Seizing Once-in-Lifetime AI Opportunity

Garrett Lord's leadership approach centers on recognizing and seizing transformative market opportunities with intense focus and execution. When he spotted the chance to leverage Handshake's network of academic talent for AI data labeling, he moved decisively to build a business that reached $50M in revenue within just four months.

Lord believes in creating separate, dedicated teams when pursuing new opportunities within an existing company. When launching Handshake AI, he established completely independent engineering, design, operations, and finance teams with no responsibilities to the core business. This separation extended to physical space (different part of the office), meeting cadences, and even compensation structures tied to the new venture's success.

His leadership philosophy emphasizes extreme ownership and urgency. The team adopted the mantra "leave nothing to chance," with Lord explaining: "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 mindset translated into concrete actions: "How do you make sure that three months from now, six months from now, you have no regrets? Get on a plane to go talk to a customer, make the late night push, check the data six times over again."

Lord creates a culture of high expectations matched with high recognition. He's transparent about the demands—working weekends, 2AM calls, and intense pace—but balances this with "a huge celebratory culture" that acknowledges impact. The organization is deliberately flat, focusing on capability rather than hierarchy: "Just because you run one function doesn't mean you're the directly responsible individual on a project. We pick the best person who's most capable of driving an initiative forward."

For teams navigating disruptive opportunities, Lord's approach suggests several practical implications:

1. When pursuing a transformative opportunity, dedicate your best people to it fully rather than splitting their attention.
2. Be explicit about the heightened expectations and workload, allowing people to opt in or out.
3. Establish separate operating rhythms and metrics that match the new venture's needs rather than forcing it into existing processes.
4. Hire entrepreneurial talent comfortable with ambiguity, particularly those who have worked at early-stage companies.
5. Create urgency by emphasizing the unique, time-limited nature of the opportunity.

Lord's experience demonstrates that when a company has a structural advantage in a rapidly growing market, the primary constraint becomes execution speed. In such moments, conventional management approaches may need to be replaced with a more founder-like mentality that prioritizes speed and ownership over process.