
Pioneer – A home for the ambitious outsiders of the world - golangnews
https://pioneer.app/
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Jaruzel
_We’re building a community of creative young people working on interesting
projects around the globe._

YOUNG people?! As a young-minded 40-something, I find this statement
offensive. On the basis that I fully intend to live for at least another
lifetime I've still got plenty of mileage left in me yet.

Why are companies obsessed with 'young people'? They know nothing, and have
hardly any experience. Us 'slightly older people' are a way better bet.

~~~
webmaven
_> Why are companies obsessed with 'young people'? They know nothing, and have
hardly any experience. Us 'slightly older people' are a way better bet._

The charitable explanation is that investing in an unknown has almost
unlimited potential upside that investing in the experienced doesn't provide
(because an _experienced_ Bezos|Page+Brin|Zuckerberg, etc. doesn't need VC
money), so investors are only left with 3-5x opportunities[0], when the once-
in-a-blue-moon 100x blockbuster is what actually covers the cost of all the
failed investments and still turn a profit.

The uncharitable explanation is that the young and inexperienced are easier
for investors to take advantage of via liquidation preferences etc.

[0] This assumes that an experienced founder with a 3-5x track record doesn't
have a 100x company in them. Which is patently false, but so goes the
narrative.

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Darmani
So, if I understand the system correctly:

In the top 10, I see projects in Hardware, AI, Psychology, and Economics.

So, the psychology guy goes up the leaderboard by producing results that will
impress the people in the other fields. The surest way to do this is to jump
to conclusions and ignore everything about sound experiment design.

Similarly, the AI guy is incentivized to train the same neural net on a
different game every week, and not to do anything new and risky.

Pardon me, but this does not sound like a good system.

~~~
gt_
It’s good for hype-based, promomotion/popularity driven types, but definitely
not for what they claim.

The bottom line is this rhetoric will never be confronted. Some people will be
chosen and those people will retrospectively be deemed “outsiders”, thereby
proving Pioneer’s mission is pure.

If you read the founder’s autobiographical blog post, you’ll see they openly
admit they were not passionate about anything until they found Y Combinator.
For them, passion and the pursuit of popularity are one and the same.

They seem to miss the fact that many people are passionate _before_ getting
funded for their pursuits. They definitely miss the fact that the “outsiders”
they are looking for are driven by their own passion, and not the approval of
others.

This is more insulting SV marketing gimmickry.

------
unforswearing
related discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725751)

