Wanted: ‘Lost Einsteins.’ Please Apply

Nat Friedman and I launched AI Grant last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851806). The idea was to give out money to promising AI researchers around the world. To date, we've funded 50 researchers, from high school students in Hawaii to aspiring researchers in Africa. We’ve been inspired by the fellows we’ve funded all over the word. I’m following it with a new project called Pioneer.

Pioneer funds ambitious people around the world working on interesting projects. Unlike YC, this is focused on small projects, not companies. A project could be anything -- open source work, research in physics or biology, or creating art.

If one does start a company, Pioneer gets 3% of equity in it in return for the network, community and guidance it provides. But it's by no means a requirement or a goal. We're merely hoping the small fraction of companies help us fund this experiment in perpetuity.

I think the largest gift we'll give our Pioneers isn't money. It'll be non-intuitive things like a network of friends (other Pioneers), a forcing function to get that thing done and mentorship from inspiring individuals.

Unlike other grant programs, we’re trying to do most of the screening in software. Becoming a Pioneer requires winning the Pioneer Tournament -- a (hopefully) fun and interactive application process. More on that on the site.

I'm passionate about this work because I'm the beneficiary of a similar system. I wrote about my story here, if you're curious: https://pioneer.app/blog/hello.

I read HN daily. And I've lost a lot of sleep about how this comments section will react to Pioneer :)

I'm hoping you'll find this at least a worthwhile experiment to run. Do let me know what ideas or feedback you have!

P.S. This effort is unrelated to YC. If you have any complaints about it, shoot me, not them!

P.P.S. Nat remains a close friend to Pioneer but his focus is on GitHub. AI Grant will continue to run as a non-profit. More details on that soon.

I think one of the largest problems a lot of creative, insanely formidable people face are a barrier to entry to a network like this. That is one thing I've always admired about YC, Startup school. Pioneer's value in this would be insane.

I'm looking forward to the results, and hopefully climbing up the leaderboard myself over the next few months ;)

That kind of honest self-reflection is something sorely missing in Silicon Valley. Far too many people think their success was inevitable and completely self-made. Very few acknowledge the very rare kinds of help they received, and for a small turn in fortune, might not have received.

It's a great thing that you've not forgotten how different your life could have been without opportunity. And it's a beautiful thing that you're using your success to extend that opportunity to others.

I'm sure your resources are limited now but hopefully over time you will expand the grant (or investment) to help more people and with more money.

Congrats and good luck!

"I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.

As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.

What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.

The period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole... operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work."

Trying to find and fund "high potential people" falls in line with Silicon Valley's narrative of the genius founder, lone brilliant hacker, etc. Perhaps not too surprising, as many behind such initiatives would likely consider themselves to be such "high potential people", and thus have some interest in perpetuating that narrative.

If the goal is truly "to put more science and less happenstance into the process of talent discovery", then perhaps investing in the "scene" would be more apt, rather than trying to target some "high potential individuals" based on vague, often highly subjective metrics that often end up being "does this teenager remind me of myself/people I like" (typically, the approach described in the article - a tournament based on voting - essentially sounds like a popularity contest).

I've also taught a lot (many thousands) of teenagers over the past decade. I've witnessed plenty of "high potential people" - those who taught themselves CAD, electrical engineering, organic chemistry, etc. and who weren't afraid to email Stanford professors out of the blue. Those usually do fine, especially because there are so many programs targeted to students like them. They also tend to have one thing in common - a very supportive, stable home environment. The problem that's more interesting, and much tougher, to solve is the long tail. The students who have to pick up their siblings after school and cook for them because they have one parent working several jobs to pay the bills, etc.

When you start to peel those layers, you realize that really, most if not all students are "high potential" in one way or another. A problem is that "high potential" in this context really means "high potential of giving a good return on investment to the venture capitalists/companies/investors seeking them out".