Garrett Lord

Garrett Lord is the co-founder and CEO of Handshake, a career network launched with Ben Christensen and Scott Ringwelski while studying computer science at Michigan Technological University. Handshake aims to expand access to career opportunities by enabling students and alumni to build professional relationships regardless of prior connections, experience, or educational background. Before founding Handshake, Lord interned at Palantir Technologies, working on forward-deployed engineering projects, and served as a high performance computing fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. These early experiences, along with the disparities observed in campus recruiting, influenced the direction of his career in technology and workforce development.

During the initial phase of building Handshake, Lord and Christensen traveled to universities across the country, pitching the platform to career centers and engaging directly with higher education institutions. Handshake has secured multiple rounds of venture funding and has been recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30 in the Consumer Technology category, specifically in the Dorm Room Founders subcategory for entrepreneurship.

Handshake has become a significant platform in early-career hiring, serving as the career app of choice for Fortune 500 companies, Ivy League schools, and a majority of the nation’s top-ranked colleges and universities. The platform connects 20 million students and professionals from more than 1,600 schools and collaborates with all Fortune 100 companies. Lord has emphasized the platform’s role in providing equitable access to job opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds.

Lord also launched Handshake AI, a business that recruits students, alumni, and professionals from the network to contribute to post-training data, evaluations, and reinforcement learning environments for AI labs. Handshake AI has achieved significant growth and expanded through multiple acquisitions. Lord is recognized as a thought leader on the future of work, entrepreneurship, and artificial intelligence, and has spoken at events such as the ASU GSV Summit and Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Speaker Series.