handshake-ai
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Josh Weyburne Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Systems Legible
From a community-built visualization cookbook to enterprise AI deployments, the Cincinnati engineer has followed one durable idea: technology matters when people can actually use it.
Igor Arkhipov and the Code Before the Curtain Rose
Before Handshake AI had a public name, Igor Arkhipov was helping write its first lines of code. His route there began with a student experiment in teaching software to read the mood of a sentence.
Frederick Kim Put the Dream Machine in a Spreadsheet
Before helping build Handshake AI, Frederick Kim turned the humble spreadsheet into a studio for exploring generative images. His quiet through-line is simple: powerful systems become useful when people can see what they are doing.
Handshake
Handshake is a San Francisco company that began as the career network for Gen Z, connecting tens of millions of students and recent grads with employers and university career centers. Built by three Michigan Tech computer science students to give kids from non-elite schools a fair shot at good jobs, it grew into the dominant early-career recruiting platform. In January 2025 it launched Handshake AI, turning its network of students, PhDs and domain experts into a human data-labeling marketplace that supplies high-quality training data to frontier AI labs - a pivot that has grown into a roughly $1B annualized gross revenue business.
Yang Zhao
Yang Zhao is the Chief Business Officer of Handshake AI, where he runs business and operations for a fast-scaling human-data business serving frontier AI labs. He spent four years at Scale AI as Head of Product Deployment and Operations before joining Handshake, and earlier led growth and strategy at the consumer-rentals company Zumper. He pitches Handshake's edge not as tooling but as raw access to the largest expert network in the US.