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Daniel Gross was born in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem, Israel to American parents. He is the founder of Pioneer.app and cofounder and CEO at Cue. In addition, he serves as a board member at Cooks Venture and served as a partner at Y Combinator from 2017 to 2018. He became a director at Apple after Cue (formally called Greplin) was acquired by the company for $40 million in 2013 for the platform's predictive search features. During his time at Apple, he was present for the project of integrating machine learning capabilities into iOS and macOS. One of these capabilities was the extraction of contact information from correspondence and its subsequent integration within apps.
Gross is a graduate of the Horev yeshiva and an alumnus of the Eli pre-military academy. After graduating, he was set to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but had joined a program run by Y Combinator on a pre-army trip to San Francisco. As a result, Gross has faced difficulty returning to Israel since emigrating to the US, as he faced arrest by military police for failing to complete his IDF service.
Daniel Gross once described himself as someone who spent most of their youth "feeling like an outsider looking in." Preceding his successes in the tech world, Gross played video games obsessively, but he eventually decided to use the competitive experience he had acquired in gaming to address large, socially relevant problems.
Gross's career in tech began with the founding of a company called Cue, which he sold to Apple at the age of twenty-three. Gross founded Cue together with entrepreneur Robbie Walker, raising $4.7 million in 2011 from various venture capital firms and angel investors, including Sequoia Capital, Lerer Ventures, and SV Angel. In 2012, the company raised an additional $10 million. As part of the sale, Gross was made a director at the company during a time of Apple's significant growth.
After Apple, Daniel served as a partner and founder at Y Combinator, an esteemed Silicon Valley startup incubator with a total market cap of over $100 million. At Y Combinator, Gross helped create and subsequently institutionalize a systematic approach to venture capital and talent search that has since become highly influential in the sector. He also became an angel investor, seeking out companies and creators with high potential in their very early stages.
In 2018, Daniel founded Pioneer, an upstart venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Pioneer specializes in finding new talent around the world, using various online methods and even gaming in addition to conventional referral and interview techniques. The company's ethos is the view that many more talented people are available than are found, including in new and unusual places, and so Pioneer's mission is to find creators that cannot be found using conventional hiring methods. The company is mostly aiming to find and fund company founders.
Experience
Daniel Gross' Y Combinator talk on the topic of advice for startup founders
