Zero to $50M in 4 months. $100M+ in 12 months. That's the story of how @JoinHandshake discovered they were sitting on AI's most valuable resource: 20 million students and experts. For a decade, @GarrettLord built a career network for students and PhDs. A great business, growing well. Then AI happened. Last Christmas, Garrett realized his network of 500,000 PhDs and 3 million master's is exactly what frontier AI labs desperately needed to train their models. He flew around the country during the holidays, talked to lab leaders, and launched a new business inside his existing company. Eight months in, they now work with all 7 major frontier AI labs and have become one of the fastest-growing businesses in Silicon Valley history. In our conversation, Garrett shares: 🔸 How Handshake found this opportunity 🔸 Why AI models need human experts (e.g. physics PhDs) to improve 🔸 What this “data labeling” actually involves 🔸 Inside the actual work: what a biology PhD does for 8 hours that makes GPT-5 smarter 🔸 The playbook for building a startup inside a startup: separate teams, separate offices, separate everything 🔸 Why the shift from “generalist” to “expert” data labeling created a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity 🔸 Why AI won’t eliminate entry-level jobs—it’s creating “Iron Man suits” that make junior employees 10x more productive Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @coderabbitai — Cut code review time and bugs in half. Instantly: 🏆 @orkesio — The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows: 🏆 @AnthropicAI — The AI for problem solvers and enterprise:

Zero to $50M in 4 months. $100M+ in 12 months. That's the story of how @JoinHandshake discovered they were sitting on AI's most valuable resource: 20 million students and experts. For a decade, @GarrettLord built a career network for students and PhDs. A great business, growing well. Then AI happened. Last Christmas, Garrett realized his network of 500,000 PhDs and 3 million master's is exactly what frontier AI labs desperately needed to train their models. He flew around the country during the holidays, talked to lab leaders, and launched a new business inside his existing company. Eight months in, they now work with all 7 major frontier AI labs and have become one of the fastest-growing businesses in Silicon Valley history. In our conversation, Garrett shares: 🔸 How Handshake found this opportunity 🔸 Why AI models need human experts (e.g. physics PhDs) to improve 🔸 What this “data labeling” actually involves 🔸 Inside the actual work: what a biology PhD does for 8 hours that makes GPT-5 smarter 🔸 The playbook for building a startup inside a startup: separate teams, separate offices, separate everything 🔸 Why the shift from “generalist” to “expert” data labeling created a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity 🔸 Why AI won’t eliminate entry-level jobs—it’s creating “Iron Man suits” that make junior employees 10x more productive Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @coderabbitai — Cut code review time and bugs in half. Instantly: 🏆 @orkesio — The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows: 🏆 @AnthropicAI — The AI for problem solvers and enterprise:

If you think everyone has a podcast, don’t even look at Substack. Newsletters are quietly taking over inboxes, with nearly 1 in 4 startup buyers subscribing. The Brex Benchmark has the receipts: from the must-reads builders swear by, to the insights shaping what’s next. Take a look 👇

.@Intercom was on the brink of death—five straight quarters of $0 net new ARR, approaching negative growth. Then they went all‑in on AI. 6 weeks after GPT‑3.5 launched, they shipped a working prototype of @Fin_ai (Intercom’s AI agent). Fin grew from $1M → $12M ARR in 12 months. Now at mid–8 figures and >300% growth, it's on track to cross $100M ARR in less than 3 quarters, and will be growing faster than every public software company by year-end. In our real-talk conversation, @eoghan shares the brutal reality of transforming a late-stage, plateauing SaaS business into an AI-first company. What you'll learn: 🔸 Why Eoghan believes most late-stage companies won’t survive the AI transition 🔸 The “founder mode” transformation that required firing 40% of staff and resulted in 98% employee satisfaction 🔸 Why having “nothing to lose” is the ultimate advantage in AI transformation 🔸 How they transformed from a plateauing SaaS business to an AI-first company growing at 300%+ 🔸 How Intercom’s pricing evolved from “the most hated in SaaS” to a model for every AI company 🔸 How 12 years of therapy and a period of “ego death” shaped Eoghan’s leadership approach Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @greatquestionco — Empower everyone to run great research: 🏆 @WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: 🏆 @DeveloperXM — The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers:

.@Intercom was on the brink of death—five straight quarters of $0 net new ARR, approaching negative growth. Then they went all‑in on AI. 6 weeks after GPT‑3.5 launched, they shipped a working prototype of @Fin_ai (Intercom’s AI agent). Fin grew from $1M → $12M ARR in 12 months. Now at mid–8 figures and >300% growth, it's on track to cross $100M ARR in less than 3 quarters, and will be growing faster than every public software company by year-end. In our real-talk conversation, @eoghan shares the brutal reality of transforming a late-stage, plateauing SaaS business into an AI-first company. What you'll learn: 🔸 Why Eoghan believes most late-stage companies won’t survive the AI transition 🔸 The “founder mode” transformation that required firing 40% of staff and resulted in 98% employee satisfaction 🔸 Why having “nothing to lose” is the ultimate advantage in AI transformation 🔸 How they transformed from a plateauing SaaS business to an AI-first company growing at 300%+ 🔸 How Intercom’s pricing evolved from “the most hated in SaaS” to a model for every AI company 🔸 How 12 years of therapy and a period of “ego death” shaped Eoghan’s leadership approach Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @greatquestionco — Empower everyone to run great research: 🏆 @WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: 🏆 @DeveloperXM — The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers:

.@Intercom was on the brink of death—five straight quarters of $0 net new ARR, approaching negative growth. Then they went all‑in on AI. 6 weeks after GPT‑3.5 launched, they shipped a working prototype of @Fin_ai (Intercom’s AI agent). Fin grew from $1M → $12M ARR in 12 months. Now at mid–8 figures and >300% growth, it's on track to cross $100M ARR in less than 3 quarters, and will be growing faster than every public software company by year-end. In our real-talk conversation, @eoghan shares the brutal reality of transforming a late-stage, plateauing SaaS business into an AI-first company. What you'll learn: 🔸 Why Eoghan believes most late-stage companies won’t survive the AI transition 🔸 The “founder mode” transformation that required firing 40% of staff and resulted in 98% employee satisfaction 🔸 Why having “nothing to lose” is the ultimate advantage in AI transformation 🔸 How they transformed from a plateauing SaaS business to an AI-first company growing at 300%+ 🔸 How Intercom’s pricing evolved from “the most hated in SaaS” to a model for every AI company 🔸 How 12 years of therapy and a period of “ego death” shaped Eoghan’s leadership approach Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @greatquestionco — Empower everyone to run great research: 🏆 @WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: 🏆 @DeveloperXM — The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers: