Guest Daniel Gross, runs Pioneer accelerator
Host Auren Hoffman
If you invest in 16 yos – who is underpriced? How to identify talent?
Simplest thing is raw energy – it’s hard to measure, but everyone knows how it feels
PG: Formidability and almost fear
Studies on Professor charisma – can tell after 2 minutes if a professor is charismatic
Every culture has energetic versus non-energetic types
IQ matters, need working memory, reason through complex problems, but there’s a asymptote rather quickly
Warren Buffett: Emotional stability is just as important (if not more)
For founding companies, initial hypothesis is generally wrong – how many things will you try, how quickly will you try them?
Energetic founders have more shots on goal
When you meet someone, would you work for them?
Is the person funny? Humor is underrated. Charismatic leaders are pretty funny
Humor creates bonding
like Peloton coaches telling jokes, building bonds with you through a screen
Don’t hire for lateral moves
True gratitude is powerful, try to lift people up
Ambition is more nurture
Who is that person performing for? Who are they trying to impress? Who are their role models?
Bezos even with all his success, is still competing with Elon
A lot of people perform for Twitter
Can we make people more energetic?
Dark Ages, we moved from alehouses > tea and coffee houses
Real miracle for human productivity
Humans have huge dynamic range, how much will you activate?
Meeting impressive people is a real motivator / energy boost
How to create more optimism in society
Number of native Chinese Nobel Laureates – only six or seven in such a huge nation
Lack of optimism
Very domestically competitive, leads to local optimization over global optimization
Israel has no market risk companies, only execution risk companies
No Snapchat, but they’ll will get semiconductors right
Related to harsh society, existential risks
What’s biggest motivator for founders?
Silicon Valley was not driven by commercial goals initially
A Walt Disney sense of building a cool place
Changed today by 1) crypto (instant liquidity) and 2) growing popularity (Eternal September effect)
As Silicon Valley eats more of the world, tech as a sector doesn’t really exist, it’s just business
Most founders now are just on easier / known paths, eg, SaaS companies
Brain is better at imagining downside over upside
Upside requires real creativity
CNN is a menu of moral panics
Some of it is useful, but only small % you have agency over
Daniel only reads Financial Times and Bloomberg – and you have agency over more of the news items, you can trade on it / react to it
Covid – unvaccinated people – no news item or celebrity endorsement will lead them to get vaccinated now
He likes to ask simple interview questions, like your favorite movies
Tyler Cowen does this
Get honest answers, get same alpha by decoding these responses
Can have a better conversation too
He likes the movie Whiplash – can filter the insecure overachiever types
It’s like a dating problem
Likes to go meta in interviews
Start an interview by talking about how most interviews are boring, maybe we’ll go on a random walk, have a fun 30 minutes together
Auren’s own experience: best hires not really related to best interviews
10x-ers – don’t think he could have predicted it at the interview stage
Prefers raw 23yo, energetic, higher beta
Doesn’t like the extremely polished execs, feels like he’s in a punching match
How do you test for aesthetic in an engineer?
Good writing can be a decent proxy
How to quantify engineering productivity
Often must choose between dirty metric that’s easy to explain, and a better metric that’s more complicated to understand
Dirty metric is usually the right choice
Auren: Successful salesperson – extremely high correlation with working hours
Almost the only metric in sales
In engineers, some of his best ones work <40 hours a week
Daniel’s best engineer left work every day at 3:59pm, but would have seen his productivity in lines of code. Spent 30 minutes planning in the morning, and then just output rest of the day
Code that works the first time is another good predictor of skill, versus it doesn’t work and let’s brute force / debug it
10x-er – what they consider easy work is often what others think is hard work – baseline sense is very different from others
Expand job description, do a lot more than expected
They just have a sense of what’s right, what needs to be done
Conscientiousness overdose
How can companies use leaderboards
Staring at charts together as a team is helpful, especially in remote work world
If you have a fixed beginning and end for reviewing stats – eg, 2 hours every week – creates more engagement
Liveliness also helps – constant up and down ticks eg stock market
Need skin in the game – real risk tied to the metrics
Remote work has shortage of emotion, oxytocin
Lots of reputational short sellers these days – looking to bring down others
eg, Slack emoji riots, cancel culture, reputation raiders
Grew up in Jerusalem, orthodox Judaism
What he learned – outsiders are very beneficial for innovation, talent is universal
Advice to younger self
Only moving at 5% of potential speed – do everything faster – how to get to 100% or even 105%
Benefitted at Apple from coworkers, especially when young, being an apprentice
Finding mentors sooner, increases compounding growth rate