Daniel Gross, also known as Gross, is the founder at Pioneer and a technology angel investor. Gross has invested in companies like GitHub, Figma, Uber, Gusto, Notion, Opendoor, Cruise Automation and Coinbase.
At age 18, he was accepted into the Y Combinator incubator, leading him from an Israeli military camp to Silicon Valley. There he created a social search startup called Cue, which was acquired by Apple for its predictive search capabilities in 2013.
He used to be a Y Combinator partner and a contributor to TechCrunch.
Gross started Pioneer in an attempt to build a community to find the most brilliant people in the world, wherever they are, and to identify cheap and scalable interventions that might help them achieve their goals. His aim is to provide some of the non-intuitive benefits of Silicon Valley to many more people.
He says the Pioneer was designed to identify “lost Einsteins” — hidden geniuses with the potential to effect change — at an early stage using software and put them on the path to greatness.
