500,000 companies and 17 million students: learnings from Garrett Lord, CEO and founder of Handshake

Emerge’s tier 1 network gives me the opportunity to share learnings from some of the most successful edtech entrepreneurs around the world. This month in my ongoing series of inspiring founder interviews, Garrett Lord, CEO and founder of Handshake, shares his journey to creating a community of 17 million students and 500,000 companies, as well as insights on making an impact, honing your sales skills and focusing on customer pains.

Take time to reflect as you read — these are purposeful long-form interviews. Why? Because we believe “there are no shortcuts to knowledge” (Ben Horowitz) and that “sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut” (Haruki Murakami). So go on — make a coffee, sit back, indulge yourself.

Here are some highlights from the interview:

⭐ You have to really believe in what you do — Starting a company is something a lot of people aspire to do, but I think it’s important to not just start a company for the sake of starting a company.

🎓 You have to invest in your sales skills — You’re selling to prospective employees, you’re selling to customers, you’re selling to investors, and it’s really important that you understand how to communicate and inspire all these different audiences.

🤝 Know that big things can rarely be accomplished solo — The size of your network can be a limiter for what you can achieve. I’m constantly looking for people who are 10 times better than me and a little bit further along in their journey to get advice and learn from them.

It has gone pretty well for you Garrett. How well?

• Today we are the market leader and the number one place where students find internships and jobs in the United States.
• We’re the biggest network of early career talent trying to find their first internship or job. There are 420,000 companies. Every single Fortune 500 company around the world uses Handshake. We have 80% of the top 500 universities in the United States using Handshake as the primary place they point their students and employers. Not only that, there are 14 million students and young alumni that use Handshake.

What is your one line elevator pitch for Handshake?

• Handshake is the leading career community for students trying to find internships and jobs. We wake up every day trying to make an impact on a problem that is very personal for us. We help students find their way into meaningful careers via their first internship, or their first job, and ultimately figure out where they fit into the world of work.

It must have been exciting. What has been the best thing about running your own company?

• Believing so deeply in what I do. Being a founder is really tough, even though it is often romanticized. When times get really challenging, which they inevitably will, it’s important that you’re doing something you believe in so much that you can’t imagine doing anything else.
• You also want to be working with a team that you’re excited to be working with side by side trying to solve the problem. The passion for your work and belief in this product’s purpose are really critical to pulling you through this roller-coaster.
• I’ve been really fortunate to have been working with some great people and great customers, we have not experienced periods of instability that a lot of companies face.

There are always challenges to overcome for a growing business. What has been the most difficult aspect of the entrepreneurial journey for you?

• Riding the highs and lows. The lows are low, and the highs are high. You bear a lot of that weight on your shoulders, because so many people are counting on you; customers, employees, investors. You can get really lonely at times. The hardest parts of the job is keeping up with growth. We added more people to Handshake this year than we had working for us for the first two or three years. We added 60 people in one quarter this year, and I don’t think we had 60 people working at Handshake for the first three or four years.
• Adding so many people has been particularly challenging, because it’s hard to get all those new employees onboarded and get them driving towards the same goals.
• Ultimately, if you hire great people and they understand how their role helps towards the company goals and the overall outcome, they will move mountains, as long as they feel comfortable in the company culture and feel like they can bring their whole self into work.
• It’s important that they have clear goals, that they communicate with their teams effectively and understand that the impact matters. Getting so many new people to align with that is challenging.

Can you remember back to where the idea for the company came from?

• We started Handshake to democratize access to career opportunity. A lot of our friends were struggling to figure out how they fit into this world of work. We went to a school called Michigan Tech, where we did not have the same opportunities that our peers had at other institutions did. We had non-traditional career interests for Michigan Tech and didn’t really understand how to get jobs at those companies, because the same set of companies were recruiting on campus every year.
• I got an internship at a pretty well known tech company called Palantir, but first at Los Alamos, where I really learned about the types of opportunities that other students had across the country and how they thought about different roles, like being a product manager, or choosing a startup versus a big company, how to get your name in front of those companies, etc.
• I interviewed several friends to work out how to break into Silicon Valley, and it was pretty amazing, because they had no idea that they could reach that high, or that they could work at companies like Palantir, like Facebook, like Google. It was pretty inspiring, because they started getting jobs at those companies. I thought about “what if we could make a software platform, or marketplace that helps students make better career decisions and really reach their full potential?”

• So that was the first idea — How can we help democratise the access to opportunity? Access is historically gated by the school that you went to. The second thing we focused on was how we can help students with information. Once you have access to the job, it still doesn’t mean you have the right information to be able to understand how to get that role, and what that role means.
• So many students think that their area of study defines their career path and the reality is that it really doesn’t. Depending on your region, you don’t have the same opportunities as someone that lives near major cities, you’re far away from them, and you go to a smaller university. It’s very challenging for employers to connect with the 150+ universities in the UK, for example.
• A funny way to illustrate this is to say that someone who went to a high profile school would understand what “i-banking” is, but when I went to school, I thought “ibanking” was internet banking. I had no idea what investment banking was, or how to work in consulting or the pros and cons of working at a startup versus a big corporate.

Handshake

Thinking over the last few years, what would you pick out as the key milestones you think happened to get to where you are today?

• When we signed up our first five universities — Those were our first university partners, and with that came 40,000+ employers and a few hundred thousand students. That was really the beginning of a true marketplace, where employers were connecting the students and universities through one platform. So the first milestone was the initiation of the network.
• Raising growth capital funding — Today, Handshake has raised about $74 million of funding. I think that funding has really let us build a wonderful team, serve the needs of our customers, and build a great product. So the second milestone was becoming well capitalised as a business.
• When we became the number one community for students in the US — Today, we’re at over 1000 universities, 14 million students, 420K+ companies. When we became the market leader, companies really began to embrace us as the primary source they’re recruiting talent from. Students began to think of Handshake as a brand they could trust and that had access to most of the opportunities out there, so I’d say market leadership has also been a really interesting tipping point for us.

Getting to “market-product fit” is essential for the success of any business. How do you think you knew you had achieved this? What were you measuring to know you had ‘got there’?

• We have three products for each of our stakeholders: students, universities and employers.
• It really started with universities. In the early days, we spoke to many universities trying to understand their pain points, which allowed us to build a better product. Scaling from 5 schools to 60 schools in our second year, and then to 160 schools in our third year, made it pretty clear that we had struck a chord and a genuine pain point in the university market.
• With the employer product, we made an intentional decision to wait prior to building our premium tools. We really understood that to be valuable, we need to achieve scale across a critical mass of schools. And now, that waiting has very much paid off. We’ve been able to leverage our scale to build a unique talent engagement suite, to help employers recruit better qualified, more diverse talent. Our product has really resonated with our audience.
• And then with students, we’ve just been laser focused on providing the best experience, to help students get jobs. It’s kind of a continuous journey, to achieve our mission of helping all early talent find meaningful careers.

Making an impact is really important in education. How do you measure yours?

• In an ideal world we’d be able to measure how well we’re helping students find meaningful jobs. Obviously, measuring this is easier said than done. We try to approximate how well we’re doing towards that mission. We’re really in the early days of learning how to measure that impact.
• Given our mission, it is important to understand that we’re making it about all students, especially underrepresented students, or groups of students who have historically had less access to opportunity. In the last funding round, we’ve had several investors, like The Chan Zuckerberg initiative, The Omidyar Foundation join, as well as many other social impact funds. We actually formed an impact advisory board, which I think is a really neat best practice. This helps us borrow their expertise in scaled impact to help us answer these questions of how to measure impact and whether that impact is equitable.
• Other than that, I think there are a couple interesting metrics we follow. For example, the average schools sees a 2–3x increase in employer-related opportunities, and a 60% increase in student engagement.

You have done well against a background where everyone says that selling in the edtech market is really hard — how did you do it?

• I think we really focused on a real customer pain. A pain that is so important to them, that they’re willing to evaluate any solution and change behavior and integrate and adopt a product. What we focused early on was “how to build a product that truly solves a pain for universities”. They are really resource-constrained with a lot of competing priorities, so it’s hard to build consensus and make decisions.
• But if your platform can genuinely make an impact on the pain points that the users are struggling with and have great user empathy, then that’s really the beginning of product-market fit and how you can scale into higher education.
• Too often, entrepreneurs believe something or want to see the world change in a different way, but they’re not focused on customer empathy and generally building a tool that customers feel like solves their problem.

Part of your journey involved raising investment — what did you learn from that?

• Market, Moat, Team and Traction. Investors care about a few things. They care about the market that you’re working in. They care about how you can build a moat around your business that is differentiated and durable in the long term. They care a lot about the team and the speed of your execution. They also care about the overall traction that you built up as a business.
• So if you have a great product, and it’s solving a real problem for customers in a good market, if you’re growing quickly, and you’ve got a great team tackling a problem, then you have a lot of ingredients that investors want to see from entrepreneurs.
• In education, the mission is also really important. A lot of people believe that there could be more equity in this process, that it can be more fair and that there are better solutions for problems in education. It really takes working with all different sides to build a solution that makes a difference in people’s lives and helps a mission that’s important.

If you had to pass on 3 golden rules for aspiring or current entrepreneurs, what would they be?

• You have to really believe in what you do — Starting a company is something a lot of people aspire to do, but I think it’s important to not just start a company for the sake of starting a company.
• You have to invest in your sales skills — A lot of people shy away from sales. There’s a stereotype that people try to stay away from, but so much of starting up your business is rolling up your sleeves and practicing and learning great sales. You’re selling to prospective employees, you’re selling to customers, you’re selling to investors, and it’s really important that you understand how to communicate and inspire all these different audiences.
• Know that big things can rarely be accomplished solo — If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, you need to build a team. The size of your network can be a limiter for what you can achieve. Starting Handshake as a student in Michigan, this was something I really needed to work hard at and there was a lot of networking involved. But once you’re a bit further in your career, I’d really suggest giving back, and helping other people. I’m generous with my time and energy, and I’m constantly looking for people who are 10 times better than me and a little bit further along in their journey to get advice and learn from them.

As regards learning from others, is there one course or book you think everyone should take/do that has helped you?

• How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie: I think so much about building a business comes back to people. This book explains the core set of principles on communication and making people feel valued and respected, building relationships and making friends. I think so much of life comes back to being great with people, which is why I love that book.
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore is also really important as a component of building a business in higher education, because so much of the customers’ buying behaviour is driven by customer evangelism and customer advocacy. Where you spend your time selling is really important early on, because you can easily get overloaded with opportunities to speak to people and so much of business is getting the right input and thinking strategically about your first set of customers.

In terms of the key components that founders need to succeed, Emerge focus on advice from Tier 1 Operators and access to our high-value network. As a team we aim to be your sparring partners to help you think through your biggest challenges. Which parts were critical to you early on?

• I think I was really fortunate to be able to be in a position in life where I didn’t have a lot of expenses. I know that some aspiring entrepreneurs don’t have that fortune, so I think access to capital is important once you have product-market fit, but I don’t think it’s the most important.
• I think having the right network of customers, prospective employees and entrepreneurs that can help you through this journey and apply a little critical thinking is the most important.

So Garrett, what’s the next big goal for you?

• We’re really excited about our partnerships in the UK and how we’re scaling internationally. We’re also really excited about the student product where that’s headed, and how we’re levelling the playing field for millions of students across the country, and, hopefully soon, the world.
• A few years from now, our dream is to go public, to be an independent, publicly-traded company. I’d say that the big goal in my mind is scaling our impact so much so that we’re able to be a publicly-traded company.

This interview was kindly given by Garrett Lord, CEO and founder of Handshake to Nic Newman, Partner at Emerge Education.

Thank-you for reading… I would hugely appreciate some claps 👏 and shares 🙌 so that others can find it!

Nic

Nic Newman

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