Finding Undiscovered Talent

 One thing I'm always on the lookout for with people. Are they moving quickly? Are they evolving quickly? 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

Persistence, power, or energy, are words we frequently use. I think that's important because you need to ensure the person's going to take many shots on goal. It's just your sense of how formidable they are to you. This may be a question you can ask yourself that reflects that on them. I think Paul Graham originally, Y Combinator, originally said t

I think it can create a lot of energy in someone, precisely because, like a molecule searching for covalent bond,  they're going to be looking for someone else to perform for, because they have that sense of insecurity and they don't know where they sit in the hierarchy.  And they will need to find a way to validate their position.

We know that in markets and industries where there is a score, people do improve, and markets are efficient. For example, in sales, it's very clear what a good day is, it's very clear what a bad day is, and people are motivated to improve. You can measure who's great and who's not. If there's someone junior on the team who's really good, they're re

But part of the issue is, though, that anytime you quantify anything the world, you are taking high-level dimensional space and you're reducing it to a lower-level dimension. And you're going to lose data.

This may be an inverse-U-shaped curve. As you can imagine, very early on, it's a picker's game, meaning, for example, with Pioneer, extremely early. We can pick whoever we want. Very late stage in the cap table, it's also a picker's game. I mean, obviously the company's public for the most part. Hedge funds are in the game of picking, not in the ga

Metrics for success is a fascinating problem, because at the end of your day, you're planting seeds. And it'll take a decade or so for it to grow into its tree. We have these moments at Pioneer where we're not quite sure, are we successful or not? Companies have, at the end of the day, a very short-term feedback loop to chase, which is revenue, whi

And probably, the most predictive one we have is, "What is something weird or unusual you built or did early on in life?" I find it so astonishing in how polar it is. Someone will tell you about, "I accidentally got my high school teacher fired." And then someone will say something incredibly bland. "I did a 10-mile hike." To me, it really explains