Investor, builder, board director. On the road w/ @mgsiegler, trying to make @maisiesiegler & @maevesiegler proud.
London & San Francisco
Joined July 2008
- Tweets19.7K
- Following957
- Followers63.6K
- Likes85.3K
Megan Quinn retweeted
Every quarter at Sierra, we celebrate the end of the quarter with Double Denim Day (or, as some like to call it, Canadian Tuxedo Day) 👖. This Q3, we needed a lot of denim to celebrate the most remarkable quarter in Sierra's 2.5 year history.
We added over $150M ARR this quarter, bringing our total ARR beyond $400M. Remarkably, we added more ARR in one quarter than we had all of last year.
The most exciting thing to me is that our pace is accelerating. It took us six months to double from $100M to $200M ARR, and only five months to double from $200M to $400M ARR.
@claybavor and I are grateful to our customers and proud of the entire Sierra team.
Megan Quinn retweeted
300+ people at Sierra Summit in EMEA. We had wide-ranging conversations with Alan Stott, COO @ VM02, and Stuart Riley, Group CIO @ HSBC about the importance of bringing employees along on the AI journey.
Megan Quinn retweeted
Exclusive: new startup Scuba launches today with $34M in funding and a mission to build the "context engine" for more effective teamwork using AI tools.
I spoke to its ex-Slack founders, Noah Desai Weiss (@noah_weiss) and Dolapo Falola (@dolapo), about their product and work 👀
Megan Quinn retweeted
Today we’re announcing Personal Agent Protocol — an open standard @Meta and @SierraPlatform are developing along with industry partners at @Genesys, @instinct, @RocketOTD, @Shopify, @stripe, and @Walmart. It will help define how personal agents interact with businesses and is open for anyone to implement. You can read more here - and if anyone is interested in joining let me know! sierra.ai/blog/introducing-p…
Megan Quinn retweeted
🚨Launch alert🚨 Less p(doom) and more p(job)!
Today, we’re launching @joinHandshake 's AI Skills Studio with @OpenAI, @Google , @NotionHQ, @clay , @Lovable, @Replit , @vercel, @salesforce, @SlackHQ , thousands of universities and millions of employers.
Start building here: joinhandshake.com/learn/
Most people want to learn AI to get better at their job and move their career forward. But all the noise about AI utopia vs apocalypse can be paralyzing. That's where AI Skills Studio comes in: you learn AI by building.
Pick a 10–45 minute project. Build something using the best tools around, tied to career tracks and skills. Get feedback along the way. Walk away with something that works, and something you can show off to anyone, including the 1 million employers on Handshake.
And it’s free to get started.
People are already building some fun and useful stuff: a medical-device sales CRM in Clay, a benefits navigator that uncovered a gym discount its creator didn’t know they had, and a multiplayer AI whodunit.
That’s what AI learning should look like. Less watching videos and taking quizzes. More getting your hands dirty, trying things, and putting it into practice for actual jobs and career paths.
Read more about why we built it: joinhandshake.com/blog/our-t…
Megan Quinn retweeted
SEPT ’26: HUMANS STILL VERY MUCH HAVE JOBS.
AI isn't even close to meeting the standard required of the most junior professionals in banking, advisory, and private equity today.
ATLAS Finance agents must navigate complexity like a human does: "Johnny you just got staffed - check your email."
Human: 100%.
Best AI: 12%.
Agents have access to data rooms, email, chat, calendars, docs, notes, Excel, etc. Our real finance professionals pushed the realism frontier further by building dozens of coworker and client personas that introduce ambiguity, (controlled) contradictions, and real-time updates that must be adjudicated to successfully complete the client-ready deliverable.
We gave 11 frontier models 100 expert-level tasks that each take humans 15–30 hours.
On Wall Street there's a saying, "If it's 95% right, it's 100% wrong." Autonomous knowledge work outside software still has a very long way to go.
Megan Quinn retweeted
AI is bringing massive change, and with that comes uncertainty, particularly about jobs. Our work at Handshake is to help more people take part in this new economy, to use AI to help push forward human knowledge, productivity and creativity.
We’re already seeing people use AI to change the trajectories of their careers and lives in dramatically new ways: to earn real $$ from what they know, more easily learn skills that open new doors and spend more time doing work they care about, whether as an employee or entrepreneur.
We have lots to do to make that work for billions of people, but I’m optimistic. And I’m incredibly grateful to everyone on the Handshake team who comes to work every day believing we can do that.
Thank you to @TIME for the recognition.
#TIME100AI
Megan Quinn retweeted
AI promises to cure disease, but can frontier models interpret the images pharma scientists handle every day?
Best score so far: 26.5% - excited to see this gap to close!
ATLAS Visual Life Sciences (VIALS), a benchmark testing whether AI can interpret the images life scientists make decisions from.
Megan Quinn retweeted
about to pass linkedin on ios downloads
handshake is becoming THE ai job network
will revert.
Megan Quinn retweeted
Rent the intelligence, own the relationship - how Sierra's Context Engine helps you build a competitive advantage in AI sierra.ai/blog/context-engin…
Megan Quinn retweeted
The Handshake story is one for the ages
Most epic pivot to massive PMF
@GarrettLord
"If you just compound and stack day after day after day and give it your best, great things will happen. That's been the story of my life and the story of this business."
@GarrettLord. Founder & CEO of @joinHandshake.
At a Christmas party in December 2024, Garrett met a researcher from a frontier AI lab who told him about the challenges of model training. Two weeks later, Garrett's company Handshake was recruiting STEM PhDs for that same lab. Fifteen months after that, Handshake AI had gone from zero to a billion dollars in gross annualized revenue, and now is the human data engine behind the frontier labs.
This conversation is a dissection of the most audacious reinvention in tech. Knuckle Up ↓
--
00:00 Who is Garrett Lord?
01:36 How did a Christmas party conversation spark Handshake AI?
11:59 How do you tell your execs and board you're refounding the company?
18:18 What keeps A players motivated in the core business?
22:22 Olympic Pace: why did around 100 team members leave Handshake?
27:02 What broke first going zero to a billion in a year?
31:45 How do you protect quality when 85% of the company is new?
39:36 Why hasn't Garrett upgraded a single exec?
49:00 What does the bear case on human data get wrong?
53:30 How do you make accounting verifiable enough for reinforcement learning?
1:00:08 Will enterprises leave the labs for open source?
1:07:13 What does all this mean for knowledge workers?
1:08:51 The inner game: how is Garrett holding it all together?
1:14:22 What's the mission in this new chapter?
1:18:27 Will vertical AI apps survive the frontier labs?
1:21:23 Quickfire: red flags, overrated advice, jobs of the future
Megan Quinn retweeted
The shift from one and done agents having a conversation to contain cost to long horizon ones doing tasks for months to drive revenue growth for businesses is underway - so happy the TakeOff team is joining @SierraPlatform to make it happen even faster
I’m incredibly excited to share that Sierra is acquiring TakeOff, the leader in long-horizon AI agents. @claybavor and I couldn't be more excited to welcome @letsleverup and the entire TakeOff team.
In less than a year, they've built something truly special: an agent platform that delivers real business outcomes, is beloved by customers, and is growing incredibly quickly. Their maniacal focus on revenue driving, long-horizon agents has taken them from 0 to near 8 figures in revenue across several 7 figure contracts since the start of this year.
As we got to know the team, it became clear we were making the same bet: that fully autonomous agents would perform human-level work at software scale and that the largest businesses in AI would be built around outcomes, not inference. Takeoff has built an exceptional platform and team to make that real, and together we’re excited to build the leading company in long-horizon AI agents.
Welcome, Aakash and the Takeoff team. nitter.cf/letsleverup/status/208…
Megan Quinn retweeted
Rest now, in peace, Om. spyglass.org/om/
Megan Quinn retweeted
Om Malik, 1966-2026
om.co/2026/06/24/1966-2026/
Megan Quinn retweeted
SpaceX just agreed to buy Cursor for $60 billion. Everyone is talking about the product, the models, the valuation. I’m interested in the human side of this AI story.
Who built the team behind one of the fastest-growing software companies in history, and how do they think about talent at the frontier of AI?
For the first episode of my new podcast, Below the Surface, I sat down with @wardadamp, @Cursor 's Head of Talent, to find out.
Before Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, ran global recruiting at Pinterest from 200 to 2000+ people, and built Growth by Design Talent, the advisory firm behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma … until Cursor acquired it last year.
We talked about what hiring looks like when the market is moving this fast, how Cursor does it differently, and what it actually takes to build a high-performance team right now.
One of my biggest takeaways: the companies that win in AI won’t just have better models. They’ll have better systems for finding, assessing, and enabling exceptional people.
Watch the full episode here: youtube.com/watch?v=-2sbeYHG…
Or subscribe wherever you get podcasts:
🎧open.spotify.com/show/033AK9…
🎤 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Megan Quinn retweeted
The future.
"Companies need to turn their workflows, domain knowledge, and accumulated judgment into AI systems that improve with each use. Private evals should capture whether a model is actually improving against outcomes that matter to the business (not just external benchmarks!). Private reinforcement learning environments should let models grow stronger on real traces from inside the organization. Its knowledge base makes institutional memory queryable and use of tokens more efficient.
This loop becomes the new IP of the firm. I think of it as a hill climbing machine. And unlike most assets, it compounds. Every improved workflow generates better training signal, which accelerates the accumulation of tacit knowledge unique to the firm. The companies that build this early will have an advantage that is hard to replicate, regardless of any new individual model capability."
Megan Quinn retweeted
Sierra just hit $200M in ARR. It took seven quarters to get to $100M, and only two more quarters to add our next $100M. Proud of the team and very grateful to our customers and partners.
Sierra just hit $100M in ARR, just seven quarters since we launched in February 2024. @claybavor and I are very grateful to our customers and proud of the Sierra team, who has redefined the meaning of intensity and craftsmanship. I have never had this much fun in my career. (Photo is Clay signing the contract that crossed the $100M mark) sierra.ai/blog/100m-arr
