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Author: jill

From zero to 25M+ users: navigating the path to viral growth: lessons from Jon Noronha

Posted on by jill

Achieving rapid growth and successful product-market fit can be a maze filled with daunting challenges. For early-stage founders, embarking on this journey requires not only a solid idea but the perseverance to continually adapt and learn. The Gamma.app team has walked this arduous path from obscurity to 25 million users, and their inspirational story shared by Jon Noronha, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, at our Zero to $1M conference should be a beacon of hope to all founders currently in the trenches. 

Here are the key takeaways early stage founders can learn from Jon’s presentation:

Choose the Right Problem

Before diving into solution development, Gamma founders pondered a fundamental question: What problem were they truly passionate about and uniquely suited to solve? As they reflected, the process of creating and delivering presentations—a near-universal business challenge– stuck out to them. They considered it in light of all the pros AND cons and chose to pursue it because of the potential impact their product could have. For all early-stage founders, it’s crucial to love the problem you’re solving enough to be passionate about it for a decade plus of company building! And it’s critical to believe that you’re uniquely positioned to build that tool. Gamma founders were product leaders and they wanted to build a tool that would thrive via a PLG strategy to growth, to specifically play to their strengths. This is a great example of considering your fit to 1) build the tool and 2) build the GTM model to get that tool out in the market. Choose challenges that your team is inherently equipped to solve well. Build on those core competencies as you scale. 

Lead with Customer Motivation

One of the things that I loved most about Jon’s growth story was how he managed early customer onboarding, made it a point to spend time going through customer support tickets, and also was intentional about getting that customer feedback back to his team at Gamma. Jon shared:

“I was relentless about sharing [customer feedback with our team]… I made sure that every week our team heard five or 10 positive things that were going well. And we were getting some diehard fans out of this. We had a small number of true believers. And when I say a small number, I think like maybe 10 to 15 people who really got it and really believed and were telling their friends. Nothing to really write home about, but still it felt good to us!”

You can’t overestimate the importance of driving this motivation for your team, especially in the early days before you’ve really gotten to PMF!

Seize Luck and Keep it Real With Your Team

After some time of slow traction, the Gamma team ended up getting to a point of “existential dread.” The world was changing fast, with the economy going into a downturn and fundraising market drying up. Yet, amidst investor skepticism and financial pressures, the Gamma team had to take a big leap of faith in order to chart their course forward. They decided to integrate AI to enhance presentation design, tapping into a burgeoning trend, unveiling features that resonated and added unparalleled value to our users’ experiences. They would not have been positioned well to take advantage of the opportunity had they not invested so heavily in customer experience and awareness. What gave Jon and his team the confidence to take this big leap amidst so much uncertainty was the foundation he’d built with users and his team. He shared, 

“What’s interesting is this period of time of existential angst was probably the most productive and fun part of the whole experience of working on the company. I think there is a lesson there about being candid with your team about when it’s time to put it all on the line, I think it’s a card you can only play so many times and we had to play it, we had no choice. So we had a huge blitz of development.”

Jon and the rest of Gamma leadership had built enough trust with his team and customers to seize the opportunity AI presented, and this ended up being a pivotal step in them finding viral growth. 

Gamma Thrives

Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. Gamma’s story highlights the importance of starting out strategically, remaining adaptable, and fostering a relentless spirit. By embracing setbacks as stepping stones and using them as learning moments, Gamma’s team navigated the complex early days of growth and product development. We are so grateful Jon joined us at Zero to $1M to share their inspiring story!

You can watch Jon’s entire presentation here:

In the next few weeks, we will be sharing summaries and recordings of the talks from Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM and link them here:

Stay tuned for more!

Startup sales success requires unlocking the power of mindset: lessons from Jason Ferguson

Posted on by jill

In the challenging world of startups, the path to success can often seem shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, especially when it comes to mastering sales and growth. However, with the right mindset, even early-stage founders without a sales background can become the sales leaders their orgs need. In his inspiring session at our Zero to $1M conference, Jason Ferguson shared invaluable lessons on establishing a winning sales mindset, crucial for any founder aiming to go the distance. 

The Power of Pathological Optimism

Even when you’re doing well, a large part of navigating sales is dealing with rejection. Founders new to sales often get deterred and discouraged too quickly because the rejection can feel like a shock to the system! A critical part of learning to persevere is embracing “Pathological Optimism.” Jason shared how he first became a pathological optimist after a few early setbacks. Growing up with dreams of becoming an NFL player, he faced numerous challenges, from physical limitations to an inability to participate in fall recruitment. His unwavering belief in the possibility of good, even in the face of adversity, enabled him to seize an opportunity to meet the head coach of the University of Hawaii when things seemed most bleak. His ability to see and seize the opportunity allowed him to succeed against the horrible odds he was facing. For founders, adopting pathological optimism means seeing potential in every engagement and maintaining resilience in the face of constant rejection. Every founder must become a pathological optimist!

Embracing Radical Accountability

A cornerstone of having the right sales mindset is radical accountability—owning results and outcomes, regardless of external circumstances. For founders, this means looking inward for solutions and taking proactive steps to close gaps, rather than attributing failures to external factors. Adopting this approach fosters creativity and drives impactful action, positioning the company for sustainable growth no matter what challenges arise. 

Authenticity as a Sales Superpower

Jason underscored the incredible power of authenticity in sales. Having overcome athletic challenges and personal demons, Jason’s personal experiences shaped his approach to his professional challenges. It took him years, but eventually he realized he was at his best when he brought his full self to work and learned first-hand that authenticity pays off. 

Sales is often misunderstood, perceived as a field dominated by specific personality types. Yet, as Jason passionately conveyed, sales is for everyone willing to adopt the right mindset. The heart of successful selling lies not in adhering to stereotypes but in embracing an attitude of optimism, persistence, and authenticity. This is especially important for founders who might feel out of their depth in sales.

Real success begins when founders embrace their unique traits and principles, transforming them into distinctive selling strengths. By committing to authenticity, founders will forge genuine connections with their target buyers, employees, investors and more. Authenticity is a precious flywheel with endless benefits!  

A Call to Action for Founders

Establishing the right mindset is foundational to achieving sales and growth success as an early-stage founder. By cultivating optimism, embracing accountability, and leading with authenticity, founders can confidently navigate the complexities of selling and growth.

Remember, your mindset is the key FIRST step you need to take to win in sales and marketing. Engage with passion, act with intention, and lead with your true self. The journey from zero to success is yours to embrace.

You can watch Jason’s entire presentation here:

Thank you to Jason, for being such an inspiration to us and to founders everywhere!

Looking Ahead

In the next few weeks, we will be sharing summaries and recordings of the talks from Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM and link them here:

Stay tuned for more!

In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about Pear’s GTM Practice, check out our page here.

My journey with founder-led sales: lessons from Tracy Young

Posted on by jill

Sales—it’s a word that often sends shivers down the spine of many early-stage founders. With all the complexities involved in strategic sales, mastering sales can feel downright daunting. However, as Tracy Young’s journey with founder-led sales at PlanGrid demonstrates, effective sales techniques can be learned and applied, even if you’re starting with zero sales experience. During her keynote at Zero to $1M, Tracy gave founders in the audience a comprehensive guide to best practices and a dose of inspiration to help them see that they, too, can master the art of selling.

Her top insights are summarized below:

From $0 to $5 Million without a Sales Team: Nailing Founder Led Sales

Tracy Young didn’t start with a robust sales team or even a deep understanding of how to run one. Instead, her initial success at PlanGrid was driven by solving real problems for real people. Dealing directly with customers—from project engineers to superintendents—helped PlanGrid understand their market’s needs and show that their product genuinely addressed their core concerns.

Focus on Growth Levers

Tracy shared that it’s important to seek out “growth levers” by slicing your market in various ways to identify which areas are ripe for investment and growth. Using this approach, Tracy was able to discover what was driving growth for her customers and that helped her narrow her focus and pitch to attain rapid growth in the early days. In just one year, PlanGrid expanded from five to fifty hospitals, proving the efficacy of strategically leveraging growth opportunities.

Grassroots to Enterprise: Build from the Ground Up

As always, in sales you have to narrow in before you go broad. In the early days, PlanGrid aimed at solving individual project-level problems, which eventually opened the door to larger, enterprise-level deals. The lesson here? Scaling starts with small, targeted wins that build credibility and customer base. When PlanGrid finally landed enterprise deals, selling a thousand licenses at once became easier than selling five at a time. 

Focus on Customer Success from Day One

Achieving high net retention rates was paramount from even the earliest days at PlanGrid. For every dollar sold one year, PlanGrid could sell an additional $0.30 the next year—showing the importance of keeping existing customers satisfied and engaged. 

Show up with Determination and Expertise

Tracy emphasized three key traits for successful founder-led sales: determination, domain expertise, and the ability to sell. She shared a powerful message: at least one founder must embrace the role of sales. And not just partially. This founder must fully embrace sales with determination and a can-do mentality in order to go the distance. 

Creative, Low-Cost Marketing: Blueprint Suits and Donut Boxes

In the early days of scrappy marketing budgets, you can still stand out by employing creative tactics. For Tracy, that meant commissioning local fashion students to make blueprint suits in order to create a memorable presence at conferences. Another clever tactic involved delivering donut boxes with a card promising better food options for future meetings. These personal touches and human interactions stood out to her early adopters, and yielded significant ROI. 

Building Trust and Belief in Your Product

Tracy highlighted a crucial aspect of selling: belief in your product. She advised founders to build something people want and to believe in the power of their product. Authenticity resonates with potential customers—they can tell if you genuinely believe in what you are selling or if you’re trying to offload something subpar.

The Resource You Can’t Waste: Time

Time is the one resource founders can’t afford to waste. Tracy emphasized creating efficiencies, whether through product development or customer interactions. Listen more than you speak, answer directly, and always know the next steps before leaving a meeting.

Championing Your Customer’s Needs

What stood out perhaps most profoundly from Tracy’s talk was her sincere commitment to her customers—the ones who “took showers at night.” The best founders are champions for their customers, solving real problems, and providing tangible solutions and aligning their customers’ success, motivations and aspirations with their own. 

Conclusion: Believe in Your Journey

Learning to sell is a journey every founder must embark on. Tracy Young’s story is a testament to what can be achieved through determination, innovation, and an unwavering belief in your product. Take these insights, apply them to your venture, and remember: you can learn to sell, and you can achieve remarkable growth before hiring in GTM.

Stay tuned for more stories and insights from Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM as we continue to share the strategies our amazing speakers shared to drive startup growth.

In the next few weeks, we will be sharing summaries and recordings of the talks from Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM and link them here:

Stay tuned for more!

About Tracy Young:

Tracy Young is the co-founder and CEO of TigerEye.Tracy is an experienced company leader with a successful track record in scaling private enterprise technology companies. Previously, she co-founded and served as CEO of PlanGrid, the leader in construction productivity software that Autodesk acquired for $875 million in 2018. During this time, Tracy led the company through years of massive growth — from inception to product-market fit, and from $0 to $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — and drove teams to execute on strategic business initiatives.

In 2018 Tracy was recognized by Forbes’ Top 50 Women in Tech and named a Top 50 SaaS CEO by the SaaS Report. She has previously spoken at TEDWomen 2020, Techonomy, Salesforce’s Dreamforce and SaaStr.

Young was previously a visiting partner at Y Combinator (Winter 2020, 2021). She holds a B.S. in construction engineering management from California State University, Sacramento.

Congratulations, BioAge! (NASDAQ: BIOA)

Posted on by jill

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!

Introducing the Pear Emerging Managers in Residence 

Posted on by jill

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. 

Zero to $1M: Winning early GTM!

Posted on by jill

Last Thursday September 5th, we hosted our first Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM summit focused on supporting early-stage founders in their journey to master founder-led sales and founder-led growth. 

We opened the day with an invitation for the early-stage founders in attendance to think of the conference as their personal sales kickoff (SKO). SKOs are strategic meetings at established enterprise companies that usually take place at the beginning of the year to reveal the company goals, celebrate successes and recognize and reward top team members. These are very high energy gatherings, where everybody takes part.

As we planned the conference, we knew we wanted founders to treat the day as their personal SKOs. The early days of a startup can be so lonely and scary. Early-stage founders struggle to navigate the intimidating world of sales and we organized this conference for the very purpose of bringing founders together to learn, share best practices, and drum up the courage to crush founder-led sales and growth.

We had a full house throughout the day with amazing energy from both speakers and founders. 

Our morning sessions were filled with personal stories, learnings and mistakes from the founder-led sales/growth journeys of Tracy Young, Jo Phillips, Jon Noronha, and Sam Adeyemo. We also had a session on how to cultivate a winning sales mindset (especially relevant for technical founders who have never done sales) led by the amazing Jason Ferguson!

Before we broke for lunch, we had a special surprise: we gifted Rose Punkunus of Sudozi (Pear portfolio company) their very first gong!

Before unveiling our surprise, we explained the 4 stages that we walk our founders through in our hands-on GTM support at Pear (outlined below) and then announced that Sudozi would receive a Gong on stage as we celebrated Rose’s growth and “graduation” from the FLS stage and on to the expansion stage.

We are so proud of Sudozi’s progress and know they are just getting started. We were thrilled to see Rose hit the Gong for the first time on our Zero to $1M stage!

In the afternoon, we designed a “Choose your own adventure” program where founders could attend breakout sessions that were most relevant to their needs and stages. We had sessions around pipeline management, pricing strategies, selling to developers, customer success fundamentals, and AI and the future of the GTM tech stack.

We closed the day with a fireside chat with the two-time unicorn founder Sanjit Biswas, known for his work at Meraki (which was sold to Cisco for $1.2 billion in 2012) and Samsara (NYSE: IOT, $26B+ market cap). Sanjit walked us through his journey in transitioning from PhD research to becoming a successful entrepreneur in the tech world, focusing on how he learned sales and how he approached sales-led and product-led growth at Meraki and Samsara.

Thank you to all the speakers for being so generous with your time and for filling the day with rich insights and inspiration for the early-stage founders in attendance. Tracy Young Joseph Elias Phillips Jon Noronha Samuel Adeyemo Jason Ferguson Stevie Case Armando Mann Rosie Roca Rich Liu Josh Greene Nelson Bostrom Elaine Zelby Amanda Kahlow Everett Berry Jessica Ko Jessica Gilmartin 🔮 Sandy Mangat Zena Davé Zach Vidibor Kerry Wang Kyle Poyar Kathleen Estreich Keith Bender.  

In the next few weeks, we will be sharing summaries and recordings of the talks from Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM and link them here:

Stay tuned for more!

All in all, it was a 10/10 day! We’re overjoyed by the amazing feedback we’ve received from founders in attendance. A couple examples include:

We are inspired to continue to support founders in their early GTM efforts, and already can’t wait for next year’s Zero to $1M conference!

Last but definitely not least, we want to thank our sponsors Cooley LLP, Banc of California, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Remote for supporting this initiative.

If you are interested in learning more about Pear’s GTM Practice, check out our page here.

Fall Speaker Series

Posted on by jill

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!

Pear Biotech Bench to Business: insights on ‘Designer Immune Systems,’ allogeneic stem cell therapies, and making an impact on the lives of patients with Ivan Dimov

Posted on by jill

Here at Pear, we specialize in backing companies at the pre-seed and seed stages, and we work closely with our founders to bring their breakthrough ideas, technologies, and businesses from 0 to 1. Because we are passionate about the journey from bench to business, we created this series to share stories from leaders in biotech and academia and to highlight the real-world impact of emerging life sciences research and technologies. This post was written by Pear PhD Fellow Sarah Jones.

Today, we’re excited to share insights from our discussion with Dr. Ivan Dimov, CEO and co-founder of Orca Bio. Ivan has co-founded three high-tech companies and two R&D centers, and he is now working to make next-generation cell therapies safer and more efficacious at Orca.

More about Ivan:

Ivan earned a Ph.D. in Applied Biophysics from Dublin City University and has since worked as a postdoc at UC Berkeley and as a visiting instructor and senior scientist at Stanford. His passion for translating his work and his tech-heavy background have made him an expert in electronics and bio-microelectromechanical systems (bio-MEMS) and have helped him to work on numerous projects and companies including Blobcode Technologies, Lucira Health, and Orca Bio. 

If you prefer listening, here’s a link to the recording! 

Insight #1: Instead of building a technology and then searching for the right application, it’s much more efficient to identify the right problem prior to creating a solution. 

  • There are many approaches to starting a company and making new, impactful discoveries. As someone with a strong tech and engineering background, Ivan was trained to find and create interesting, powerful new technologies and go hunting for applications; he made hammers and went searching for nails. 
  • However, when working with Dr. Irv Weissman at Stanford as a postdoc, Ivan learned to do things a little differently. 
  • Though Ivan’s background was primarily in applied biophysics and bioengineering, the Weissman lab’s focus was medicine and biomedical research. Ivan acknowledged that when you work in medicine, you are exposed to an over-abundance of problems, and in this environment, Ivan learned that the most effective solutions are those that are tailor-made to fulfill a clearly defined need. 

Working with physicians was a huge change in mentality for me…you’re seeing suffering everywhere and you have all these problems, and you sort of have to figure out, okay, which problem do you want to focus on, and what’s the best solution or technology you can come up with for that problem? I think that’s probably the better way of doing innovation…rather than trying to squeeze in some technology that was thought of in a different context and trying to make it work.

  • One such problem was related to the poor outcomes of stem cell transplants, a procedure in which a donor’s stem cells are harvested and administered to a recipient. Ivan explained that there wasn’t a way to sort out the good cells from the bad and ensure that the recipient was only receiving cells that would therapeutically benefit them and minimize unwanted side effects. 
  • The idea of creating precise and well-defined stem cell therapies would become the central theme of Ivan’s work at Stanford and later of Orca Bio.

Insight #2: Academia is great for exploring, learning, and making mistakes. However, industry is where you can iron out the more mundane details of company creation and focus on impact and real-world use cases.  

  • Having started three companies–Blobcode Technologies, Lucira Health, and Orca Bio–Ivan has extensive experience in taking ideas from academia to industry. 
  • Lucira Health, a diagnostics company that has since been acquired by Pfizer, was spun out of Ivan’s work at Berkeley. The goal was to miniaturize a microfluidic chip that could be utilized as an at-home diagnostic. Notably, the company received approval from the FDA for their at-home COVID test that could read out results in about 30 minutes.
  • While at Berkeley, Ivan spent time fine-tuning the idea and conducting proof-of-concept experiments for the chip. However, it became apparent that this academic setting wasn’t necessarily conducive to the less thrilling aspects of the project. Spinning out and starting Lucira allowed the team to more efficiently work on the ‘mundane’ details like reproducibility and clinical trial design.

[Academia is a safe place where] there’s a lot of openness to trying out new things… and the greatest thing about it is that you can try it and you can make a mistake and that’s okay. You can come up with a better alternative.

  • While Ivan agrees that academic labs are a great place for ideation and company incubation, it’s important to be vigilant and humble enough to realize when it’s time to take the next step. Industry and academia each have their respective strengths, and Ivan learned that both were crucial to the growth and future success of his companies.

Insight #3: Stem cell therapies don’t have to be so risky: by cherry-picking the cells that a patient receives, long-term outcomes can be significantly improved.

  • In leukemia, cells in the bone marrow and lymphatic system become cancerous and rapidly multiply. To treat this type of malignancy, patients often go through multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, or targeted immunotherapy and may receive an allogeneic stem cell transplant. 
  • Essentially, a conventional allogeneic transplant begins when the patient receives chemotherapy and/or radiation to wipe out all of the cancerous blood cells together with the patient’s healthy blood and immune cells. Once the cancer can no longer be detected, stem cells from the bone marrow of a healthy donor will be administered. These new cells can multiply and grow into mature, functioning blood and immune cells.
  • For some patients, this treatment is curative and wipes out any trace of cancer from their systems. However, even after chemotherapy and radiation, some cancer cells may go undetected and cause a patient to relapse.

The problem with cancer is that if you leave even a little bit of it behind, even a single cell that hides and survives, it has the potential to reinitiate and restart your cancer from scratch… When you get into full remission–meaning we can’t measure any more cancer in you–it just means that our tests aren’t sensitive enough to see if it’s there or not there.

  • Once the stem cell transplant is complete, it takes a couple of weeks for the new immune and blood systems to get up and running. The hope is that these new immune cells can wipe out any remaining cancer cells that may be hiding out. 
  • In addition to the potential for relapse, patients frequently develop either acute or chronic Graft-vs-host-disease (GVHD), complications in which the new immune cells from the donor start to attack the patient’s (host’s) own cells and tissues. GVHD can affect many parts of the body and can even lead to death. 

In a standard transplant, your chances of surviving for twelve months free of relapse or free from GVHD is somewhere around 30-40%. With Orca Bio… we can get rates somewhere between 70-80% ideal survival rates.

  • So how do they do it? Ivan’s goal at Orca Bio is to revolutionize the cell therapy space by creating a high-precision cell therapy that gives patients only the most efficacious donor cells. 
  • Orca’s unique platform identifies and sorts for donor cells that have the highest therapeutic benefit. By removing cells that either harm or don’t help the patient, the patient’s chances for relapse or developing GVHD are dramatically reduced.
  • With what they call their ‘designer immune system,’ Orca’s approach aims to help patients recover more quickly, prevent relapse, and be safe enough for older or sicker patients who can’t receive traditional stem cell transplants.

Insight #4: To solve the problems of current allogeneic stem cell transplants, you have to balance killing the remaining cancer cells with protecting the patient’s own tissues and cells.

  • When designing an immune system to infuse into patients with blood cancer, it can be difficult to kill cancer cells without harming other cells in the patient’s body. 
  • In a healthy immune system, cells called regulatory T cells (T-regs) monitor and regulate what effector T cells are doing. Such effector T cells can help promote inflammation and eliminate cancer cells. However, when a patient has cancer, there is an imbalance between these two cell types, and the immune cells don’t effectively kill the cancer cells. 
  • These types of cells are often involved in autoimmune disorders and can also play a role in the development of acute GVHD shortly following the stem cell transplant or in chronic GVHD, long after the treatment has concluded. 
  • Orca Bio’s first product, Orca-T, helps to restore balance in the immune system by first bringing stem cells and T-reg cells into the patient’s body to let them set up the immunoregulatory environment. Once the T-regs and stem cells have had a chance to settle in and begin restoring the patient’s immune and blood systems, conventional T cells with cancer-killing capabilities are administered.
  • Orca-T has reached Phase III clinical trials for indications such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML), myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL), and mixed-phenotype acute leukemia (MPAL) in patients with matched donors who are younger than 65. Matched donors are those that share the same human leukocyte antigen (HLA) profile, and this means that these cells are less likely to be identified as intruders in the patient’s body, thus reducing the risk for GVHD.
  • Patients receiving Orca-T first receive chemotherapy and/or radiation to target cancer cells and suppress their immune systems. The first dose of Orca-T is an infusion of stem cells that regenerate the blood and T-regs that help set the immune landscape. Two days later, the patient receives an infusion of conventional T cells that can begin to attack any remaining cancer cells. 

What’s amazing about this approach is that by doing that, you’re not turning off the effector T cells from destroying the cancer. You’re just turning off alloreactivity in the key organ sites where you might create GVHD, but you’re still keeping it on for wherever the cancer might be.

  • Moving forward, the company is continuing its work on Orca-T by expanding the age range of patients who can be treated with the drug.
  • The pipeline also includes next-gen cell therapy treatment, Orca-Q.
  • To solve the problem of limited matched donor availability, Orca-Q is a high-precision cell therapy that has been tailored for haploidentical, or half-matched donors. These donors are typically parents, children, or siblings and can be much easier to find. However, the risk for GVHD increases with a half-matched donor compared to a fully matched donor.
  • Orca-Q has so far shown positive results in Phase I in oncological indications and is being investigated for autoimmune and hematological indications, as well. 

Insight #5: Sometimes science is personal: reflecting on Orca’s journey, Ivan and his team have a deep understanding of how their work can change lives.

  • Having treated more than 400 patients so far, Orca has seen firsthand how patients can benefit from their novel stem cell transplants. 
  • In particular, patients who are too old or too sick for traditional transplants now have a fighting chance.

One of the most incredible stories was about my co-founder’s [Nate Fernhoff’s] father-in-law. He was 71 years old when he was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome. He had an aggressive variant of the disease…however, physicians feel very skittish about treating folks at that age with a myeloablative allogeneic bone marrow transplant, so they’re offering a reduced protocol [with a much worse chance of controlling the cancer]. We started looking for clinical trials, anything that would cover folks of that age.

  • Dr. Fernhoff’s father–in-law, Mikhail Rubin, was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer and found that his options for treatment were extremely limited. The most successful and aggressive forms of treatment were offered only to younger patients. 
  • Meanwhile, Orca’s clinical trials had so far proven to be safe and effective. The Orca team sprang into action and started working to convince physicians and the FDA to allow them to treat patients older than 65 and expand the enrollment criteria for the trial.
  • Ivan noted that this exclusion of the most dire patients stems from the industry’s hesitancy to add further risk to clinical trials.

In April of 2021, we were given the permissions, and were able to treat him. It’s been a phenomenal recovery. He recovered much faster than any of his younger counterparts even though a lot of physicians thought it would take months in the hospital for him to get out. Yet, in the first year after, he started riding his mountain bike and did 3,000 miles on his bike.

  • Not only is Mr. Rubin back to biking, he has also been cancer-free and GVHD-free for three years now. 
  • While science tends to be objective in nature, personal connections and motivations help drive the mission and make work like this possible. 

PearX W25 applications are now open

Posted on by jill

The S24 batch of PearX is underway and the founders have been pushing hard to launch products, grow customers, and get their products to scale. This year we have seen a surge in AI companies with over 95% of S24 companies focusing on AI. Our AI team is ready and looking for companies in AI infrastructure and vertical applications. Read more about our AI thesis. We couldn’t be more excited about the S24 batch of companies, which we will share more about publicly in the fall.

Simultaneously, we have been hard at work preparing for the W25 batch kicking off in January. Today, we’re opening applications for our W25 cohort and encourage all teams from idea stage to companies with traction to apply. Apply here now.

Key Dates:

Early applications and interviews: Early application deadline on August 30th. If you apply by this deadline, you will hear from us by mid-September.

Regular Applications: Applications close on October 1st. You will hear from us by November 25th at the latest.

PearX is an immersive small-batch 14-week accelerator which counts top performing companies like Viz.ai, Affinity, Xilis, Capella Space, Cardless, Nova Credit, Federato, Valar Labs among its alumni. Pear has also backed DoorDash, Dropbox, Vanta, Aurora Solar, Gusto, Guardant Health at the seed stage.

At PearX, we provide custom services and support for each company. From capital, hiring, founder-led sales, to fundraising support, everything we do takes into account the unique needs that each company has.

Here is what you get with PearX:

  • Capital to build your company, your way: We invest between $250k and $2M in all PearX companies. We know that some founders only need a small amount of capital to ideate and other teams are in more cost-intensive verticals that require more funding. All companies are unique so we’ll work with you. 
  • Credits: We provide up to $650k in credits from top providers like Azure, OpenAI, AWS, Google, Anthropic, and many more.
  • Founder to founder: Work 1:1 with a partner who has been in your shoes and knows your industry. Our team has started and sold 10 companies to the likes of Cisco, Instacart, Plaid, and Zynga.
  • Join the best community: Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be a lonely journey. Joining PearX means joining a community of like-minded founders. We kick off each cohort with Camp Pear: a 3-day retreat for the entire cohort to come together, learn key company building tactics, and get to know one another. Not only will you work alongside your PearX batch for 14+ weeks, but you’ll also have the wider PearX alumni network to lean on. 
  • Access Pear Studio: Everyone in PearX receives dedicated office space in Pear Studio SF, our 30,000 square foot state-of-the-art office space with standing desks, conference rooms, phone booths, and more. This space is completely free to you for the first 12 months.
  • Build a scalable sales motion: Our go-to-market team, Pepe and Ana, will guide you through the critical steps of sales: nailing ICP, prospecting, customer discovery, messaging, and more. 
  • Recruit the best talent: Our dedicated PearX Recruiter, Nate, will find your founding engineer, co-founder, or whatever critical hire your team needs. In the last two cohorts, Nate has hired 25 people for our PearX companies. Nate leads the full cycle of recruiting for your team – from sourcing to closing candidates. This is an unprecedented level of support for an accelerator, but that’s how much we believe that hiring impacts company building. Last batch, Nate hired an average of two people per PearX company.
  • Fundraise strategically: We help you raise additional capital when you’re ready. From perfecting the story and creating a pitch deck to creating a target investor list and negotiating and closing your round. In fact, 90% of companies that go through PearX raise capital from institutional investors.

Join us for PearX W25:

Are you interested in joining our PearX W25 cohort? We’re looking for the next generation of category defining companies. Please apply at pear.vc/pearx.

How three PearX S19 alums raised $50M this quarter

Posted on by jill

Today, raising capital is far more challenging than it was a few years ago. There are no fake Series A’s— most businesses require a good foundation, strong unit economics and growth as well as a moat to get there. We talked to three alums from our 2019 PearX cohort to hear how they raised capital this year: Andrew Powell from Learn to Win, John Dean from Windborne, and Parth Shah from Polimorphic. 

PearX is our exclusive, small batch, 14 week program. 90% of our companies go on to raise a successful seed round from top tier investors. PearX alumni companies include Affinity (S14), Viz.ai (S16),  Cardless (S19), Federato (S20), Valar Labs (S21), and more. 

Answers have been edited for brevity. 

Learn to Win (PearX S19):

Learn to Win is a training platform that empowers companies to design, deliver and assess the impact of employee training. They serve customers across commercial and government markets in primarily high-intensity training situations. Learn to Win closed a $30M Series A round in June 2024, led by the Westly Group and joined by Pear and Norwest Venture Partners.

Windborne Systems (PearX S19):

Windborne is a full-stack, vertically-integrated weather intelligence company. They operate the largest balloon constellation on the planet, running a base weather forecast with the data they collect from those balloons. Windborne raised a $15M Series A round, led by Khosla Ventures and joined by existing investors Footwork VC, Pear VC, and Convective Capital.

Polimorphic (PearX S19):

Polimorphic digitizes government operations, helping governments provide a great customer service experience to their residents and businesses. AI-powered search and voice software empowers municipal employees with saved time and resources, while delivering a modern service experience that delights residents. Polimorphic raised a $5.6M round, led by M13 with participation from existing investors Shine Capital and Pear VC.

It’s been five years since you went through PearX. What did you learn from this accelerator program that still provides you value today? 

Windborne: Mar played a big role in us even founding a company. Our very first check came from Pear Dorm. Fundamentally, we learned how to be entrepreneurs, and every connection in those early days came through Pear. 

Polimorphic: One of the most interesting pieces of it was thinking about how venture-scale businesses are different. When we came into PearX, we didn’t even have a company yet, and we hadn’t even landed on this iteration of Polimorphic. 

It takes time to find product market fit. PearX supported us during the exploration phase— you need to be nimble, trying stuff until you find what clicks. COVID interfered with a lot of our plans to work with the government in the early days, and recently we’ve really found product market fit.  

Where has Pear helped your company the most? 

Learn to Win: Hiring and fundraising. Pear has helped hire our first few engineers and our first few executives. 

Windborne: Especially in the last year and a half, Pear’s talent team has been insanely helpful with hiring. Beyond that, they offer general advice on people ops: compensation, policies, equity splits— everything around managing people. We use Ashby for free through Pear. It’s very convenient to have a VC you trust a lot to help you get set up with these things. 

One of the single biggest challenges that all companies face is talent. If you’re good at talent, you’ll win. If you’re bad at talent, you’ll lose. To have a VC that stands out in talent is incredibly valuable. 

What’s a piece of advice for founders trying to raise a Series A? 

Learn to Win: When it comes to Series A, there’s certainly more of an emphasis on metrics and scalability. Talk to other folks in your sector and ask them what key metric they were gunning for, what pieces of evidence they gave to investors to help them understand your business opportunity.

At seed, we proved we could build a great product and deliver great value for customers. What needs to change is an engine that can repeatedly do that at scale. 

Windborne: My biggest piece of advice is to be wary of advice that isn’t relevant to you. Think about where you want advice and where you don’t. For us, we disregard a lot of things people tell us when it comes to engineering and manufacturing when they don’t understand the way we run our business. You’re not going to win by only following commercial industry wisdom. 

As the rounds progress, things definitely get harder— riskier, scarier, more challenging. But they also get so much more fun. 

What sets Pear apart from other venture firms? 

Polimorphic: Pear’s willingness to be involved. We were pre-idea, pre-company when we met Pear; we just knew we were interested in the political realm. Pear stuck with us as we started to explore government. Their ethos of investing in people manifested in sticking with us through a few different iterations.

Learn to Win: Pear is an expert at early stage— even what comes before it. We were still students at Stanford working out of our dorm room, and Pejman and Mar were some of the first people to believe in the potential of our business. In the early days, there’s so many people that could point out a million reasons why your startup will fail. Pear believed in the one reason out of a million and helped us understand how to dig into it. 

What are your goals for the next phase of your company? 

Learn to Win: We’re trying to ramp up our defense business and grow aggressively across the board. We’re just scratching the surface, and we’re excited to see what we can do with this new capital.

Windborne: We want to scale up data collection operations. We’re launching around 100 balloons a month, and we want to be doing a few hundred a month. By the next round, we want to be doing over 10 million a year in revenue. And more importantly, we want to be collecting more in situ weather observations than the rest of the world combined.

Polimorphic: We’re on path to having 100 government clients, which is a big milestone. We started with cities and counties and are about to do our first state-level deal. That’s the next big phase: acquiring more customers, delivering a new paradigm for governments to provide customer service to their residents. 

All three of these companies were in the same PearX S19 cohort. At the time, these startups were all just a few founders and an idea. It’s amazing to see their growth and to see them collectively raise $50M+ over the last quarter. Read more about PearX here. Applications for PearX W25 open on August 20th.