Daniel Gross – Finding Undiscovered Talent

You can kind of imagine the world getting split into two: jobs that have a very clear set of next steps—working in the military, or working at Starbucks, or working as a manager in a large company, clear jobs—and then you got opaque jobs. And I think starting a company is an incredibly opaque job—it's very unclear what to do next. It's very unclear, if you're starting a business, how it's going to become Stripe or how it's going to become Airbnb. That seems like an unfathomable goal.

I find the question of talent to actually be the most important question in the world because it is, at the end of the day, required to do anything interesting.

I feel like a lot of founders forget that everything big starts small.

I enjoy reading a lot of old news. I find that, at the end of the day, the world moves in cycles, and the tricky thing is the length of the cycle seems to be just ever so slightly longer than the length of the human lifespan—so it seems really new and novel to us, but it's exactly what people went through in prior times. And we don't read old news because I don't know why—new news seems more important. I find old news is a great decoder ring to life.

In my view, at the end of the day, when you're betting on a founder, especially if the market's not super clear, what you're trying to do is you're trying to predict that that particular person will have as many shots on goal as possible.

We can kind of construe two different styles of jobs—maybe jobs where the delta between the median and the tail is maybe 10% or 20%, so like a cab driver. The best taxi driver in New York City is going to be 15% better than the median, but in a creative pursuit, or in investing, or software engineering, the tail is literally 10 times.

I think if we're able to build a reliable metric for day-to-day progress, it will not only be a great service for creating more startups, but I think it'll be a great thing for productivity—you don't improve what you don't measure.

There is one question that Pioneer asks that's been, to us, the most revealing question, period ... 'What is something weird or unusual you built or did early on in life?'

Over the course of a couple of decades, centuries, a bunch of different psychometric techniques have been discussed. Myers-Briggs is a tremendously popular one that, in my personal and very humble opinion, is horribly inaccurate and doesn't regress to anything really material.

GPT-3 is a machine learning model that's been developed by OpenAI that's achieved a remarkable advance in the field of natural language understanding. From writing essays to summarizing text to doing question-answering, GPT-3 is not quite like a human, but it's surprisingly close.

There are a lot of questions you can't really ask people directly when you're talking to them in interviews or social settings... and I find their opinion on movies to be something that lets you have that conversation in a fairly coded way.