Daniel Gross: belief

Transcript context

…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? I’d love to be able to answer yes to your question that that was somehow extremely informative to me. I grew up in a dark, secluded corner of Jerusalem, right outside the old city, and so I can’t really say I had the most expansive view. But in reality, the real place I experienced growing up is the internet. Many people now like to talk about how bad social media is and how bad these online communities are. That’s a very nice thing to say when you’re looking out into the rolling hills of Sonoma and this beautiful world that we live in here today. Look, obviously, the place where I grew up is certainly not a third world country, but it’s very different and isolating, to be honest. I think there are many people who immigrate to San Francisco and California who feel similarly. The idea of growing up on the internet does let you see all sorts of experiments. I grew up in the open-source community, writing code. And so that, to me, was an interesting example of a very different organizational model than many different companies, where the leadership in some of these open-source projects is actually quite undefined, and you really tend to see those struggle versus ones that have a defined leader. There’s an infinite variety of forms of cooperation, but I can’t really credit Israel with that. I’d probably really credit at the time, the 56-kilobyte dial-up internet connection I had. Speaking of internet connection, Tyler, you’re an early adopter. One of the things that you’ve done, which is a little bit niche but very fun, is the Ethnic Dining Guide. That’s your way of looking at the world through food. You are not so good at desserts. You go straight for chocolate ice cream. That’s your go-to move. Is there something fundamentally different about people who write about food, or who are food critics, versus people who write about dessert? And is there such a category? There should be, right? Dessert critics?…

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