Daniel Gross – Finding Undiscovered Talent

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:14)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:41)
Daniel is the founder of Pioneer, an extremely unique company which he describes as a fully remote startup generator that helps talented people around the world figure out if their idea has legs. You can learn more about it at pioneer.app. Our wide-ranging conversation covers the art of asking great questions, the use of predictive modeling and psychometrics to identify talent, and why psychometrics are probably overrated and not that scientific. We then dive into exciting new frontiers for tech investing ranging from GPT-3 to satellites. I really enjoyed this conversation and hope you will too.
So Daniel, I don't think I've ever started the podcast by asking about movies, but there's two that you and I were talking about earlier that I thought would be a fun place to start. Those two are Crank starring Jason Statham and Whiplash, which is one of my all-time favorites. Why do you care about these two movies?

**Daniel Gross** (3:30)
I love those two movies. I find them very useful as a screening tactic as well.
Whiplash is to those maybe who haven't seen is a story of a musician, a drummer in particular with a talented coach who gets pushed a little bit too much. And I very much love that story. I very much empathize with it. The story of kind of the insecure overachiever falling almost too much in love with the vehicle of his performance. And you could cut it many ways, whether it's an inspirational or cautionary tale. But what I find interesting is there's a lot of questions you can't really ask people directly when you're talking to them in interviews or social settings or whatever. And I find their opinion on movies to be something that lets you have that conversation in a fairly coded way.
It's so interesting. I find it relaxes the conversation a little bit. Even as we're talking about movies now, it feels much less tense than a conversation about, I don't know, the top performing stocks or something. So there's an element of play and novelty in kind of using it in the interview.