Garrett Lord is the Co-Founder and CEO of Handshake, the career network for the AI economy. Since founding the company in 2014, Garrett has grown Handshake into the platform of choice for over 20 million job seekers, 1,600 US universities, and 1 million employers—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses. In 2025, Garrett launched Handshake AI, which connects domain experts on the Handshake network with leading AI labs to provide the human judgment necessary for developing and evaluating frontier AI models.

Nick is a general partner at Upfront Ventures. He focuses on early-stage investments in hard tech and national infrastructure sectors like advanced manufacturing and robotics, industrial automation, energy and utilities, aerospace and defense, and more. Prior to joining Upfront, Nick was at Crosscut Ventures leading seed investments. Before Crosscut, Nick was an early employee at Warby Parker, where he was the general manager of the Home Try-On business. Nick also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Human Ventures and as an investor with the Dorm Room Fund, First Round Capital’s student-run investment fund.

Nick graduated with a degree in economics from UC Berkeley and earned his MBA from The Wharton School.