President @joinhandshake! Helping everyone earn, learn and grow in the AI economy. Loving @emilychangtv and our four crazy kids.
East Bay, CA
Joined April 2009
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🚨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…
This is one of the main drivers of companies and schools reaching out to get AI Skills Studio for their employees or students. Easy ways for everyone (tinkerer or no) to see AI value and go 1 step beyond using AI for search or asking it to optimize their fantasy football lineup.
Jean-Denis Greze, founder of @TownAI, argues AI isn't diffusing because most people aren't tinkerers: a text box isn't enough, so the product must both identify the value prop and perform the work for them.
"There's this business that rents surfboards on an island to people and then uses Town to inspect surfboards and little beach buggies, whether they've been damaged, to decide whether afterwards the person should get their deposit back."
"What makes it work there is the tinkerer... The unlock is, is there someone over there that gets AI enough to wanna tinker a solution to their problem?"
"And the problem with that is that there aren't enough tinkerers in the world, or there aren't enough people that have the time to be tinkerers to help their business. And I think that's why AI is not diffusing."
"Instead what you're doing is you're using [AI tools] as a replacement, as like a better Google search."
"If you can make a non-tinkerer into getting the same value as a tinkerer... you could be a ginormous business today because AI can solve so many business problems. You don't need more intelligence. The intelligence is there."
@jgreze @arampell
This entertained my family for hours tonight exploring different crops and regions. Obvious to see why my dad, a Salinas native, was called lettucehead in his freshman dorm!
Beautiful work, @sabhyac267. My son wants to know when other states and countries are coming next…
I made an interactive map of every farm field in California! Inspired by the @Snapchat map!
All 384k of them: lettuce in Salinas 🥬, cherries in Brentwood 🍒, dates in Coachella 🌴, and 1.6 million acres of almonds 🌰 Zoom into any field and see exactly what's growing there.
I've been obsessed with maps from years of hiking and cycling. Models like Opus 5.5 / Astra making building with them so fun!
Built on public crop data from @CA_DWR.
Click to see growing near you? 👇
Jonathan Stull retweeted
Been a while since we had a sales episode! Thanks @HarryStebbings
Very proud to partner with @Cloudflare to help find and hire great AI talent @joinHandshake.
Incredible to see Cloudflare’s commitment and how they’ve built a program to drive so much business impact, so quickly.
A year ago, many companies were cutting intern and new-graduate hiring. @cloudflare went the other way.
And the results have been inspiring! 🎉
Read about the power of 1,111 interns:
blog.cloudflare.com/one-year…
People are saying…
A year ago, many companies were cutting intern and new-graduate hiring. @cloudflare went the other way.
And the results have been inspiring! 🎉
Read about the power of 1,111 interns:
blog.cloudflare.com/one-year…
"It's basically an inverse Biggie Smalls. More problems, more money..." the great @wesafield
Jonathan Stull retweeted
We have an incredible opportunity in front of us. AI can transform education.
But it is a small vision to use this technology to produce the same passive content that has proven to be ineffective pedagogically.
Explanations themselves are always insufficient.
Oh, you didn't understand the video? Have you tried watching it again? Watch it harder this time.
When children are stuck or confused, these kinds of experiences don't bridge the gap.
AI can handle a much more dynamic approach, stepping children through an experience where they are actively constructing knowledge.
A back and forth where they are participating, experimenting, and discovering, dynamically adjusting to their ability and providing the right content at the right time.
That kind of learning sticks.
Maybe the video is some kind of support in all this. But verbal explanations (especially with math) just wash over kids.
Don't get me wrong. It's nice that Claude can do this. It's nice to have this tool in your toolbelt when educating your own kids. It's also nice that it can whip up a little activity or quiz.
But there's plenty of videos and plenty of digital worksheets out there. We don't need more of them! The problems in education won't be solved by more videos explaining how to divide some cookies.
We have to confront the reality that these artifacts do not produce good educational outcomes. Ultimately, If this modality were effective, Khan would have solved education a decade ago. But Khan doesn't work for most kids because this isn't how they learn.
You learn by taking action! By doing!
Listening or watching some explanation doesn't click for a kid who needs help. And a lot of kids need help!
The opportunity with AI isn't to recreate more of ed-tech 1.0.
We must be more ambitious.
Jonathan Stull retweeted
On the cost-learning frontier, I was surprised how well @Google models did on StudentBench evals.
Gemma 4 31B was the cheapest AI tutor to match expert human GRE tutors at 918x lower cost ($0.00524 vs $4.81).
4 of the 6 tutors that achieved equivalent gains to a human tutor were Google models.
Gemini was the top AI tutor in 3 of 7 GRE academic domains (among 12 AI tutors).
Absolutely cooking this week at @joinHandshake. 🔥
Tue, we launched AI Skills Studio. Today we launched transformative research AND a free product anyone can use to improve their GRE scores by as much as a human tutor. studentbench.org/
Anyone can now use the most advanced AI tools from the leading AI companies to build real projects to advance their career in just 10-45min, for free. joinhandshake.com/learn/.
And anyone can now use AI to get better on gatekeeping standardized tests.
At @joinHandshake, we believe everyone should reap the benefits of AI to push their careers and lives forward. And we're putting our time, research, product development and money behind that vision.
👋Momentous research finding by the @joinHandshake AI Research Team, now productized for anyone to use...for free.
Read Curtis's whole thread. But, in short, our research team established (across months of rigorous experimentation and analysis) that AI tutors were as good as human tutors for the GRE. But for 7 cents / hour (!) vs $75/hr! 🤯
The GRE is a major gatekeeper to economic opportunity. Now *anyone* can use this AI tutor on the GRE for *free*: studentbench.org/
So much more to come. Very excited for more research into how AI can augment and support humans knowledge and intelligence vs automation alone. Absolutely incredible work by @cgnorthcutt, @inaara_hasmani, @kjfeng_ , @TKhangi, @andreas_plesner, and @jomulr and the HART team.
Today we establish that AI is as good as expert human tutors for immediate GRE learning gains (p=.015, n=2,383 students, study conducted July-Sep 2026).
One hour with an expert GRE tutor: $75.
One equivalent hour with an AI tutor: 7 cents .
918x cheaper, equivalent learning (p=.044, n = 140).
In 5 of 7 academic topics, the top AI tutor beat the expert human tutors on average.
How we measured it: pre-test -> 1 hour with (AI or human or no) tutor -> post-test.
There are no LLM judges. Learning gains are post-pre. Everything is real students.
Why we did this:
> 1 trillion USD is being spent per year on machines making machines better. StudentBench shows us how to shift these resources so machines also make humans better.
Why I did this:
I grew up in rural Kentucky. My dad, grandad, and great grandad were all mailmen. Getting into a good college changed my life. Now we have done a rigorous study to help AI labs evaluate LLMs and help show how bright AI can be for students of all incomes.
I believe in good science that leads to the democratization of opportunity.
The research paper behind StudentBench: arxiv.org/abs/2609.28470
Data, code, details: in this thread
If you're wondering what I'm selling, sorry to disappoint: we released all study data for free on Hugging Face, and made studentbench.org free to use. Enjoy.
lots more in the video / thread!!
Yes! Very excited to have you, @WesAField and @nishantXranka helping lead the future of Handshake. Let's go.
new gig. joined @joinHandshake as chief communications officer, alongside two people I'm lucky to start with: @nishantXranka founding Handshake Labs and @WesAField running commercial for Handshake AI.
the pitch that got me: the network where 30M people start their careers is also where experts are teaching AI to do real work. not many companies get to tell that story. let's go @GarrettLord @jonstull @Sbhaiwala03!
There's a new version of this post
Excited to partner with @figma to help more people learn how to build with AI
We partnered with @joinHandshake's AI Skills Studio to launch 4 missions so you can learn how to:
→ Design and animate your own icon set
→ Build a looping animation
→ Illustrate a sticker pack
→ Turn a mood board into app mockups
Jonathan Stull retweeted
Career network platform @joinHandshake announced its new app, AI Skills Studio. The why, @jonstull describes as access to AI creation tools that allow for adaptation to the rapidly changing professional landscape.
New @joinHandshake Research Team benchmark just dropped. Tons of great detail but the tldr is: we have a long way to go!
Excited to work closely with every frontier model to climb these hills and to help every banker get 10x more productive.
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.
This trend is accelerating. If you want to transform your company to win in the AI economy, you need to find talent that is fluent in AI, agile and open to reinvention. Early talent is the sweet spot.
Palo Alto Networks CEO @nikesharora says roughly 50% of the company’s new hires over the last six months have been early-career.
Three talent profiles PAN is prioritizing in the AI era:
1 – People who can actually use coding agents
“One set of people we want are people who are AI-savvy, who know how to use AI to get their jobs done better, who know how to use coding agents.”
“These are people who are learning, and they’re typically having to run through hackathons to get to Palo Alto. We don’t look at where you went to school. We care about whether you can use coding agents, whether you can use AI.”
“If we keep following that trend, it’s reasonably likely that we will overwhelm the non-AI-savvy people with more AI-savvy people. That’s kind of ground zero. You’ve got to get that done.”
2 - Cybersecurity experts who know AI
“The second part is there are people who are really good at cybersecurity and know AI and they’d like to get involved.”
“If you want to work in cybersecurity, there’s no better place to work than Palo Alto Networks. We’re the largest cybersecurity company in the world. You want to have an impact? You want lots of proprietary training data? We’ve got it.”
3 – Pure AI researchers
“The third part is raw, pure AI researchers who can do wonders with small language models and large language models.”
“There we have people who are AI literate. We have some PhDs in AI who work here who have a cybersecurity bent, but they can go back to their roots in AI.”
