Daniel Gross: evaluation

Transcript context

…Pioneer is principally a website, but it is an online start-up accelerator, a pre-YC [Y Combinator], which I would have to explain in most cities but not in this one. There are many ways where it’s different and unique. One of them is that everyone on the platform gets a score every week for the work that they do, so you’re incentivized to make your score go up. The broad idea there is trying to really address a question somewhat related to talent, which is, why aren’t there more start-ups? And there are many answers to this question, but one of the reasons why there aren’t more start-ups is — as we were saying earlier — the act of starting a company is completely irrational, and you tend to get a lot of negative stimulus before you get positive stimulus. You start working at a new job. You have a boss, and that boss wants to, hopefully, make it a good experience for you. They tend to build a map and a game for you — “basic game” in quotes here. Start-up doesn’t have that. You tend to just hear, “No, no, no, fail.” Then finally, you might get somewhere, but a lot of people don’t crest beyond the J curve, really, and they just drop at the nadir. Gamification is a way or some way to make something compelling. Ultimately, the goal of basically creating more start-ups is the theory behind Pioneer, somewhat how Peloton gets more people to cycle. Heck, people in South Korea are literally dying of exhaustion because they’re playing video games to death. There is something very powerful about that effect, whether it’s used positively or negatively. Now, you ask the question of what creates more goodness, basically — competition or cooperation. We think competition, broadly, is what creates greatness. The answer is both, obviously, because competition creates cooperation within small groups that compete against each other. Now, it is true that not everyone who signs up for Pioneer wants to compete on a global leaderboard against everyone else in the world. Very good competitors, I think, even the best, most competitive people tend to have a predictive model of like, “I’m only going to enter games I can win, or at least, games where I have maybe a 40 percent chance of winning.” But I strongly believe, whether you want to compete globally or not, everyone wants to improve every single day. It’s very similar to Peloton in the sense that you can have a score, and you could be playing against yourself. You could just be trying to grow your revenue week over week, or the amount of active users you have, or any one of different metrics and KPIs [key performance indicators], or you could be competing globally. I think that affords us all modalities because I really think there are very few people that don’t want to improve at least themselves, if not want to compete against others. Of course, every form of competition usually will entail some form of local cooperation, and I think it’s a very good thing. want to improve at least themselves, if not want to compete against others. Of course, every form of competition usually will entail some form of local cooperation, and I think it’s a very good thing. Ultimately, a lot of what a free market enables is for people to get excited about the idea of competing, building a better product, trying a new experience. Many of those fail, but occasionally, those work, and it creates the microphones that we’re using, the building that we’re in, and the city and world that we live in. So, I think both are necessary 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?…

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