Ex-YC partner Daniel Gross rethinks the accelerator

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.

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.

(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!