Daniel Gross: evaluation

Transcript context

…On a day-to-day basis, though, you’re trying to create a community, right? Does the leaderboard sort trade that off a little bit because people are just trying to go further up? Does it turn it into a zero-sum game instead of forming a community? Yes, it’s a good question. What we try to do is make the game not necessarily appear zero-sum. It is true that for every ending week, at the end of the day, if you have a sorted list, someone will be at the top and someone won’t. But there’s no direct reward function for being number one versus number two. There is the glory of it, and a lot of our founders send us and tweet screenshots of their position on the leaderboard — whatever, it’s great for them. There’s no direct reward. The guarantee Pioneer gives you is that if you’re in the top decile, we will review your application, but you could be 25th or 32nd — it doesn’t matter, we still review your application. It just helps us in that case to get a broad sort, and because the game is not that zero-sum, I think people still tend to at least cooperate on non-business-related things. I think on business-related matters, founders should either merge their companies or compete and not cooperate. That’s totally fine. I think we manage to have the best of both worlds. But I do think, when constructing these universes and whatnot, it’s quite important for it to not feel necessarily zero-sum. You could go compete with someone on a running track, and ultimately, their running faster than you doesn’t eat away at any of your pie, so to speak. And I think that’s important because, like everything, it’s a spectrum. A lot of these start-up communities — and ultimately, San Francisco is one for better or worse. It’s basically a giant start-up campus. They work because people do, at the end of the day, feel some form — even if it’s not directly related to their business — but some form of kinship with each other. Silicon Valley lore’s obviously littered with stories of the person who let me sleep on their couch, and one thing led to the next, so we have both, I hope. How much of your time growing up in Israel and watching different experimentation with community building, different kinds of communes, inform how you decided to build Pioneer?…

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