Garrett Lord: prediction

Transcript context

…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. Yeah, I think it's been a pretty natural extension from helping people jumpstart, restart or start their career. Monetizing your skills and this new employment ecosystem is going to look very different in the future, and to zoom into how we discovered it, it's like because we have such a large access to this audience, and as the world shifted from generalists to experts, we're the largest expert network in the world. We have more PhDs, 500,000 of them use Handshake than any other platform. We have three million master students who are in school or alumni. And so, we started to see all what I would call middleman companies reaching out to us saying, "Can we recruit your PhDs and master's students?" And like any great marketplace we started sending them to these different platforms, and started to really realize that from hearing from our users that the experience was really frustrating. Training was very transactional, it was very amorphous how you could get paid. There was immense amount of drop-off in the process to actual project like completion on these other platforms. So, we started to think the company was making tens of millions of dollars from helping these other platforms, and we started to realize what really kicked it off was hearing also from the Frontier Labs, they started to reach out to us and started to go direct and trying to almost cut out the middleman. And we started to realize, well, we could really serve our fellows, our PhDs, our experts, we could treat them. We just believe there will need to be a platform, an experts first platform in the pursuit of ASI and advancing AI, and there will need to be a place that everyone in the world could go to, to monetize their skills and their knowledge as these labs are focused on improving in all these multidisciplinary. And yeah, we entered the business in, really I started doing it over Christmas and New Year's. That's when I started flying around. My family thought it was a little wild that I was on planes trying to chase different leaders, but we built an incredible team of people that came from the human data world, and really started building out our platform in January, and then started really monetizing the relationships about five months ago. Fast-forward to today, we're working with seven of the Frontier Labs, basically every lab that's doing work and building the best large language models, and the team has exploded and revenue's exploded, and it's been really a incredible ride running back new company inside of a company for the second time over again. And just to share some numbers, tell me if this is correct or if you're sharing these, but I heard that you hit 50 million in revenue just four months into this? Today we're at eight months in and you're on track to hit $100 million in revenue in the first year.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.