Garrett Lord, CEO Handshake
"Gunners are gonna gun!"
Every now and then you meet someone who is just a sheer force of nature – Garrett Lord is one of those people. We recently had the absolute delight of hosting the unicorn founder and CEO of Handshake. Having Garrett join us was a little personal for me because of what Handshake did for me. I did my undergrad at the University of Tennessee, a non-target school (ranked #105) that has some of the best technical talent in the country. All the fancy tech companies never came to recruit at our school, and still don’t, but I got my first internship at Microsoft through hustling and Handshake. That was my ticket, and it opened my eyes to a whole new world. I haven’t looked back since. This is what Garrett and his team have done for people like me – democratizing access to opportunity for every single student who is smart, ambitious, and has a dream.
Handshake is now the premier job platform for college students used across 90% of universities in the U.S. and by over 900K Employers including all Fortune 500 companies. Garrett built this company from the ground up and has gone on to raise $434M from Kleiner Perkins (John Doerr), Coatue, Lightspeed, Chan Zuckerberg, and many more investors.
Storytime
Garrett’s one of the best founders of our time, but he is an unlikely entrepreneur. He grew up far from Silicon Valley and attended a local community college before transferring to Michigan Tech–a small school located in Michigan. Garrett didn’t have the family connections or the benefit of an Ivy League education, but he was ambitious. By his junior year, he had secured internships at Los Alamos National Lab and Palantir, but it had been a grind to get there. However, at each of those opportunities, he absolutely crushed it, out-working and out-shining his peers from Stanford, MIT, etc. Here he was, a kid from small-town Michigan who had had to work 10 times as hard to get opportunities he was more than qualified for. It was at this moment when Garrett thought, oh there are these opportunities that my peers at Michigan Tech would crush it at but why can’t they get these opportunities? That’s how Handshake was born and here are some lessons from Garrett.
Hustle Hard
The early days of Handshake were an absolute grind. To get Handshake started the team needed to:
Build the product
Get Schools
Get Students
Get Employers
Raise money
Building the product was the easy part because the team was an all-star squad of 10x engineers. But how would they get the first school, students, and employers? They just started grinding. They put 36,000 miles on his Ford Focus driving from university to university. They slept in the back of McDonald’s parking lots and showered in college gyms. They walked into
many college career centers and heard plenty of “No’s” in response. But as Garrett puts it, all you need is one shot and you never look back. They had their first school sign-up, and two more quickly followed. Then Handshake signed five at once. Garrett then decided to raise money, another uphill battle for a 20-something-year-old from small-town Michigan. Again, Garrett got told no again and again. Finally, True Ventures bought in, and again, all you need is one. Since then the team never looked back. They went on top sign 60 schools. Then 160. And now 90% of U.S. colleges and universities partner with Handshakeuse and they’re rapidly growing across Europe. But again, years of hustling went into this – from overlooked to overnight success.
Passion and Perseverance
The story of Handshake is very much mission-oriented. Garrett and his co-founders wanted to democratize access to opportunity. Everyone talks about looking for missionary founders – Garrett is one of them. The root of the word passion is Latin for suffering. To be passionate about something there has to be a mission bigger than you, and in this case, it was clearly there. And it’s what kept Garrett and his team going, despite all the setbacks. Garrett urges all founders to make sure that what they’re going after has a mission bigger than themselves because when the going gets tough and everyone is telling you no, that is all you have.
Naivete is gift
We asked Garrett if he’d do it all again and he said no, knowing how hard it was. Even Jensen Huang said this. But what sets every great founder apart is the naivete and mindset of not dwelling on what might go wrong. Because everything will go wrong. All you need is one break. No risk no reward.
The founding team sets the seed for culture
Garrett attributes Handshake’s culture to the early team and honestly as he says it “Mid-westerners are known to be nice, humble and hardworking” – something that has carried these kids from small-town Michigan to now running a multi-billion-dollar company. Choose your co-founders wisely and your early team members even so. These are the people who will shape your culture.
We’re fortunate to have spent time with Garrett! He’s a special person, in every aspect of it. A role model of what it means to be a person, leader, and visionary.
Handshakeis hiring!