
Ex-YC partner Daniel Gross rethinks the accelerator - vo2maxer
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/19/ex-yc-partner-daniel-gross-rethinks-the-accelerator/
======
Uptrenda
To best honest I don't see the point of this. I tried Pioneer and all the
updates people wrote were vanity updates designed to look impressive and
impossible to validate. I used the platform for a while with the hope of
perhaps winning some perks in the future. But then I found myself spending all
my time on trying to market my project and present my updates to be appealing
to the rest of the "contestants" rather than... you know... working on the
actual product. Like, what is the point?

If you're working on highly technical problems no one is going to understand
what you're doing anyway until you're basically at the stage where you're so
polished you can spoon feed people everything... By which point you probably
don't need any outside assistance. If you look at what goes on at Pioneer it's
basically the startup equivalent of Instagram: lots of glamour shots with no
actual substance. And at the end what do you get if you do manage to "win"
something -- nothing that would help you out beyond what you can already do
mostly for free yourself.

I found the app more useful as a diary than anything related to its intended
purpose. And I don't really have the time to dress up boring engineering
challenges to "advance" in the tournament. For what it's worth, I've checked
out a fair few of the projects part of that tournament and there are some gems
there. But I'd say the quality overall is low and the platform is more geared
towards marketing bros than complex research or engineering projects.

~~~
devmunchies
Yes. I think it has the same problem as IndieHackers (which stripe also
invested in / acquired), where it’s mostly for people who don’t have anything
going for them. If you already know what you need to do it’s a waste of your
attention. It’s becomes social media for founders.

And anything social will promote what is popular or trendy to the tribe, and
some of the actual better businesses are neglected because they aren’t
“interesting”.

This brings the quality of the whole experience down since the best
contributors are absent because they are building a company.

i personally would rather just get funding and take advantage of investor
connections via introductions, and maybe occasional strategy advice. I don’t
want the extra work. I currently have a side business making over 70k/mo in
revenue and don’t have time to do anything extra. (Yes, side project, not
solo)

~~~
alexcnwy
I sort of agree but Indiehackers does have loads of useful content especially
the interviews with successful bootstrapped founders (who I agree aren’t
really on the forums much)

~~~
devmunchies
Yeah I agree. I go on IH several times a week out of habit. The podcast is
solid.

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tmilard
I have been 'playing' with pioneer.app for two month.

I kind of of like it. But I am biaised : I have always liked innovation...

Pioneer, the most consuming part is on Monday evening where I comment, judge
10 startup match. It take a few hours if you do it well. You are in a position
like people at YC receiving pitchs. Most of people in my surroundings would
find this 'job' painfull. I just love it. If you do it seriously, it's great
to help creators, to give them a few advice sometimes, to celebrate their
achievements. So yes, pioneer is-and-was a very good fit for me. And as a
result, with my startup, I get often great advice. I would say a mix of
many'consumer' advices (often), and entrepreneur cleaver ones (sometimes). The
most interesting is perhaps to understand that, when a consumer critic comes
back often and repeatedly, you, as a startup founder understands that THIS
critic point has to be fix right away. It's clever ! In a way Pioneer's
comments enlightens and ranks the differents small failures of your startup.
Be it, the 'ugly web site' or other things...

In a way I find pioneer to be the more energetic and an interesting bijective
experience, much more than Ycombinator. Because it successfully solves the big
downside of YC as a startup founder : At YC you pitch, you describe everything
of your startup. And then ... True(interview,great) or False (nope... ). I
mean, there is no in-between : you do not know if you were far-away ranked or
close to being accepted for an interview.

Here at pioneer.app the process of selection is crowd-sourced to us founders,
and I believe it works : 1) I know my rank in a weekly base. It can be harsh
but it's instructive. 2) I believe it scales better than YC in the Long run
because us founders do the (tiring) selection process.

~~~
tmilard
In a way, crowdsourcing as long been a very successfully trends in consumer
startups.

Now with pioneer.app we can perhaps see this crowdsource trend finally
entering the elite business angels business.

Crowd of selected people are 1) Less biaised perhaps, 2) Divinding the job to
hundreds of volunteers can be a good way to GARANTying that the selection job
is equality done for each startup 3) And most of it's free.

------
zcanann
I'm also backed. I'm working on Squally, a PC game to teach low-level comp
sci.

My two cents:

Other accelerators are under pressure to only fund companies that will be "top
of their batch" come demo day.

This often means rejecting small projects, solo founders, and pre-traction
companies.

However, Pioneer welcomes these companies with open arms. Make no mistake,
it's still hard to get in. It took me ~8 months of sustained effort before I
was accepted.

But once you're in, you're in the company of helpful people who are just as
hard working and talented, and have access to valuable mentorship.

~~~
nemothekid
I disagree - if you aren’t planning to become a 1-in-100 company, you
shouldn’t be taking VC period, otherwise your VCs will destroy your company in
3-4 years.

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kulesh
I'm one of the founders backed by Pioneer and Daniel Gross, we make Karma:
peer recognition and appreciation platform
([https://karmabot.chat](https://karmabot.chat)). We have passed a 'Python
script' phase and actively enjoying the tournament.

~~~
djstein
just wanted to say, your landing page is awesome

~~~
kulesh
Thanks! team++

------
morajabi
Even though 3 of my friends won and got accepted, it still didn't make sense
to me. After a few weeks, my friend James recommended me to join. I was a
skeptic. But was I right?

I joined. After the first week, we could feel the energy every day. We had to
meet our weekly goal—which we ourselves set, not anyone else. We were
naturally building faster, marketing and talking to users every week. Got our
first paid client $$$ in the third week IIRC. I found voting to be fair, but
you need to be able to clearly explain what you're doing and optionally add
links or screenshots, etc.

It's a very helpful format for planning that we're still doing with my co-
founder. Also, every week you need to pitch your project in a one-liner again.
It's so good to hammer your pitch based on feedback. After all, as Micheal
Seibel, CEO of YC says, your parents need to understand it in a 1-2 sentence.

We won! Every Monday at 10 am my cofounder and I was staring at the
leaderboard, hitting CMD+R every second. We were close to the top. But...
Boom! Leaderboard changes show that we're... #120? Another refresh. Couldn't
believe. We're #1!!! Probably their system was still applying the scores.
Damn, we were running around the room. With more progress stayed #1 for
multiple weeks until we decided to take a break. We won in August 2019.

From the email we got: > Congratulations to our newest Pioneers: Mohamad &
Behnam Rajabifard, who are building There, a virtual office for remote teams.

After winning, we have frequent AMA live sessions with founders, product
managers, CEOs of top tech companies. Every month we have 1-2 office hours
with Daniel were we can get help on what we're doing. There's our Slack
community exclusively for winners and has channels for everything.

In 6 hours we're having another live event where we're sharing our meal
remotely and catching up with friends in Pioneer.

(Just in case you're looking to join and have any questions feel free to DM me
on twitter.com/morajabi, I'd be happy to answer any of your concerns)

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tobiastobias
Pioneer really worked great for us. I think there are 2 reasons:

(a) The reality of starting up is that nobody cares about what you do. This
can make things hard to explain to people around you. Pioneer provides
feedback and recognition even people outside of the startup bubble understand.
“See, there must be something to it - some people get what we do.”

(b) Pioneer helps to track things over time. Starting up is a lot about
hacking things together and iterating: Finding a good idea. Building an MVP.
Getting in front of first customers (..). Having the log of my tournament
submissions is a great way to collect what worked and what didn't.

..I think you shouldn’t play pioneer with an entitlement to win. It is
foremost a free feedback tool. As well remember, you only see a small subset
of the other players. I really enjoy reading about other projects during the
weekly voting. There must be soo many cool teams out there!

------
alexgunnarson
Pioneer made all the difference for us! It really gives you an amazing amount
of focus and energy to do the best thing for your startup, which is what
should be obvious but isn't: to make actual progress (i.e. make something
users want, not e.g. do startup competitions or get featured in the press).
That's the one metric you're evaluated on — progress — which is the only one
that matters to the life of your startup anyway.

Thanks so much to Daniel and everyone else for making Pioneer a great
experience!

P.S. — My cofounder and I are building Deft (shopdeft.com), which is product
search for humans, not robots. You can type how you speak, search by image,
and search over every product site!

------
moralestapia
Hey it's nice to see this here, I just got in last week, I'm the one with the
"remote adoption" (for pets!) platform, something I wanted to do for quite
some time but never found the right motivation.

If Daniel or partners come here, I have a bit of (unsolicited) feedback:

When you join late it's easy to feel like no matter what you do you will not
be able to reach the top 50% just because of first-mover advantage. Perhaps
you could try a dynamic where even latecomers have a good chance as well.

Also, it would be good to be able to see all your historical activity within
the site, as well as some kind of chart on how has your score been growing
through time. I keep this in a notebook, but you could do it for all of us
with a few lines of code ...

Last but not least, it would be very cool if you could show the complete
leaderboard, not just the ones above/below you. This is the main criticism
I've seen here and there directed towards the scores on the site being
manipulated. If you make this transparent, the problem will go away.

------
danial
> The accelerator won’t give them cash but will help founders incorporate
> their startups, give them guidance via a network of experts, and toss some
> other substantial perks like $100K worth of cloud credits and a roundtrip
> ticket to San Francisco to inject a bit of face-to-face time into the
> process.

Question to those of you who are in the program: what Pioneer perk is most
valuable to you? Is it access to the Pioneer social network? Or the status
signal for being part of a startup accelerator? Surely it's not the help with
incorporation or the round-trip ticket to SFO.

~~~
isaacaderogba
I'm not sure the perks are what encouraged me to apply in the first place.
They always sort of felt like a nice add-on. Rather, it was for validation
that what I was building seemed valuable. Perhaps this ties in to your status
signalling point.

Also, it was refreshing to be able to compete on weekly progress as opposed to
writing some lengthy business application.

~~~
danial
Validation of product is useful. Makes sense, thanks.

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awb
> Y Combinator invest $150K in startups for a 7% slice of equity, by
> comparison, a $20K investment from Pioneer will cost founders 5% of their
> company plus the 1% they gave up to join the accelerator in the first place.

The 1% for advice, status, etc. sounds like a good deal. $20k for 5% though
sounds really steep unless you're planning on a very low exit (under $1M).

~~~
baristaGeek
Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders being backed.

Not really. YC used to invest that amount 10 years ago for 6-7%. Airbnb,
Dropbox, Stripe, etc. were definitely not planned for "very low exits."

These days people get into YC with pretty elaborate stuff. I think that an
underrated founder with just an idea or an mvp with little or no traction,
wouldn't get into YC today (think Airbnb, Reddit, etc.).

Pioneer is building a model to invest in deals earlier in the pipeline. It
will probably give them outsized returns in the future.

------
isaacaderogba
Pioneer and Entrepreneur First are probably the most compelling attempts of
rethinking the accelerator.

Haven't contributed to the Pioneer community too much (also backed), but it's
clear that things are picking up internally with frequent talks, office hours
and "remote dinners" \- the first of which is tomorrow.

Really excited to see what other companies spin out of Pioneer

------
adityarao310
"Talent is global and evenly spread, but opportunities are not" <\-- if I had
to define Pioneer

Being part of Pioneer until now has been a great experience! We are in early
stages of building [https://www.kaapi.team/](https://www.kaapi.team/) (easy
performance management for remote teams) and running in the Pioneer
leaderboard was a huge factor of us being able to "ship" things like
[https://timewise.how/](https://timewise.how/)

1\. Leaderboards can be gamified, yes, and I am sure some participants try to
do so. But that froth gets cleared in final evaluation by experts. And you can
fool a small percentage by showcasing vanity metrics, but I always climbed
higher in the tournament when we got actual customers and product growth.

2\. If you are not from the valley, getting access to a strong network of
peers who help keep you accountable is great

3\. Also, you get back what you put in. I feel as if I am yet to get the
maximum "juice" from Pioneer, but that is on me. I haven't yet asked for
enough intros and personal mentorship help from the Pioneer team. But since
winning the tournament, and joining the camp, we have talked to 20 potential
customers, and have beta customers lined up.

4\. Personally for me, this is a refreshing way of going from idea to
business. It's 2020 - geographical constraints of being in the valley
shouldn't be a barrier!

5\. I think it definitely has some kinks it needs to iron out in the
tournament (e.g. advisors never replied, and the feature is now scraped). And
also in the camp itself - but I love the fact that the Pioneer team is
actively working on iterating itself like a startup!

PS Yes, I know you don't always need accelerators or funding or mentorship to
build a business. There is no one way of getting it right, and this is just
one of them.

Your mileage may vary.

------
666_howitzer
I got into the program, like a week ago. Still learning the ropes, I'm having
a great time with them so far. Their internal slack group is really fun and
their team is also quite responsive when it comes to resolving your queries.

On a deeper level, I really appreciate the strategic approach they have chosen
when it comes to supporting and nurturing the entrepreneurs that they have
backed, where the default approach is not writing a check to make the problems
go away. But, actually listening to the myriad problems that crop up over the
course of your startups journey and actually making a concerted effort to
solve said problems.

Related: [https://nadiaeghbal.com/microgrants#designing-for-
impact](https://nadiaeghbal.com/microgrants#designing-for-impact)

------
boiler_up800
Also backed my Pioneer and Daniel. Nothing but good things to say. Inside
Pioneer is one of the more helpful communities on the Internet I’d say.

------
yeldarb
Pioneer has been a great productivity hack for us.

As an early stage founder there’s no benchmark for how you’re doing relative
to your peers. Matching up head-to-head weekly is a great way to assess your
progress.

Knowing I’m going to be judged against the milestones I set for myself on
Monday has definitely pushed me to work late on a Sunday night or two to make
sure I complete everything I said I was going to do that week.

------
hengelpao
Pioneer opens the opportunity for the people from various countries. We are
Verihubs (veripass.verihubs.com) are backed by Pioneer and we are from
Indonesia.

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algo_trader
But this is terrible signalling for Pioneer "winners".

If Pioneer doesnt invest $50K in you, why should anyone else? And if they do,
you are starting out with a ridiculous valuation.

However, the social/community aspects can be a net-positive for founders.

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pyankoff
Playing the Pioneer tournament is super fun and
[https://airsite.co](https://airsite.co) probably wouldn't exist without it.

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adamonkey
I'm shocked by the lack of diversity of those who win Pioneer, given that this
is supposed to democratize funding for anyone across the globe.

Right now, it's mostly peer recognition which is prone to favor projects the
dominant demographic finds cool. But I could see the competition based on
revenue be more democratizing.

~~~
666_howitzer
I think this problem has more to do with the pipeline than their selection
process.

~~~
adamonkey
YC has better diversity stats though? And I don't think it's because its
pipeline is too different.

------
textread
Is this kinda similar to 'Entrepreneurs First'?

~~~
pyankoff
I would say not really, apart from the fact that they both fund individuals or
projects at the earliest possible stage.

EF is in-person and more focused on matching co-founders and forming teams.
You need to have a project for Pioneer, while EF accepts people based on their
profile/interviews.

You can say that all accelerators are pretty similar: you get investment,
listen to some speakers, attend office hours, etc. So what matters in the end
is the network of people running the program and participating in it.

------
DoreenMichele
_Our minds are constantly spinning on ways to raise awareness amongst female
founders and we’re working with our community to improve female
representation_

We mostly don't even know how to get men and women to really talk with each
other if the goal is not romantic/sexual in nature. I sometimes feel like I'm
the only person on the planet trying to work on that and I get no credit and
it doesn't pay spit.

I don't know how on Earth you think you can get people to work together if
they can't even talk. And I don't know why that seems "non obvious" to most of
the planet.

------
pouta
What's the best way to pitch Pioneer?

~~~
alexgunnarson
Not sure what you mean. To become a Pioneer, sign up (pioneer.app), rise up
the leaderboard by making progress on your startup, and make the top 50 to be
eligible to be selected. Not really a pitch-your-startup process to it.

~~~
Animats
This is for things that can be done in a few weeks. That feels like something
that made more sense in the early days of the web or the early days of phone
apps. Those fields are very crowded now.

