Garrett Lord and the geography of a first chance

Garrett Lord arrived at Palantir in May 2012 with an internship he had chased by email and a problem he had not expected to encounter. The other interns seemed fluent in a world he was still learning to pronounce. They knew the schools, the companies, the research projects, the next steps. He had come from Michigan Technological University in Houghton. They had come, overwhelmingly, from places whose names already opened doors.

He could do the work. That was the curious part. Lord won Palantir’s summer hackathon, and the company offered him a referral bonus for bringing in other engineers from Michigan Tech. A school that had barely registered on the recruiting map suddenly became interesting when someone from it performed well. The talent had been there before the recruiter noticed. Lord had found a way through, but a referral from one intern was a rather small bridge for everyone else.

There is an appealing version of this story in which a student gets a coveted internship and sensibly enjoys it. Lord returned to campus with a different preoccupation: how many other students were being overlooked? His career took its direction from the gap between having an ability and having a chance to demonstrate it. The first chance, he discovered, comes with an address.

A computer business, then a bigger question

Lord grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He played hockey and baseball, skied, and went to the Woodward Dream Cruise with his grandfather. Computers held his attention early. Later, while studying part time at Oakland Community College, he ran an IT business to help pay for his education. By the time he transferred to Michigan Tech, earning money and learning to build things were already intertwined.

Michigan Tech supplied both difficult coursework and plenty of reasons to leave a desk. Lord joined ski patrol and played broomball. He met future co-founder Ben Christensen through an outdoor adventure group. Both joined ITOxygen, the student Enterprise team that took on technology projects for outside clients. Scott Ringwelski would become the third co-founder. Their connections formed around shared work and shared interests, well before there was an investor presentation to rehearse.

A computing fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory widened Lord’s view of what a technical career might offer. He met students whose campuses attracted employers he had scarcely encountered. The disparity became personal. A job search is easier when someone has already explained the available jobs; it is easier still when those employers come to you. A student can be ambitious and remain badly informed about where to direct the ambition.

That experience helps explain the business he eventually chose. He was interested in access to the conversation around work as well as access to a vacancy. Knowing that a company exists, understanding what its people do, and believing that an application might be welcome all happen before an interview. A recruitment system can lose a capable person at any of those steps.

“But we were always students first.”

Garrett Lord, 2022

Three sides of the same door

Handshake brought together students, employers and university career services. Each group had a different reason to care. Students needed to discover and apply for opportunities. Employers needed to find people beyond a familiar circuit of campuses. Career offices needed software that made their daily work easier. Winning over one group would be insufficient if the other two found the system cumbersome.

The founders’ early development work happened in a Houghton rental that cost $700 a month. Lord graduated with a computer science degree in 2014, the year the recruiting platform launched. The modest setting is memorable, but the more useful detail is the problem they were trying to solve inside it. The product had to serve people with different incentives without making the student an afterthought.

Michigan Tech adopted Handshake in 2015 and gave students accounts when they returned that fall. By March 2016, nearly 4,700 students had used it, and 1,960 companies had posted 6,695 jobs. These were tangible changes at the school where the idea had taken shape. Students could add interests and project experience to a profile, filter openings, and apply. The university could see activity that had previously been harder to organize.

A career-services official compared the program to an online dating site: the software needed enough information to understand a person’s preferences. The analogy has a useful limit. A first job involves schedules, money, location and qualifications, alongside mutual interest. Lord and his colleagues were building a system that could handle those particulars across institutions. Charming an individual recruiter would no longer have to carry the whole enterprise.

The sales territory had a steering wheel

Useful software still needed customers. Lord and Christensen traveled between universities in a Ford Focus, pitching career offices. They slept in McDonald’s parking lots and used college gyms to shower. The trip makes a good founding anecdote because it is so pointedly unglamorous. A car can be a bedroom, although very few bedrooms require an oil change.

More consequentially, the journey put the founders in front of the people who would decide whether the product survived. Universities were buyers with existing systems and obligations to their students. An argument about fairness had to become a practical answer to a career office’s questions. Could the software help staff? Would employers use it? Would students bother? Every visit exposed the proposal to another institution’s version of the problem.

Lord’s persistence had already helped him obtain an internship. Here it served a different purpose: persuading organizations to change how they worked. Handshake’s early progress depended on accumulating those decisions. The network could grow only after someone agreed to join a network that was still small. That is a demanding sales pitch, however admirable the mission printed above it.

A network that outgrew the road trip

By January 2017, Handshake was being used by three million students at 170 universities and connected them with roughly 100,000 employers. Lord, Christensen and Ringwelski appeared on that year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list in consumer technology. Those figures describe an early stage of the company, but they also show the distance between a founders’ sales trip and a product other institutions were adopting.

Its expansion crossed national borders. On a trip to a university conference in Edinburgh, Lord and early team member David Shull spoke with British and European representatives. The recruitment problems sounded familiar. Shull subsequently moved to London to build the UK operation. An American campus problem had counterparts elsewhere; the founders could take the idea abroad without inventing a wholly new reason for it to exist.

The company raised a $200 million Series F in 2022 at a $3.5 billion valuation. Investment brought new relationships as well as money. Lord described EQT Ventures partner Alastair Mitchell as someone he regularly called for help, including at important hiring moments. That detail complicates the lone-founder picture. Someone who builds a network for other people also needs people to consult himself.

Recognition widened beyond startup circles. Lord represented Handshake at the White House in August 2022 for a discussion of staffing shortages in education. In June 2025, he spoke at Stanford about the company’s origins and network effect. The student who had once looked across the room at people from famous campuses was now explaining his company at one of them.

A Christmas-party conversation changes the work

In December 2024, Lord spoke with a researcher from a frontier AI laboratory at a Christmas party. The researcher described a need for expert contributions to model training. Handshake already knew how to reach people with specialized knowledge. Within two weeks, the company was recruiting STEM PhDs for that lab. The new opportunity arrived through a conversation, which is a pleasingly literal development for a company called Handshake.

The resulting AI business connects human expertise with developers who need training material, evaluations and environments in which models can practice tasks. An expert’s contribution may involve designing a difficult problem, judging an answer or making professional work assessable. The company’s earlier relationships with students and graduates became useful for finding people who could supply that judgment.

Lord pursued the venture as a new business inside the existing company. His 2025 interviews described distinct teams and offices. That arrangement gave a fast-changing operation room to develop while the recruiting network kept serving its users. It also introduced a new question for the CEO: how much of his own attention should go to a business whose possibilities were changing faster than its organizational chart?

By August 2026, Lord reported more than $1 billion in gross annualized revenue for the AI unit after 16 months. That is a measure of the business’s running pace, rather than a year’s completed revenue or profit. The distinction matters when growth becomes the headline. The underlying story is that a pool of people assembled for recruiting had become commercially valuable for a second kind of work.

The first chance keeps changing

Handshake’s October 2025 refounding announcement set out a broader ambition: help people demonstrate skills, find work and prepare for careers shaped by AI. It described a hiring market in which applications were becoming easier to generate and genuine ability harder to distinguish. That problem would have been recognizable to the student Lord. A document can tell an employer where someone studied without showing what they can do.

The company has since moved further into learning. After acquiring Uplimit in June 2026, it introduced AI Skills Studio, where users build practical projects with guidance and feedback. Completed work can be shared through a Handshake profile. The proposed route is from learning to something a potential employer can inspect. A claim on a résumé becomes more useful when there is a working project beside it.

The AI expansion brings a tension that deserves to stay visible. Handshake helps people find jobs and recruits people to improve technology that could change those jobs. Lord’s aspiration is to make participation in that economy a source of opportunity. Whether an individual finds a lasting career depends on more than a platform’s growth, and a paid project is a different arrangement from a permanent position. The forms of work matter.

Lord once imagined opening a computer-repair shop. The business he actually built has carried him from Michigan career offices to university networks and AI laboratories. Through those changes, one practical question has remained useful: where are capable people being missed? He first answered it by sending emails. Then by visiting campuses. Now he is asking what their expertise can do when the employers, tools and definition of work are changing together.