecting to like badges on your profile and leaderboards by school. You know, we have access to millions of experts. So these experts, it's pretty cool. You can make like $60, $80, $100. You know, I think our average bill rate's over $100 an hour, like, you know, $125 an hour applying your expertise in the domain that you're studying. You know, you're getting a master's in accounting and you're getting paid $100 an hour to provide data and correct models. Um, and yeah, we're doing really also wild things like, you know, audio, like a ton of audio work, like these models, I, I can't get, I won't get too far into it, but, uh, you know, in the areas of trajectories and, you know, tool use and, uh, text data and coding data, like Handshake has, in our opinion, like one of the largest networks of experts that are captive and trust Handshake. And so we're trying to build a great experience for them to produce data for the labs.

And can you just walk me through like a, how, like, okay, they find an expert on math or science.

Mm-hmm.

What is that expert actually doing?

An average frontier lab, of which we work with 6 of them, most of the frontier labs, let's pick something like mathematics. So they all care about, and let's merge mathematics with educational design. So, um, an analogous type of project that we would do for a lab is actually explaining and breaking down the decisions around how you would teach a particular math problem to a student. Uh, so you'd be applying mathematics experts who would actually agree on the step-by-step, like, here's how I would solve the problem. And you'd merge that with, uh, educational design PhD around the whether you like option A or option B more. And you might even get more specific, like you might provide like hints or you might provide, uh, data around students in the Southeast prefer this educational design pattern, whereas students in the Northwest prefer this educational design pattern. So it's a public paper. So you go in, if you're a physics PhD, you break the model. Um, you identify a reasoning error in a step-by-step instruction flow. You correct the reasoning flow, and then you provide the ground truth right answer. Uh, and then they do things like, you know, pass at K1, pass at K3, pass at K10, which is like, does the model, because they're non-deterministic, does the model get it right 1 out of 3 times, you know, 3 out of 3 times, get it right 1 out of 10 times? So we'll actually go in and provide distributions of data around how many times is the model passing this question? Here's what the right answer is. And that would be an example of a physics PhD focusing on their area of research, asking questions the model cannot do today and providing the actual right answers. Most of the data we produce, if you were to read it, you could lock me in jail for 30 days and ask me to solve one of these physics problems. It's not happening. You can't even— I can't even barely read the type of data that we create because it's really experts and PhDs.

Yeah. And then the goal is, okay, frontier model gets better as a result. And the next time somebody, Mamoon Hamid Hamid, asks the model a question around the thing that you just asked it, it'll produce a generally accurate response.

Yeah. I mean, I think we can even make it simpler than that, which is like, so model companies, they measure themselves. There's many ways to measure themselves. I'm just, this is just our, you know, a point of view that we hear regularly, which is like, there's like a model card. So if you look at like one of the latest models, let's pick like Llama 4. Yep. There'll be a model card and the model card, uh, talks about its skillset in coding and MMLU. It has all these like what are called benchmarks or evals. Eval are essentially, you know, you, you try never to expose your model to the actual eval because then it will know the right answers. So it's held out. It's like you're never trying to give that data into what the model's being trained on so that you actually understand whether it's improving in an area or not. And so what customers regularly come to us with and ask us for is data that helps improve a capability area of a model targeting getting better on these evals or benchmarks. And so They're asking for, if you can imagine what they're focused on, it's all the economic use cases of models. They want more professional domains. They want to be able to use tools. They want to be able to do trajectories to actually be able to solve problems. Think about investment where you're putting together a total addressable market and then building a slide deck and then breaking down a model. They want to be able to stitch together many of the labs. They had an entire flow you know, agentically. And so we, we are providing data that they use to evaluate their model's performance and to train their models to make it better in certain capability areas.

Like, so you go to the holiday party, you like start, like your brain starts going, calling Mamoon Hamid Hamid. Like, how long did it take before you decided, oh, like we're going to build this product, like we're going to go for this.

Yeah, it was two funny stories there. One funny story was like, so I, you know, you can never pick the timing of when you get all energized about something. So I got super energized. I like, I got charged up. I like canceled like every, I mean, there's a couple of things you can do now that we have more resources that you couldn't do when you first started Handshake. Like one, you can hire expert firms like GLG and Tegus and Alpha Insights. I know their names because we hired them all. and you could be like, I want to spend $50,000 on each one of these expert networks. Like, sign me up. So I first like signed up to all the expert networks. Uh, I started like basically going into my network and trying to meet with anyone and everyone that would talk to me about the space. I basically canceled like all my, like basically everything. And I would sit—

you cleared your calendar to go just for this.

And I would sit on these expert calls from like, I wake up like 5 AM in the morning because it was 8 o'clock East Coast. I was so energized. I would just go nonstop talking to like researchers and product managers and people at companies that worked in the space and, uh, academics like TIGIS and these other companies are pretty liberal around who they'll bill you for on your, on your time. So I started to, first I started talking to everyone and I started whittling it down and whittling it down to be like, I want to talk to, you know, I, I really built a point of view on how I want to talk to you. And then I was like, wow, we are so well positioned to build this business. Like I, and then I was upset with myself. I was like, how did I miss this? Like this is This is ridiculous. And my wife's like, you know, it's okay. It's okay. Like, so then I, then it was like Christmas. And so, uh, my wife has family. She has their home as a place in Arizona. And I just told the whole family, I was like, I am this Christmas. I love all you guys, but like, I am, I basically am like not going to be here. And so, and so I remember, you remember I was talking, I would just fly out of Phoenix and I went to like New York and I went to like Seattle 3 times. I was like, just like chasing people because One of my key things I think about building a company is you gotta like hire great leaders who can help you build this business. And, uh, I recruited like 3 incredible folks who joined the team. And, uh, I also built this like elaborate spreadsheet of basically like on these GLG calls, I would ask like who I should hire. And I basically had like a point system, uh, that I, it was not that savvy, but just like, and I had this one guy who will remain unnamed. He'll know who he is, but he consistently came up at the very top. And there was another guy that came up very top in the industry. And, uh, I now— the two top guys that everyone thought I should hire, I have hired both of them now on the team, uh, which is pretty awesome. And, you know, I did not take no with this one guy. I mean, I almost left a guitar on like a last-minute plane ride. Like, you know, just like, you know, you got to chase— you got to go full force.

Insane. Can, um, I do not want to divert too far from this because I have so many more questions. But the way you recruit is a full-contact sport.

Yeah.

Can you talk about—

it's got to be, right? Every founder's like this.

You're like, not every founder.

Yeah. A little different.

Yeah.

Full contact.

Yeah.

Some people are playing tennis.

Yeah.

Yeah. You're like the bruiser on the hockey team. Yeah.

Michigan.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, uh, when, okay, when you were like, for example, like be specific about these two AI researchers. When you say I wouldn't let him, like, I wouldn't let him go, like, I wasn't going to take no for an answer. What does that mean? Like, you have a first call. They say, sorry, but I'm getting paid a gajillion bucks at wherever I am. Like, I'm, you know, I'm happy here. I'm working on this project. The normal stuff that you hear.

Well, both are kind of iconic stories.

Go ahead.

I don't know. It's interesting.

I mean, yeah, definitely interesting.

So like one, uh, one of the guys, he had accepted another offer to join an early stage company. And this is like, I think it's like right around New Year's, like right before New Year's, like in between Christmas and New Year's where like a lot of people aren't working. And, um, he, he was the number one guy on the spreadsheet that I had been told to hire. And I did an intro call with him, like introducing myself and, you know, talking about our business and why I thought we had the right to win. And he was pretty intrigued. He's like, well, can we meet? We, you know, I'd love to meet again. And like any, you know, good sales rep or founder, you like book the next meeting on the call. You know, you don't like push the email to schedule. And he's like, well, I have like a bunch of family stuff going on. Like I can meet tomorrow at like 11 o'clock. I was like, cool. Like, go see you tomorrow at 11 o'clock. So we talked again at 11 o'clock. My whole Wolf family in Arizona was like, this kid is just weird. Like, diabolical. Like, this is just fucking—

you're still, you're in Arizona and you're on the phone.

And then I earned the right because I didn't want to be a little bit too aggressive and like fly out to him. But I like was trying to get the right to fly out to him because that's a little weird if you just say I'm going to fly out to you like right away. So, uh, you can't look too desperate. So then, then I had that 11 o'clock meeting, then I like sealed the deal where it was like casual enough that I could then fly out to him. And so I flew out to him. We ended up like taking over.

Where'd you fly?

I flew to San Jose and then drove up to him. And we ended up chatting and chatting and, uh, he was supposed to start in like early January at this next company. And we spent, I think I spent like 3 or 4 days with him in person brainstorming and building alignment and learning from each other on what we could build and what the assets were of Handshake and how much engagement we had. and he decided to join the team. Uh, so that's like, that was, that was—

sorry, you spent 3 or 4 days in San Jose?

Yeah, in San Jose.

Like you left Phoenix? Yeah, you left Arizona? Yeah, during the holidays, during the holidays.

I'd actually fly out in the morning and then fly back in the evening, and then I did, yeah, 2 trips. Yeah, yeah. So by there, I was also, I was also chasing the guy in Seattle. Um, that was fun. And then the, the, I think one of the coolest one, the even better story, iconic one is I, this one guy, this other guy who lived in Qatar gave me an opportunity, you know, I'd been hounding him to meet with him, uh, while he was in New York for his 30th birthday party. And so I flew to New York to meet with him and he gave me a little bit of time at his 30th birthday party weekend. And we spent, ended up, uh, 1 hour turned into like a couple hours, you know, a whole morning. Uh, and then he canceled his birthday weekend plans with his friends and flew back with me and Mamoon cleared his calendar. I was like, I am coming back red-eye to San Francisco, like with, you know, package inbound, like, yeah, yeah. It was like, hot. Yeah.

I had this coming in hot.

Yeah.

We met and yeah, it was like partners meeting day and we got to meet.

Thank you for first. Yeah. And now he's, he's been good in both these. There's been several leaders, but both these two guys are incredibly instrumental in building our business.

Full contact. And I'm curious, like, because I think I was saying this a few weeks ago, Mamoon Hamid, like, I have not seen— like, I have not seen many incumbent businesses. It's even weird to think of you as an incumbent, but like, you know, a business that's been around for the last 7+ years, pre-AI era, that takes their base and then leverages it in such an advantageous way to like take advantage of this market. Right now. I have very few examples.

You know, you've been building Handshake for, you know, a decade almost.

Yeah.

Right. And I think of Handshake, you, you always had this goal to, uh, democratize access to opportunities for early talent. Right. And this is not a departure from that goal, is early talent. This happens to be master's, PhD students. And you're connecting them with frontier labs where there's real work for them to be done. It is, you know, maybe a slight departure from the core selling software to Fortune 500 companies, which we still do. And we, we own that market as a company and we own the career center at 99 point whatever percent of universities in the, in, in the country and beyond. Um, but I don't see it as too much of a departure. We, we just, utilize that asset that we are building for the last decade to then build another business on top. So now compared to other companies that have done this, I just in my mind just going through this right now, I remember Roblox, very different company, had a good, good like decade of just building the infrastructure to do the, to build the kind of games that you can build on Roblox. And it was not, I think for like a good decade it was not like a, a thing. Like people, kids weren't going on Roblox and creating these, you know, characters and worlds and all that stuff. And it took a, but if it wasn't for everything that had been built in that prior decade, the Roblox that we know today wouldn't really make sense or exist or, so that's a 20-year-old company, but yeah, only in the last decade has that hockey stick revenue adoption engagement happen. Yeah. Then I think about like, you know, some of our own companies that, you know, we backed an e-commerce company called Amazon. Yet enterprise value, you know, of AWS probably eclipses that of the e-commerce business. Uh, or another one of our greats, Google, like, you know, search business, which is still an amazing business, but there are other, couple of other businesses that have since then, um, you know, whether it's maps, and, uh, then there's, uh, productivity and now cloud. Um, some greats get to have act 2, you know, but, but it's after act 1 is really working. Um, and it usually, it's at a higher revenue base. It's not at like several hundred million. It's usually like a billion plus of revenue base from the core that gives you that wind in your sails to go do act 2. And I'm not even sure this is act 2 for us, Garrett. I'm not sure if you fully agree, disagree, uh, on sort of the rationalization of where we are within the age of AI with, with Handshake. But, but it is, it, it's not common necessarily, but I don't think it's actually, this is like a, a big departure from the core mission of Handshake.

Oh yeah. I mean, think about it, like LinkedIn is an incredible business, right? They have, I think it's like 5 or 6 revenue lines over a billion dollars, right? They have marketing solutions, talent solutions. They have, uh, sales solutions. They have Lynda and learning. They have the Job Seeker Pro product. I mean, there are several business lines are over. So I think when you build an engaged audience, to your point, there are many ways to monetize it. And I think, you know, what I, what I'm constantly encouraging our team to think about is like how we can be, how we really are like connecting what we're doing in Human Data to our core marketplace. 'Cause what we really wanna do is be the best matching marketplace for people to find job— great jobs, right? And explore and discover and build like a whole network around that. And so what we're doing with this human data business is just fueling data that helps us get better at recruiting in our core marketplace.

And maybe just, uh, for the audience, just the three-sided marketplace that we are today.

Yeah.

Uh, just to maybe make that crystal clear.

Yeah.

There's 1,600 universities in the country that use it, which is 92% of the top 500 universities in the country. They're basically, if you're kind of older listening to the call, you know anyone in college, you could text them right now and there's 0% chance they haven't heard of Handshake. Like everyone's on Handshake in America. If you're 18, 19, 20, 21, trying to think about a first internship, first job, like you're on Handshake and you're on Handshake more than you're on LinkedIn. Um, and we are growing that audience beyond college, like larger and larger every single year and aspire to like, you know, go bottoms up against these large incumbents as they're trusted place they go to find internships, where they go to find jobs. Um, there's a million employers that recruit on the network, including 100% of the Fortune 500. So every single Fortune 500 company, this is the primary way they hire students. There isn't a small business, medium-sized business, large business in America that recruits from college without most likely coming through Handshake because we power all of the schools. Um, and yeah, that's the network's very, uh, very strong in college. We're growing and we're growing in France and Germany and the UK as well.

Can, can I, like, you, you made a comment of like, you're not sure this is act 2. Do you think it's act 2?

I mean, it's definitely a totally new business unit inside of the company with a different set of capabilities and a different set of leaders. But we're really leveraging, um, and it's been a, a very much like a zero to one in building this business. But a lot of what we're doing is monetizing the core asset and audience that, and we always dreamed of like monetizing and always thought we would be able to monetize Many, many, there would be many ways to monetize this audience over the long term if we could get them engaged and get them to trust us and get them to use us regularly. It is also for PhDs and master's students, for PhDs in particular, there weren't that many. I mean, it's actually like the community we're building with, with PhDs and professionals on the network now. Now we're acquiring like lawyers and accountants. Like it's really quite cool to build like professional community. Uh, if you were a PhD, like there wasn't really a place on the internet that you felt super welcome before. Yeah.

Well, it's also kind of a no-brainer. Like, my mom was getting her PhD until she was 34 years old. When she was like 33, 34, like, and you told her from Iran she could like be in the US and solving like, you know, like science problems for $100 an hour. She'd be like, is this a joke? Like all day.

Totally.

Keeps your mind sharp. You get to meet other PhDs. Like, that's kind of a no-brainer.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sure you have some pretty amazing stories.

Yeah. I think the Some, some of the best stories are like, uh, where students, when you think about it as a PhD student or almost all the people that do work on our platform though, people don't really realize this. They're like probably 90 plus percent of people that are doing work have already graduated. So they're all alumni on the network. That's so like people don't realize how large the alumni network is on Handshake. And yeah, the, uh, like a pretty awesome story is like just connecting like these dots, which is like, I want to learn more about AI in my area of research and actually apply it. Well, what's cooler than getting paid like $125 an hour to like, like learn complex prompt engineering, learn what models are really good at, learn where they hallucinate and fail in different situations, learn how to elicit failure. Like you're, what we're hearing from people is that they're actually bringing a lot of these skills then back into the area of expertise. Uh, and then connecting it to like employers, we, we, we, we're already doing this today where it's like companies want to be able to recruit these AI digitally, like the word right now is cracked. Like software engineers, right? And so it's like, how can you actually be able to help articulate like who's really good at these tools? Um, and then companies are asking us like, how can we upskill our young employees and employees with these schools? So we're really unlocking, I think, a lot of addressable opportunities around the business by participating at the forefront of like what labs are doing.

It's amazing. Um, Garrett, when the— over the COVID timeframe, things went crazy, like hockey stick up into the right. Then ZIRP era ended, that your TAM started to saturate, meaning like you were in most of the Fortune 500, you were in most of the, the schools, right? 490 or whatever, whatever. And so you start figuring out like, all right, like what, you know, like you want to keep growing the business. And I remember you were like, there's a moment where the business is not growing like it used to be. And that was like very unnerving, right? You were like, you felt the ants in your pants to get back to the growth that we were at. And it's funny cuz you always talk about finding a second act and a third act, but like you didn't, sometimes you just kind of gotta be in the game and then all of a sudden serendipity hits you across the face at, in this case, our holiday party. And you're like, oh, here it is. Like, this is the thing. And you're kind of beating yourself up, but like sometimes you can't like plan for that. You can't like, I don't know, you just can't plan for these, like these things, these moments in time. It's crazy.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'm in this really cool organization I've learned a lot from and have grown a ton from called like YPO with other, with other CEOs going through the exact same trials and tribulations, like trying to build companies. And there's this like big proverb in our group, like you just can't quit, you know, you just gotta like stay in the game. And yeah, I mean, building a company also for all the people that aspire to build companies or currently build companies that are listening, it's like, it's, you know, Mamoon knows, it's like there's super highs and super lows and Uh, you know, you staying in the game, like you, you hopefully can create, you know, it, there's always ways, there's always ways to create opportunities. In our core business, like, we have less than like 3,000 companies that pay on the network. There's a million companies that use it. So like, right now our self-service business is adding a million dollars a week in addressing small businesses on the network. That business should be $400 million, like minimum $500 million just from small businesses, right? We, there's no pro products, like there's no midsize products. So all we do is basically sell the largest companies in the world, great, great products. And we have opportunities to like level the playing field for medium and small businesses that I can actually go out and be as competitive as like Google is in recruiting. So, you know, if we just drag out like single-digit percentage, you know, conversion rates on a million companies using Handshake, there's still a ton of value to be built in the business. Um, and then yet alone, like the post-college opportunity, the international opportunity, the opportunity when we think about like building this large matching marketplace globally. So I, I remain like very optimistic, but yeah, we got punched in the face super hard when the economy like fell off, business started to decelerate. We had to, you know, it was, it was really hard. Um, I feel extremely like proud of all the, the, our team and the people that stuck through it and helped us like You know, get back to that winning mentality internally. And now, like, confidence, the juju's high at Handshake. Like, people are, people are excited.

Well, dude, no kidding. Can I ask you on the, on the how you organize the business internally?

Mm-hmm.

When you have this new thing that's coming up and you said you do a zero-to-one, like it feels zero-to-one, like you're recruiting these researchers. Yeah. Almost as if it's a new startup. How do you, how do you orchestrate that? Same building? Are they the same resources? Are you sharing resources?

I think we'll soon have a separate office just right now because it's growing like— we're hiring like people, like 12 people are starting every Monday, right? So it's like— and we'd love like 20 people to start every Monday. So, I mean, we just turned down a $20 million project like yesterday morning because we just can't— we can't deliver on it. So the, the way we operate, I mean, it's been very fun to like run back a second company inside of a company and you like learn you learn lessons around like what you want to, you know, do the same way and what you want to do differently. I think the second time around, like I've really been leading with like a lot of authenticity, like being, I've really learned like authenticity matters so much and like you don't have to be perfect, but if you like, you're, you know, a good person and you like, you're trying your best every day, like just like people give you the benefit of the doubt and just being more forward-facing with the team. That was something I think I fell into like some patterns around when Hinchik was struggling of just being like too scripted and not authentic and too disconnected. Uh, so I've really learned a lot about that in turning around our core business around leading with authenticity that I brought from just day one in this new business, Handshake AI. Um, you know, it's been pretty fun. I mean, last night we were at the office till 2:30 in the morning, which is like, are you serious? Yeah, it's pretty, it's been pretty insane. Like lowest sleep scores my entire life for sure over the last several months.

Lower than like the sleeping in McDonald's parking lot thing.

Well, I was like also 22 back then, so it's much easier. I'm like 35 now. It hits way differently getting like 4 hours of sleep at 35 than 22. Me too. Uh, and, uh, the team's like super excited about, so I don't know. I mean, to answer your question more specifically, it's like, you know, we have, uh, you know, we've really kept things super flat in the new business. Everyone like rolls up to me essentially. I have like direct exposure to like all the leaders running everything. I really am not trying to, in this new environment when it's small, you're like not the, you try not to be the boss. I like to say in meetings, like I'm just another really smart guy trying to participate with my opinion in the meeting. And would love like to encourage active debate and like different points of view. I have some, we have superstar team that are like extraordinarily capable. I mean, this team that we built, like kudos to them and people are giving it so much effort. They're so passionate. They're trying so hard. We're just, you know, so the main thing I constantly am encouraging everyone saying is like kind of a lesson learned from my dad. It's like, um, you just never want to wonder what if. It's like we have this once in a lifetime opportunity, like just give it your all and try to lead every day and never wonder like, what if, right? Like, give it your all. Um, and then in the core business, we have incredible leaders that it's more scaled up. I mean, you set annual goals, you break it down into like what you accomplish quarterly, you break that down at the manager level to like what happens weekly. It's like, it's more systematized in how we track progress. Whereas, I mean, our demand tripled last month, right? So it was like, you can't have a set of like OKRs in this new business. So it's Hopefully that's helpful.

Do you put any constraints around it? Meaning like, do they have unlimited access to capital? Like, do they, like, do you think about any of the constraints that an early company would have?

Yeah. I mean, we, we have some like really constructive conversations at, at the board meeting. I mean, we want to operate at like a strong gross margin profile for this business. Um, and you know, the way it generally works right now in the industry is like You know, you, you, you'll subsidize some of the early pilot work to basically break in the door and like prove yourself, uh, single digit, like hundreds of thousands of dollars of like pilot work. Once you prove yourself and you're producing high quality data faster than anyone else, uh, then you get an opportunity to like scale up these projects and participate in more volume. And at that point, we're very transparent about our margin. People like working with us because we're just, they're researchers, like they're engineers, like they, they would prefer not to even be on the phone with us. Like, can we just like handle this via Slack, right? So if we can just make this as— you don't need to bring— what's also fun is like, I've, you know, I've traveled so much all around the world selling Handshake and like, all I have to have is 6 customers and they're all engineers like me who like don't like being sold to.

Just on Slack.

Yeah, just on Slack. It's like the best, right? It's like, do a good job and you will rip. And so, uh, we are doing a very good job. We You know, we, and we just, you know, kind of beaten, raised and like, you know, don't set too high of expectations. And the business right now is, you know, it's just flooding in.

It's insane. I'm so happy for you.

Thank you.

I'm so happy for you.

Thank you.

And like, interesting, obviously, like just broader validation in the market that a comp— it's not the same comp, but a comp— Scale AI got bought for whatever it was, like $16 billion for half the company, for half the comp, for half the company. And to Meta, like, there is something here, you know, I don't know what it is, but like, you're fishing in an interesting pond right now.

Yeah. And I would say just it's a testament to Garrett as a founder and, you know, the, the very trite founder mode, but it's true testament to just like when you have one could say that the same circumstances, handshake as handshake with someone else at the helm, would not have seized the opportunity the way you have. And, uh, that's just a testament to the grit, the resilience, the, the motor that drives you, Garrett. And I think maybe 9 out of 10 times it probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for, uh, your ingenuity and your thought process and your just your desire to go make it happen.

Thank you.

I totally agree. I totally agree. And you have to go inject energy into this business and only you can do that. Like the, that handshake energy that comes from the core that feeds into this difference business, like there's that comes from you, you know, Um, I'm stoked we got to do this. Thank you, guys. Are you hiring? Like, what?

What?

What?

20 a week.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At midnight last night, we made a decision. We're hiring a Franchi guy in New York. So if you're in New York, we're trying to build the whole team in San Francisco and build that, like, culture up and keep the kind of connectivity super tight. But there's just so much demand. We're now opening up Handshake AI in New York. So if you're in New York, we'd love to hire you. We're hiring dozens and dozens of people across engineering, operations, products. And yet it's a really— we would— we also have an incredible team that works on our core business, super talented people. We're hiring, you know, we're hiring at huge volumes there. So if you're passionate about this mission or interested in working at the complete frontier of, of where tech is headed, like, we'd love you to apply. You can find us at joinhandshake.com.

I can't help myself. I have one more question around hiring. Like this idea of headcount is going to get smaller like that, that businesses are going to be built with way less people. I haven't like, I haven't totally seen that. Like when there's an opportunity like this, it seems to me that most companies are like, all right, we're going to go take advantage of this opportunity and appropriately staff it.

I don't know.

It seems like you're doing the same.

Yeah. I mean, we're just get to focus people on different problems and hire less people in certain— I mean, like I think there's two things you can hold true at the same time. One, there hasn't been as much impact on our core company with AI as you'd expect. And B, it's also completely underhyped and the impact over the time will be much larger than we imagine. It also is like these AI, just algorithms and neural networks in particular, have been incredibly impactful in our core business. I mean, we have this completely agentic interviewer. Where you, you know, Mamoon Hamid's taking it, you like, you interview with it and it grades you on a rubric. And we're like, you know, you can't hire 3,000 people in a month without using AI tools, right? So we're embedding all those tools in our core marketplace. Um, yeah, so I don't know if I'm really answering your question, but yeah, I think we'll see, uh, significant impact to the number of people we hire at Handshake vis-à-vis these AI tools. And that's what we're hearing from companies in the network as well. Like What they really want, so there's, it's kind of fascinating. There's two schools of thought. One school is there will be no jobs for students in the future because AI will automate away all entry-level jobs. And the other school of thought is actually the companies want these like 8x, 10x, like digitally enabled productive employees. And, you know, take an example of like an engineer in our team I spoke with yesterday, like he had a PR up in a day and a half using Cursor in our mobile codebase. It's like on, nope, nobody does that like without these tools. And what we're hearing from our companies is that yes, they're going to hire less people in certain roles out of college, but there's an incredible appetite for people like, take social media marketers to like know how to use DALL-E and like marketing analytics tools. Like there's, there's an opportunity to help these people really find great opportunities, uh, in companies that want, they want to hire one person that's like the equivalent of 8 people. Uh, and I think that's what we're hearing from our companies.

Yeah.

And maybe I'll just add that we're seeing our companies that are doing a lot more with less people, uh, or just shipping way more, way faster. What would take a year is happening in 3 months with the half the people. And a key metric to just keep track of for all of us is just revenue per employee. And I think that's what's going through the roof is the efficiency or the amount of revenue being generated per employee is actually increasing at a rate that we've never seen before. Because what's happening is like you're building products, you're selling it for a lot more and have a lot less people building those products. And so I think that is really happening. I was actually just at a board meeting yesterday, companies Series A company built so much product already, and direct question was, hey, you have 20 engineers. Uh, how many engineers would have, have taken 2 years ago, 3 years ago? 80 engineers. So you're seeing that truly flow through where tools like Windsurf, Cursor, uh, and all the other supporting products that go along with building products. That you can just do so much more with less.

Totally. Guys, thank you. Um, when you hear the word grit, what do you think of?

I think my dad.

Yeah.

Yeah. Pretty, pretty gritty guy.

Thanks for doing this, guys. Really fun.

Yeah.

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