Garrett Lord on Building Handshake and Shaping the Future of Careers with AI

At the 2025 Kleiner Perkins Fellows Founders Summit, Handshake co-founder and CEO Garrett Lord joined KP partner Josh Coyne for a conversation about building, scaling, and reinventing one of the most important career platforms of this generation.

Garrett reflects on Handshake’s early days—convincing universities and employers to change entrenched systems—and shares why the company is now betting big on Handshake AI. He opens up about the challenges of scaling a marketplace and an AI business in parallel, how he thinks about leadership and ambition, and what advice he’d give his younger self.