E56: Daniel Gross, Founder and CEO of Pioneer

Daniel Gross is one of the most interesting members of the startup community today; he is the youngest YC founder in history and sold a company to Apple at 23 where he ultimately rose to lead Apple's efforts in machine learning. After his time at Apple he joined YC as a Partner in 2017 and ultimately moved on to found Pioneer. Pioneer is a fully remote accelerator dedicated to funding projects and startups built by the ambitious outsiders of the world. Daniel founded Pioneer to provide some of the non-intuitive benefits of Silicon Valley to many more people. Pioneer provides capital to jumpstart ideas, but most importantly Pioneer broadens people’s horizons of how they view themselves.

We spent this conversation talking about a number of topics: (1) how the world will bounce back from COVID, (2) the philosophical underpinnings of Pioneer (e.g. believe in oneself, curiosity, etc.); (3) the nature of games and (4) why an organization like Pioneer is so valuable to flattening the innovation curve.