Garrett Lord: commitment

Transcript context

…Will only get better, just boggles the mind, and now we know why things are getting better because all the work you guys are doing. Just one quick question on this whole scale thing, I guess they were, I don't know, the main company doing this, now they're swallowed up and Alex is running superintelligence in Meta. Are they still a big player in this labeling space or are they out of it and that's a big opportunity? Yeah. I mean, kudos to the whole Scale team, a lot of respect for what they built, just many great companies operating the space. I think to the core of your question, I think if you viewed your research team and your model building team, and the experiments they're running to be really the cornerstone of how you're improving, you probably wouldn't want the latest research of what you're trying to work on being invested in by a peer. I mean, that's just generally what we hear in this space. And so, we have seen an incredible search and demand, and are I think extraordinarily well positioned. We like to say the only moat in human data is access to an audience. Basically, there are many, many small players in this space, some midsize players in the space, and they're basically running TikTok ads, running Instagram ads, paying money for Google Search display ads, YouTube ads, and they will be like, "Can you get me 200 physics PhDs?" What do they do? They only can do one thing. They have 100 recruiters on staff, they all get on LinkedIn, they all send messages, they spend a couple million bucks on performance advertising campaigns. Somebody's scrolling their Instagram feed that's a physics PhD of which you can't target them that well and they like see, "Come train a model." It's like, "I've never heard of this brand before. " The huge advantage that we've had and why we've resonated so fast in the marketplace is we built a decade of trust with 18 million people, and they trust us, and we built a ton of brand affinity, and they use Handshake, and they have an active profile, and we have a ton of information around their academic performance and what they've done in school. And so, we're able to really target people really effectively, and get to scale and volume of high quality data faster than anyone else. And I think that competitive advantage of access to an audience is really resonating in the marketplace. Today's episode is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. I use Claude at least 10 times a day. I use it for researching my podcast guests, for brainstorming title ideas for both my podcast and my newsletter, for getting feedback on my writing and all kinds of stuff. Just last week I was preparing for an interview with a very fancy guest, and I had Claude tell me what are all the questions that other podcast hosts have asked this guest so that I don't ask them these questions? How much time do you spend every week trying to synthesize all of your user research insights, support tickets, sales calls, experiment results and competitive intel? Claude can handle incredibly complex multistep work. You can throw a 100-page strategy document at it and ask it for insights, or you can dump all your user research and ask it to find patterns. With Claude 4 and the new integrations including Claude 4 Opus, the world's best coding model, you get voice conversations, advanced research capabilities, direct Google Workspace integration, and now MCP connections to your custom tools and data sources. Claude just becomes part of your workflow. If you want to try it out, get started at Claude.ai/Lenny, and using this link you get an incredible 50% off your first three months of the pro plan. That's Claude.ai/Lenny. Okay, this is an awesome segue to where I wanted to go, which is just how this business emerged. This is a business that you built on top of a business you've already had. From what I understand, you were at like $150 million in revenue, you've been at this for a long time. You found this opportunity, and now that looking back it's like obviously this is an amazing idea, labs need data, you guys have the supply of incredible experts. What an opportunity. Talk about just how you first realized this was something that you could be doing, and should be doing, and then how you started to execute down this path.…

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