Separate Teams for New Business Success

Garrett Lord's approach to building a new business within an established company centers on creating clear separation and maintaining founder-level intensity, even after a decade of success.

When Garrett spotted the opportunity to leverage Handshake's network of 18 million professionals (including 500,000 PhDs) for AI data labeling, he didn't delegate the initiative or try to integrate it into existing operations. Instead, he created a completely separate entity within the company with its own distinct identity, pace, and culture.

"I just really believe it's separate everything—separate engineering team, separate design team, separate accounts and operations team, separate finance team," he explains. This separation extended to physical space (working in a different part of the office), communication channels (separate all-hands meetings), and even recruiting and onboarding processes. This prevented the established business's processes and expectations from slowing down the new venture.

The new business operated with founder-level intensity. Garrett set clear expectations about the demanding pace: "This is a 24/7 job... this is an early stage company." The team embraced a "leave nothing to chance" mentality, drawing the number of days in the year on a whiteboard to emphasize the fleeting nature of their opportunity. As Garrett puts it, "There will never be a time like this. I've never seen anything like it. I doubt I'll ever feel anything like this in business again where there's unlimited demand."

This intensity extended to compensation structures, with different incentives tied to the new business's hurdles so "people felt like owners." The team adopted a more metrics-driven approach from the beginning, implementing weekly, monthly, and quarterly operating cadences that the original Handshake had initially resisted.

For leaders considering similar initiatives, Garrett's experience suggests that half-measures don't work when pursuing transformative opportunities. The new venture needs complete focus, different expectations, and the freedom to operate like a startup. For ICs, this means understanding that joining such an initiative requires accepting startup-level commitment, but also offers startup-level impact and ownership within the safety of an established company.

The results speak for themselves: in just four months, Handshake AI reached $50 million in revenue and is on track to exceed $100 million in its first year—potentially surpassing the decade-old core business's revenue in under two years.