I joined. After the first week, we could feel the energy every day. We had to meet our weekly goal—which we ourselves set, not anyone else. We were naturally building faster, marketing and talking to users every week. Got our first paid client $$$ in the third week IIRC. I found voting to be fair, but you need to be able to clearly explain what you're doing and optionally add links or screenshots, etc.
It's a very helpful format for planning that we're still doing with my co-founder. Also, every week you need to pitch your project in a one-liner again. It's so good to hammer your pitch based on feedback. After all, as Micheal Seibel, CEO of YC says, your parents need to understand it in a 1-2 sentence.
We won! Every Monday at 10 am my cofounder and I was staring at the leaderboard, hitting CMD+R every second. We were close to the top. But... Boom! Leaderboard changes show that we're... #120? Another refresh. Couldn't believe. We're #1!!! Probably their system was still applying the scores. Damn, we were running around the room. With more progress stayed #1 for multiple weeks until we decided to take a break. We won in August 2019.
From the email we got: > Congratulations to our newest Pioneers: Mohamad & Behnam Rajabifard, who are building There, a virtual office for remote teams.
After winning, we have frequent AMA live sessions with founders, product managers, CEOs of top tech companies. Every month we have 1-2 office hours with Daniel were we can get help on what we're doing. There's our Slack community exclusively for winners and has channels for everything.
In 6 hours we're having another live event where we're sharing our meal remotely and catching up with friends in Pioneer.
(Just in case you're looking to join and have any questions feel free to DM me on twitter.com/morajabi, I'd be happy to answer any of your concerns)