012 - Daniel Gross (Founder of Pioneer) on the Future of Games And Opportunity Democratization

Hey, how's it going everyone? Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Forward Thinking Founders. Today I'm stoked to be talking to Daniel Gross, who's the founder of Pioneer. Before Pioneer, Daniel was a partner at Y Combinator. Before that, he was director of AI and machine learning at Apple, and it all started with his startup Q that went through Y Combinator. Today we talk all about Pioneer, giving people access to opportunity, games, different kind of games, and everything having to do with productivity software and how it's changing. I hope you really enjoy today's episode with Daniel. I know I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I learned a ton. I hope you learn a lot too. With that, let's get into today's episode. Here we go. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me on.

Yeah, absolutely. A pleasure to have you on. So let's dive right into it. Pioneer. Tell me about it. And I obviously know a good amount about it. Tell the listeners who haven't heard, what is Pioneer? And give it a little backstory, just a little bit into why you wanted to start Pioneer.

Sure thing, sure thing. So Pioneer is a kind of online game for people around really anywhere in the world that are working on a project, which could be anything. Could be research in biology or machine learning or something that could turn into a company, that are seeking a little bit of funding, mentorship, and community and guidance for their— for whatever project they're working on. And what it enables you to do is to basically win all these resources. But unlike kind of venture capital or grant systems, the way you win is by playing a game. And so it takes place over 30 days on the internet, where you try to get as many points as possible by kind of completing these different quests and games. And we take, at the end of 30 days, we take the folks that score the most points, and then we fund whatever they're doing. We also put them together with industry experts, depending on what you're working on. So, you know, if it's a company, folks like Patrick Collison or Marc Andreessen. If it's research, folks like Laura Deming. Or if it's cryptocurrency, folks like Balaji. So that you really end up kind of getting really the main benefits of what we think are the basic booster package requirements. required kind of for success, which is, you know, mentorship, community, and guidance. So in essence, we're almost trying to build something that feels like an online Ivy League campus almost, where, you know, you can get kind of connected to really impressive people just like you would on Harvard's campus. You get a brand as a byproduct of winning Pioneer, just like you do as a byproduct of graduating Harvard. And you get funding as well. And unlike Harvard, though, the way it's run is, you know, number one, entirely on the internet, and number two, with admissions kind of entirely done in software, as egalitarian as possible. So if you're listening to this and you're working on something and you're wondering whether it's worth taking to the next level, Pioneer is a very easy way to at least experiment with it.

Yeah, that's a great explanation. When I saw it launch on Product Hunt, it had to be at least a year ago, maybe a little longer. It was last August, right? Yeah, so when I saw it launch and I tried it out, I just thought it was this It's fascinating because it's just a very different take on, on a website and on a game and on a productivity kind of machine in some capacity. And I signed up for it and I played, I believe, the first 3 tournaments. So I'm curious, in the early days, you obviously put something out there, you see how it goes, and you iterate on it. So I'm curious, in between the first tournament or the second tournament and your current tournament, What are some things that you have learned about people, and how have those things that you've learned impacted some of your product decisions that you've made?

I think that's a great question, because ultimately, you build a product and you launch it, and you have all these convictions and opinions about what's going to work and what doesn't, and you're always humbled by your customers and your usage, and you realize You're pretty much shooting in the dark. So we've learned quite a bit actually and evolved our product in response to usage. The largest lesson that we've taken from our users is it seemed we were of the view that the main benefit of Pioneers would be winning the tournament, getting the funding, getting the mentorship, getting the guidance, all that stuff. Getting the status. But it turns out the most useful part of Pioneer is the experience of competing in Pioneer itself. Summiting Everest, actually being at the top, is apparently very boring. You spend maybe 2 minutes there oxygen deprived, take a photo, and go down. But it's the climb and the ascension to Everest that you really form your character and your memories. And it seems like with Pioneer, in similar vein, the benefit is in the journey. And so as I You know, one obvious way we saw that is both winners and also people who didn't win Pioneer continued to play tournament after tournament after tournament, which again really was not our original thinking around it. And so we changed the product actually quite recently to evolve beyond kind of an episodic 30-day tournaments that have stop-and-start finishes, you know, every couple of weeks where the doors kind of open and close. At random times, we changed it to kind of an evergreen ongoing tournament, something you can apply to pretty much any time. And just like starting a new match of Fortnite, you know, we'll— you may have to wait for us to place you with a cohort of people that started at the same time block as you, but you can get started anytime. There's no moment where the doors are closed. And that was really in response to watching people just want to play this thing over and over and over again. So that's kind of one, probably the largest product lesson we've learned from our users. The second one is, you know, as it turns out, the funding that we give people was very easy to get attached to that as the big thing people wanted, but it turns out it's not really the large needle mover on people. Pioneers, the funding is useful. For some people, it's a big deal, actually, especially if you're in an emerging market where a couple thousand dollars is enough to live off of for, you know, a few weeks or maybe even months. But the real thing we give people is almost the radicalization that their project is worthwhile. Because when you play in a competition and forget winning, you improve your position, you build your confidence, and you build this conclusion. the project's worth doing because you're improving your position. And, and, you know, that ultimately to us was a wonderful thing to hear because the real goal for Pioneer isn't just to detect people that are promising and to fund them. It's actually to create more of them, almost to generate people that without Pioneer existing, had the website never been created, either would have gotten stuck in their own culture or stuck at a boring job at Accenture. But with Pioneer, we're doing something slightly more colorful and vibrant.

That's an awesome future that you're painting. I actually want to go, go into the future a bit. So you've been at Pioneer for, for a little while now. You've learned some valuable lessons and things are, things are active. I mean, it's fun going back and playing the newest tournament. I guess it's an ongoing tournament. So I'm wondering This keeps happening. People from different countries join Pioneer, they play, they gain confidence, they build their products, maybe some of them win. What is the future that you're kind of rowing to? And another way that I want to phrase that question is, in 5 years, what does the world look like with Pioneer? And what would it hit? What does the world look like with Pioneer and that would not have existed that way without Pioneer? Like, what's different?

The simplest answer to that for me is ideally the world has— you gave me 5 years? Okay.

Or 10 or 20. It's more just like, where are you rowing to? And yeah, what does the world look like in the future with Pioneer growing?

My hope is that 5 years from now there are maybe 500 more people around the world that not are just pioneers. I would have hoped we funded thousands of people at that point, tens of thousands maybe, but there's 500 people you could point to that are really changing society in some significant way. And you could think of this as like 5 years from now, the the Met Gala, they're all Pioneers. Or 5 years from now, there's 500 more kind of verified Twitter accounts, if that makes sense. People that stand out in some notable way. And it'd be real neat, and this is a little bit hard, but it'd be real neat if when you spoke to those people and you called them up and you said, where would you be without Pioneer? They would tell you, oh, I'd be doing something very different.

Hmm.

Because again, the real vision for us is to create more of these extraordinarily productive people. I think the world could stand to have many more of them. You could ask, well, why? Why do you believe that? Shouldn't the market's kind of efficient? I mean, you know, people seem to be raising money, people and I, but I don't believe that. And I believe proof for this is both existing in research and literature. Raj Chetty has done quite a bit of good research on this from children who say score highly on IQ from low-income homes are far less likely to earn as much as those from higher-income homes. So there is an element of like being born in the right place. But also, I think if everyone thinks about their own story or the stories of great people, there's, there's so much luck and happenstance involved in success. And there's no software that tries to neutralize that from the equation, right? And so that's what we're trying to do, a kind of DSP that, that removes the white noise of luck from the equation of success. And I think if we do that, we'll literally have created You know, just more people doing interesting things from asteroid mining to going to space to curing cancer.

That's awesome. That's a future I want to live in. So you describe Pioneer, I think you've always described Pioneer as a game. 2 questions regarding that. Where does your interest from gamification and game and building a game come from? And actually, yeah, well, it will be a 2-part question. Where does that come from? And then second, how do you think the fact that since you're building a game, do you think that there are going to be other games that are built in different arenas, these new types of games that aren't just software that you're interacting with a virtual player, but do you think Pioneer is pioneering a new kind of game? And the next time you go into an EA Sports, it's not just games on the DVD, it's like life games that impact your life. I'm curious how you think about that stuff.

Oh, look, I generally believe that gamification, as much as it is a bastardized term, is still incredibly underutilized and leveraged in all forms of productivity software. And why this is, is it's like everything else in life. It's an emergent property of the incentive structure of the system it's built in. And so Video games, their sole purpose, the sole purpose of video games is to put you in flow.

Hmm.

Is to make— to let you disconnect from the world, from your own mind, and really refocus you on an activity to the level that is so intense you forget time is moving. And so as a byproduct, they discover— video games discover all of these interesting things. Response time really matters. Scores really matter. Feedback loops matter. Leaderboards matter. And there's all of these insights that get discovered again because the sole purpose of the game is to put you in flow. Meanwhile, productivity software has a different purpose. You know, the way Gmail makes money is not by putting you in flow. The way it makes money is by sending emails. So it does— everything does in general the bare minimum it needs to do in order to succeed in the environment that it's in. We built just enough muscle to be able to carry our bodies on Earth's gravity, unless you like work out and subject it to more weight. Had we been living on Jupiter, we'd have more muscle, right? And so it's a byproduct of the system that you're in. And so Gmail, it's kind of this weird thing that emerges, and it's not fun. It's not motivational. It can send email. No one has really married those two. No one's really gone and tried to bring the kind of insights from the game world into productivity. Pioneer's done that. And my hope, yeah, my hope is that it's the beginning. We'd love to see mimicry of these concepts in other industries as well. I mean, you know, I'd love if people took us up and cloned some of our concepts of leaderboards and point systems and quests and side quests. And just like we bled that into productivity, they could bleed it into, you know, a futuristic Google Docs that motivates you to write more and write properly so that you experience less moments of like pause and, you know, start and stop that people experience when they're writing. With email, helping you accomplish your goals as opposed to just doing the bare basics. You know, even things like, you know, even things like workout apps, I think, could be far more gamified than they are today. And you see, that's one world where there's— you're starting to see a little bit of this. And you'd ask, well, why there? Why is any of it happening there? It's because they struggle, right? So workout apps generally struggle with compliance. And so people don't retent on them usually. And so the system is forcing them to think a little bit more about how to get people in flow all the time. But ultimately, my view is that gamification provides kind of this nuclear energy that is missing from most of the software that we use. Pioneer is certainly trying to inject it into its software. And certainly 5, 10 years from now, if we're successful, maybe we'll have inspired a new way to think about building software.

That's, uh, that's awesome. I really like that. Um, one thing I want to mention just about fitness apps, 'cause you mentioned that and I had to say it, uh, there's this app that launched like a month and a half ago called FutureFit.

Right.

And it's a— they ship you a smartwatch for free as part of the subscription. Um, so you aren't able to like— so the accountability is to the, to the highest level. And, um, it's just the only fitness app that I've ever used that has gotten me to the gym 4 times a week for the last month and a half, excluding when I was a little sick. So it's been, yeah, I don't know if it's gamification, but the extra expense of the smartwatch, which may seem not like a stupid move on their end, is actually retaining me and probably retaining a lot of users, which I think is an interesting dynamic.

Kind of an exploitation of the sunk cost fallacy, but used in your favor as opposed to against you.

Yeah, it's, 'cause the thing when you're, when I was on their website and it said, oh hey, like it's this much, it's $150 a month I think, which is not cheap. But it's cheap if you think about personal trainers. It's expensive if you think about it as an app, but they say, oh, here's a watch too. You're like, oh my gosh, I get a watch out of it. So it almost tricks you to like, oh, but you get a watch, but then you start going through the cycles and you don't want to stop because the workouts are so good. So that company, I'm a very early adopter of it, and I'm trying to be a pretty big advocate and trying to like share it and whatnot because it's cool. So anyways, I just wanted to mention that simply because you were talking about fitness apps. Going back to Pioneer and this kind of future of gaming, or this future of productivity plus gaming, do you have any interest or insight or thoughts into using VR or AR with Pioneer, as those are 2 softwares, or those are 2 technologies that already have next type of gaming on it? Do you have any— plans for that? I'm curious. Yeah.

You know, when you start a company, the default is failure. And one thing I think first-time founders do quite a bit is there's so much novelty in the world. They try— and there's so many interesting things to think about. Um, in an attempt to reduce odds of failure and increase the, the chances of potentially having a successful outcome, they try to like actually, uh, load up on, on their backs, on their already broken backs, so many new things.

Interesting.

In an attempt to make themselves successful, not realizing that that is just increasing the already infinitesimal odds they have of success. So a classic example you see of this is management structures and hierarchies. Occasionally, first-time founders will start companies and they'll get very focused on holocracies. Well, there'll be no management structure. Everyone reports to everyone. I read in a blog post that that works for Valve, the gaming company, so it's going to work for us. It feels much more egalitarian. But it's bad. And there's a reason pretty much everything from, you know, Napoleon's army to Apple has structure today. It just works when you have a certain scale of people. And in similar vein, I think we can— we have a very limited— and all companies have a very limited number of what you could call frontier bets we can place, things where we can say we're doing something big and different and weird here. And our frontier bet is already— we're over, like, encumbered with psychology, psychometrics, game gamification, global funding models, you know, optionality-added funding structures, potentially income share agreements. We can't encumber ourselves with AR and VR too. That being said, I think AR and VR show a lot of promise, and my hope is that tools will get built potentially by pioneers in the AR and VR world that we could potentially leverage and use, but we can't do it in-house. So, for example, you know, one thing that I think is really important for us is that someone figures out why video conferencing is not as good as meeting in the real world. Because it's not. It's not. It's certainly better than trading emails, but it's not as good as the real world. No one seems to know why. I have never gotten a satisfying answer about it. And maybe with a VR headset, It's just like you develop the same bonding as you do in the real world. Now, for Pioneer, that's a giant deal because that means Pioneers can really interact with each other, befriend one another, build community, build brand, build network as if they were physically in the same place, which they can't do today. But we're not going to build that in-house. We'll gladly fund a Pioneer to do it, but we won't do it in-house. And so I think VR and AR and A lot of other things like cryptocurrency and embryo selection and all these things will change the world. We in-house can only work on the engine that finds and prospects promising people and invest in those projects. I don't think we have the right or honestly ability to focus on making, you know, an iPad and iPhone at the same time.

I think a lot of people will appreciate that answer. I know I do as Pretty much a first-time founder, so that's really insightful. A couple other questions for you, and then the final question that I always ask. So you mentioned just earlier in this podcast that you're in a way building kind of like a Harvard-like alumni network, kind of like a school in a way.

Yeah.

Can you just— I'm kind of interested in what does— like, are you building kind of the next Harvard in some capacity? And actually, I'll ask it in a different way. In 100 years, does Pioneer have campuses? You know, I know it's very far out, and you can only— you just said you can only focus on what you can focus on, but just like, let your mind go for like a second. Like, what could Pioneer become?

Yeah, I think there are 2 narratives here. One is, one is that Pioneer truly becomes a religion in the physical world, and it becomes a religion for following your dreams, for productivity, for self-actualization and achievement. And religions have local chapters. They have people that meet in local communities. It's not really centrally governed. There is kind of a general thing that it stands for. So maybe it's the color yellow and the fact that it's a collection of people not pursuing the traditional path, who are a little bit weird, very ambitious, very curious, importantly, very productive. That's one view, you know, a kind of CrossFit for productivity style. The other view is kind of like the first, except it takes place entirely on the internet. And in that view, there isn't— yeah, we have campuses, but the campuses are these VR/AR chat rooms. And maybe the reality of it is 100 years from now, it's both. But the goal is very much to build this kind of enduring movement of people, predominantly earlier on in life, who are disagreeable enough to, you know, cut from the main path that their culture rewards them and try something slightly different, slightly unconventional, just on the odds of success, on the small odds of success. And Pioneer becomes a force in convincing, you know, 10 times more people to do that. I really, really believe that we're kind of missing that from the world now. And so if anything I've created around that is still around 100 years from now, it's that idea. It's that movement of self-actualization.

That's awesome. Yeah, I like that a lot. One question that just popped up, and then we'll roll into our final one. I've listened to a few interviews with you, but I don't know if anyone's ever asked this. Why yellow?

Who knows? Who knows why people make these decisions? There's something about the aesthetic that I think speaks to the character of Pioneer, which is energetic, optimistic, somewhat hopefully pleasant to look at. Depends on the particulars of the shade. And so I kind of also like that it's effectively the color of almost photosynthesis, which is a product that delivers energy to plants. And hopefully we can be a source of energy Cool.

Well, that's awesome. I have been— this has been a very—

It also kind of looks cool. So, I mean, that's the—

Well, when it was launched, the website, and it still is this, the website is very, very yellow, and I just— it stands out. I think when I see the website and the logo and just all of it, there are— it's not like it's blue, everything's blue, whereas not that many things are yellow. And I think your ideal pioneers, your ideal kind of applicants to be, or your ideal players, kind of are trying to stand out in a way. So that's— I like that. I like that.

I'll use that in a future podcast. I'm crediting you.

Cool. Yeah, this has been a pretty awesome conversation. I have loved Pioneer and some of your blog posts from what you've written in the last several years. So it's been awesome to be able to talk. My last question for you is, you're building the future right now with Pioneer. You're helping other people break free from what they maybe don't want to be to see who they could be, to become that. And you're giving opportunity, you're funding, you really are building the future. And usually when I do this podcast, they ask, what advice would you give to someone listening to this podcast if they want to build the future? But I'm just going to ask, what advice do you are you going to give to someone who may want to be a future pioneer, uh, like who wants to change the future and be an outlier? You know, like, well, where would you tell them to start, uh, and, and take that first step?

Well, I think the thing to realize— what— so the problem we should bear in mind that, uh, when we talk about changing the future, the mind immediately goes to these Fairly large, grand ideas. Things like going to, you know, Jupiter, or curing cancer, or like I mentioned before, I don't know, asteroid mining. And it can be both incredibly ambitious and exciting to think about those things, but also very confusing because it's not really clear how to start. So I think that the question for the potential future pioneers, you know, where do you start from? And I think the most important lesson we're trying to give people, the ailment we're trying to cure in people, is the ailment of self-editing or analysis paralysis. Like, oh, I'm not sure what to do. None of these ideas seem good. And I think, you know, Pioneer was really created with the sole purpose of reducing the kind of activation energy required to swing into a project. Really, it's our message to people to say, don't worry about it too much, just pick something simple and go. And it can be quite inspiring to go back and look at the early websites of Facebook or LinkedIn or Amazon, for that matter, and realize how stupid and silly they look. And, and superimpose that on what you're going to have today, it's going to look stupid and silly, like a Bootstrap template you cobble together with some JavaScript. It's not going to look great. It may turn into something great, but you shouldn't worry about that for now. In the running world, there's a famous aphorism they tell people, you know, to use at mile 18 or 30 of your marathon or ultramarathon, which is to run the mile that you're in. Don't really focus on the long-term goal here. And I think that kind of is the counterintuitive advice I would give to someone. Just focus on, you know, the week that you're in. And you can have— you can inspire yourself with a 20-year goal, but I really wouldn't get scared by it or wonder how to approach it. Just focus on where you are and kind of try to move one step forward. You'd be surprised what ends up happening is if you're even somewhat successful, you get pulled into this feedback loop where it becomes really easy to just continue going and going and going and going and kind of hill climb your way to success.

That's a great answer to finish it out. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on to the Forward Thinking Founders Podcast. I really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me.

And for everyone listening, I hope you enjoyed this awesome podcast with Daniel. And I hope you all have a great evening, morning, or afternoon. See everyone. See everyone. See everyone. See everyone.