Month: September 2024

Congratulations to Kristen Fortney, Eric Morgen, and the entire BioAge team on this week’s IPO!

BioAge is now a clinical-stage drug company developing therapeutic product candidates for metabolic diseases, such as obesity, by targeting the biology of human aging. The company’s differentiated discovery platform includes access to unique human datasets and has enabled it to uncover promising targets associated with aging and metabolic disease. 

BioAge’s lead product candidate is an orally-available, small molecule drug that offers the potential to drive improvements in weight loss and body composition in obese patients when combined with GLP-1 drugs. BioAge has also applied its platform to develop treatments for diseases driven by neuroinflammation.

Pear has a long history with BioAge and its co-founders, Kristen Fortney (CEO) and Eric Morgen (COO). I first met Kristen in 2015 when she was a postdoc at Stanford in Professor Stuart Kim’s lab, where she studied the genetics of extreme human longevity.  That year, Pear invested in BioAge’s initial seed financing, and we have gone on to successively back BioAge at every subsequent round, including the most recent Series D round. 

We’re incredibly proud of the team for making their public market debut today. The financing will help BioAge advance the clinical development of its existing pipeline, with the assessment of its lead product candidate in obesity in two separate Phase 2 studies – the first of which already kicked off this past July. 

This is also a moment to celebrate Kristen as a trailblazing CEO. Building a company is extremely difficult and Kristen’s leadership through ups and downs is commendable. Kristen had a clear vision from day one, surrounded herself by an incredible team from the beginning, and persevered against challenges.

I am delighted to have Kristen be our first female led IPO at Pear. In the tech industry, there still aren’t enough women running companies, and this is a real opportunity to celebrate that more women are rising through the ranks. In the 200+ year history of the NASDAQ, only 41 companies have been founded and led by women. We’re so pleased that this week, that number became 42. Congratulations, Kristen!

We are excited to announce the Pear Emerging Manager in Residence, the first of its kind in the industry.

Early stage investing is more akin to company building than a finance job. You have to find amazing founders, building a great product, in a massive market, who can build a strong business that people love.

To find those people, it helps to have people who have been in the trenches before as operators. At Pear, our investment team have all been founders & operators. This helps us partner with top founders and help them go from zero to one.

At the same time, emerging managers are such an important and impactful part of the startup ecosystem. They have unique networks and access to dealflow as well as the hard earned scars on their backs from operating at early and growth stages. They can help founders accelerate their path to product market fit and beyond by sharing their deep knowledge from years of experience operating and building companies. 

Prior to joining Pear, I was part of this emerging manager ecosystem as a founder and managing partner at MKT1 Capital. I’ve seen first hand the impact emerging managers can have on a startup’s trajectory by helping in very specific ways. At MKT1 Capital, we helped founders hire their first marketer and build their marketing strategy. Most founders don’t come from a marketing background and most investors don’t, so it filled a clear gap in the ecosystem.

Part of what drew me to Pear is our intense focus on providing resources to founders in the areas they most need. We have an amazing talent team with decades of recruiting experience that helps founders make their first few hires. We have a GTM team who helps founders figure out how to bring their products to market with founder led sales.

Before joining Pear a few months ago, I started talking to Pejman and Mar about how we can help bring together the top operators turned emerging managers in a unique way. Today, I’m excited to introduce the Pear Emerging Manager in Residence Program, our newest program to help enrich the early stage ecosystem. We have four impressive operators turned emerging managers who will work closely with us at Pear to help them build their funds while also partnering on investments to help founders that need their unique superpowers. They will have access to Pear Studio and Pear will invest directly in their funds. 

I’m proud to introduce our inaugural Pear Emerging Managers in Residence:

Sarah Smith, The Sarah Smith Fund, a $25M pre-seed & seed fund 

Sarah has been both an operator and investor. She held leadership roles at Facebook and Quora during massive growth inflection points before joining Bain Ventures as a Partner. When a founder is involved in a company over the long haul, the company is 4-5x more likely to be a top 25% performing equity in the public markets. Sarah’s fund is focused on identifying outlier founders and supporting them with people operations expertise. We have seen first hand the impact she makes in working closely with top founders as they build their companies, so much so that founders seek out her unique approach and want her on their cap table. 

John Gleeson, Success Venture Partners, a $10M pre-seed & seed fund

Prior to starting Success Venture Partners, John served as VP of Customer Success at Motive where he played a pivotal role in helping the company grow from $1M to over $300M in revenue. He also co-hosts the largest Customer Success Meetup in the world, with quarterly events in San Francisco and New York City. Founders seek John’s expertise in building founder-led Customer Success at the earliest stages to ensure early customers renew, locking in product market fit, building the GTM machines and setting the company on a path to world-class Net Dollar Retention. SuccessVP includes over 75 LPs, many of whom are Chief Customer Officers from companies like Toast, Slack, GitHub, Braze, Monday.com, and Notion. 

David Ongchoco, Comma Capital, a $10M pre-seed fund

David started his career by writing about startup founders and investors for the Huffington Post and Inc. Magazine. He was spent time operating at companies like Uber, Amplitude, Rutter, and more. He spent time learning bout venture capital at Dorm Room Fund and through fellowships at Learn Capital and True Ventures. At Comma Capital, he has built the strongest community of Gen-Z and Millennial engineers and startup founders. They support early to mid career engineers and builders through their Comma Collective community, in=person event series in NYC and SF and programs focused on the first 3-6 months of starting a company. 

Adarsh Bhatt, Comma Capital, a $10M pre-seed fund

Adarsh started his career in the hedge fund and growth equity world in places like Moon Capital and HQ Capital before making his way to operating roles at Truepill, Flexpa, and Dukkantek. He co-founded Comma Capital with David to support early to mid career engineers and builders at the earliest stages of their journey. 

We look forward to continuing to find ways to partner with top emerging managers who specifically come from operating backgrounds to help build the next generation of iconic companies. 

Pear VC is pleased to be hosting a Fall speakers series in Pear Studio Menlo Park and Pear Studio San Francisco. We have invited prominent tech leaders to join us for conversations on effective leadership, entrepreneurship, and lessons learned throughout their careers. This Fall, we’ll host conversations with these tech leaders:

• Dara Khosrowshahi – CEO of Uber
• Vladimir Tenev – Co-founder and CEO of Robinhood
• Adam Foroughi – Co-founder and CEO of AppLovin
• Pedro Franceschi – Founder and CEO of Brex
• Tony Xu – Co-founder and CEO of DoorDash
• Vinod Khosla – Founder of Khosla Ventures

We’re looking forward to an exciting Fall!