On a road-trip recently from Dallas to Austin I happened catch an episode of the IndieHackers podcast featuring Daniel Gross of Pioneer. Since first hearing the episode I’ve become sort of obsessed with Pioneer and their month long Pioneer Tournament. If you haven’t already heard of Pioneer it’s essentially an online startup accelerator where founders compete in a month long tournament to receive $7,000 in early-stage / super-pre-seed funding. Maybe not quite as nice as YC’s $150,000 standard deal, but pretty good for an online accelerator!
Now that I think about it, a better comparison would probably be YC’s Startup School— very similar concept with a similar amount of funding awarded to the winners. But I don’t know, I think Pioneer seems like it’s going to be more fun than startup school. Startup School is more of a MOOC, whereas Gross has really gone out of his way to gamify Pioneer to make it fun.
Okay, so when does it start?
Since the tournament is a month long I assumed that registration would begin the first week of every month. But after doing a little research, it appears that the tournament doesn’t run every single month. There tends to be a little bit of a gap between tournaments where the Pioneer team must be making tweaks and whatnot to their software.
As of May 2019 there have been 4 month long Pioneer Tournaments. According to my research on the Wayback Machine, these tournaments have begun:
So there you have it. If anyone else out there on the internet can’t wait for the next tournament to start, now you have some sort of idea when the next one might begin.