Ex-YC partner Daniel Gross rethinks the accelerator

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.