Ben Christensen

I co-founded Handshake in 2013 with two friends while we were still in college in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, with no startup network and no real idea how any of it worked, which is a big part of why the mission (access to opportunity regardless of who you know) has always mattered to me. Over the next decade-plus we grew from the three of us to about 800 people, connecting 20M+ students with over a million employers, and more recently built Handshake AI, which provides training and evaluation data to frontier AI labs..

I've moved through very different jobs along the way. I ran sales, success and support for our university business as we grew from 5 to 600 partners. I led People as we went from 60 to 400 employees. I built our engineering offices in Berlin and Romania, led consumer product engineering, and most recently worked on partnerships with frontier AI labs.

I'm now focusing my attention on climate. I invest in and advise early-stage companies that are helping fix our planet and ensure we have a positive future to look forward to.