Pioneer + Stellar

tl;dr:

We're air-dropping cryptocurrency to Pioneers. The Stellar Development Foundation will award winners of our second tournament $6,000 in lumens in addition to the Pioneer investment ($5,000 with the possibility of a $100,000 follow-on).

Apply for the October Tournament here: https://pioneer.app.

Background

Pioneer is an experiment in building an online game for productivity. We launched this August.

The Harvard campus is a wonderful place to nurture and grow. It affords its inhabitants a network of other like-minded people, an invaluable stamp on their resumes and encouragement to take their passion more seriously. We want to instill those virtues in an online game that anyone can play — not just the elite that make it to the Ivy League.

By funding the best players of our game, we hope to surface and support the millions of "Lost Einsteins" around the world — creative outsiders who have tremendous creativity and energy but lack opportunity. Each month we start a fresh tournament of our game. We just closed our first.

The First Tournament: What We Learned

People seemed to really enjoy the the motivational aspects of Pioneer and the positive feedback they got from other players:

  • “Hugely appreciative of Pioneer for the sense of urgency it created for me last month. I highly recommend you to participate in the next cohort if you have a side-project, but are burdened with inertia...For me, even the positive feedback was socially reaffirming. It spurred my creativity and excitement to do more.” — Leonard Bogdonoff
  • “I would highly recommend everyone with an idea in mind to apply for this tournament as the voting and the positive feedback will help you in developing the idea into a better version and get closer to converting your idea into a reality.” — Joel Zacariah
  • "The video-game aspect of the tournament further incentivizes you to complete your goal to get a higher ranking, much like you’d want to happen if you were playing a game, and this might be my favorite feature of Pioneer." — Lama Al Rajih
  • “By having to submit weekly progress updates, you feel more accountable for your actions which acts as a key motivator during the week. Throughout the week, I was constantly thinking about what to include in my update which helped me work as hard and as efficiently as possible." — James Gallagher

We learned a lot about how we can make the product even better. For example, the leaderboard has been upgraded to show regional positions, so that you have a better sense of peer comradery. Applicants receive both positive and constructive feedback from their peers. And many more features. We're constantly iterating and thinking how to make this an amazing experience for everyone to play.

Though we’re just getting started, we seem to have a global reach. Applicants hailed from 117 countries, ranging from 12 to 87 years old. Almost half of the tournament featured people from countries like India, UK, Canada, Nigeria, Germany, South Africa, Singapore, France, Turkey, and Kenya.

We'll be announcing the winners in the coming days.

Partnership with Stellar + October Tournament

As we grow, a surprising challenge we face is getting money to our Pioneers. Turns out sending small amounts of money around the world is hard. Which is why we're really excited about our new partnership with Stellar.

The Stellar foundation is joining us in funding Pioneers. Winners of the October Tournament will get $6,000 in lumens in addition to the Pioneer investment ($5,000 with the option of a $100,000 follow-on). $1,000 lumens will be completely unlocked and $5,000 locked up for two years.

Excitingly, Pioneers will get their lumens before the dollars arrive. This really speaks to the power of the Stellar network.

Human potential is one of the world’s most underestimated resources. With the start of the October Tournament, we hope to amplify the work of extraordinarily talented people and accelerate the progress of pioneering ideas.

The October Tournament opens today. Apply here: https://pioneer.app.

The Updated Pioneer Offer

Startups are all about listening to user feedback. Today we’re doing just that.

tl;dr: New Pioneer offer:

Get a $5,000 grant to work on whatever project you want. If you turn it into a company, Pioneer may additionally invest up to $100,000 in it. That’s it.

Longer:

Last week we announced Pioneer: a search engine aimed at finding the millions of Lost Einsteins around the world. Since then, applications have poured in from all over the world -- Estonia, India, Slovenia, Nigeria and many small cities across the United States.

Pioneer is trying to provide what we think are the long term benefits of a university -- the network, community and motivation. To do this over the long run, we need a way to scalably fund Pioneer in perpetuity. Universities charge students. As a consequence many end up in serious debt, which can take years to pay off. This is a broken model, and we know we can do better.

And so we decided to try something new. We don’t expect all Pioneers to start companies, but we think some will. We want to help them do that, and if their companies become wildly successful, capture a small fraction of the gains. If you become Facebook, Pioneer can fund a million people. And you’re still very rich. And if you never start a company, you owe Pioneer nothing.

It's important that this offer be attractive to ambitious, creative people in a wide variety of fields. We spent the last three days reading thousands of applications from users around the world. Most didn’t seem to mind the terms. A few prospective applicants gave us good feedback on our offer. We decided to improve it and make our first batch of offers on more flexible terms. Our top priority is building a vibrant community. Nothing else matters.

Most Pioneers will receive $5k and owe us nothing. If you create a company from your project and raise money from investors, you agree to let us invest up to $100,000 alongside them. Our right will expire once we've invested $100,000 in the company, and it is capped at 20% of the round size (if others are investing $50,000, we’ll invest at most $10,000). More on our offer page.

We started Pioneer to support the the millions of brilliant people who lack opportunity and access to role models. We hope this gets us closer to that goal. To ensure that our updated message reaches the broadest set of applicants, we’re extending the application deadline to August 27th.

Introducing Pioneer

My name is Daniel Gross. I was born in Jerusalem, Israel. I spent most of my youth feeling like an outsider looking in. High school wasn't interesting. I didn't have many friends. And I didn't have much to be passionate about. Eight years later, I live in Silicon Valley and have built products that have touched billions of people and sold a company along the way. Today, with Pioneer, I want to help make that a possibility for anyone.

Everyone has something they are passionate about. There was one thing I loved: programming. I loved programming because I could make anything I wanted. Unlike chemistry or biology, there were no rules. No dangerous substances to avoid. The only limit was my own imagination. And I did a lot of it during my teenage years.

After graduating high school, I had felt that I hadn’t found my people or my cause in life. My Dad forwarded an article about “Y Combinator”, an entrepreneurship program in San Francisco. It sounded cool, and the people in it sounded like the kind of outsiders I wanted to be around. I connected my trusty Nokia cell phone to a clunky laptop and applied to YC from the desolate Israeli military camp where I was based. I was 18 at the time.

To my surprise I was selected for interviews. The journey from there was something of a whirlwind. I started a company called Cue, raised money from some of Silicon Valley’s best investors (including two rounds from Sequoia), and ended up selling the company to Apple in 2013 when I was 23. I became a Director at Apple, leading various AI projects before returning to YC as a Partner (I’ve since stepped down my role to focus on other efforts). The most surprising part of the experience was how much it meant for someone to believe in me. I didn’t know how important that would be, but it meant everything to find a community of similar outsiders.

I’m by no means “successful”. I was able to accomplish these things because of the people who took a bet on me despite me being unknown. Others that have gone far further started small too. SpaceX was originally conceived as the "Mars Oasis Project" -- a PR stunt aimed at increasing NASA’s budget. Google was a university research project. And many great scientists started as unknown as Ramanujan.

Over the past few years, I’ve been reading research that touches on how ambitious kids fare with a lot of interest.

For example, Raj Chetty found that "children from high-income (top 1%) families are ten times more likely to become inventors than those from below-median income families" , despite low-income kids scoring just as well on early childhood tests. Chetty used the term “lost Einsteins”, referring to geniuses who would have been able to do great things had they been exposed to opportunities in the right way. We’ll never know what they could have achieved.

More recently, two economists showed how International Math Olympiad winners are broadly geographically distributed (talent is everywhere!), but that winners from rich countries have a much higher likelihood of going on to produce significant mathematical work. They observe that there’s a lot of “lost knowledge” stemming from the structural impediments facing brilliant young mathematicians in poorer countries.

Lastly, there was this pretty remarkable paper. Two researchers in the US reported that an extraordinarily cheap intervention ($6 per student) targeted at high-achieving, low-income students -- basically, just encouraging them to apply to top-tier colleges -- had a marked impact on their propensity to do so. (Students who simply saw their notice were, on average, admitted to colleges whose median SAT score was 53 points higherand that spent 34% more on their students.)

This all matched my personal experience. The combination of a few fortuitous events and people who gave an outsider opportunity drastically altered my life trajectory.

So I started to wonder: would it be possible to somehow scale this? There are obviously tons of organizations doing great work trying to create better opportunities around the world. But the vast majority were started before internet usage was so broadly pervasive among global adolescents. Could you augment their efforts by going “direct to consumer”? Could you build something that helped to identify brilliant people, no matter where they are, and help turbocharge their careers and unlock opportunities?

I started Pioneer in an attempt to build a community for people who feel the way I do about the world. It’s an attempt to find the most brilliant people in the world, wherever they are, and to identify cheap and scalable interventions that might help them achieve their goals. I want to provide some of the non-intuitive benefits of Silicon Valley to many more people.

While Pioneer will provide money to people, it’s not about the money. My hope is that this experiment can broaden people’s horizons of how they view themselves. I met amazing peers and challenged myself to do what I thought I couldn’t because of my environment.

If any of this resonates with where you are today, please sign up!

If you’re interested in working with us, we're hiring. And if you’ve ideas about how we can make this a success, please drop me a line. Pioneer is proudly funded by Stripe and Marc Andreessen.