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

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:

Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CEO and Founder of Counsel, on defining a new healthcare paradigm in asynchronous care

Today, excited to get to know Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CEO and Founder of Counsel, the modern solution for access to care.

Before founding Counsel, Muthu was the CMO of Notable Health for almost 4 years and was an Attending Physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and UCSF Medical Center. He graduated with his MD from Stanford Medicine and (fun fact!) was also the Student Commencement Speaker for his graduating class.

Founded in 2023, Counsel provides patients with high-quality, personalized medical advice from expert doctors within minutes. Counsel recently announced $11M in seed funding from investors like A16z, Floodgate, Asymmetric Capital and Pear VC! We at Pear VC are proud to be partners to Counsel!

If you prefer listening to the podcast, here is the recording.


Muthu’s Background and Career Path

  • Starting from early childhood, Muthu always had a dual interest in both technology and healthcare, influenced by his physician father and growing up in Houston, Texas, which is the world’s biggest medical center. When Muthu arrived at Stanford for undergrad, it was an amazing place where Stanford really thrived on cross-pollinating ideas across different domains from medicine to art and humanities to AI. He learned that having multiple domains of experiences is a super valuable combination. Stanford had a really popular concept of being a “T-Shaped” person, the idea of having a depth of experience in one area, with the ability to connect that experience across multiple domains. This “T-Shape” concept really stuck with Muthu, which became a big focus of his to develop a deep expertise in one area but still maintain connectivity and knowledge in others. As he has evolved in his career, he admits that he’s more of an “H-Shaped” person now, having two domains of expertise, connecting both artificial intelligence and clinical medicine. He shares that we are starting to see industries are starting to collide in ways they haven’t before.
  • Throughout his career, Muthu has always had a contrarian underdog mentality.

“What do we believe today that won’t be true in the future? What are paradigms that today feel ubiquitous but in the future may change?” 

This led him to pursue opportunities and companies where people were excited to change those paradigms. Muthu was drawn to Notable in 2019 on using AI to supercharge administrative workflows, which was more of a contrarian of an idea back then, now ubiquitous and seems obvious today. Muthu served as Chief Medical Officer at Notable for almost 4 years, supporting some of the biggest health systems in the country. Today, Muthu has shifted to a new paradigm in asynchronous care with Counsel.

Founding Story of Counsel

  • Muthu shared that founding a company was a major decision—one he approached with years of careful thought, aiming to achieve a true alignment between his expertise and a meaningful, impactful problem. His commitment to healthcare stems from understanding that success in this field demands a blend of AI proficiency, clinical medicine insights, and go-to-market strategy—all essential and deeply interwoven in healthcare innovation.
  • Counsel specifically addresses the urgent issue of healthcare access. In the U.S. and globally, we’re confronting a critical shortage, with the healthcare system on track to face a gap of 100,000 clinicians within the next 5-10 years, if not sooner. This shortage already reflects in long wait times, averaging 40 days to see a primary care physician in most cities. As a result, many patients turn to Google for medical advice, often leading to decisions that strain the healthcare system and negatively impact their own outcomes, such as unnecessary ER visits or unneeded MRIs.
  • Muthu explains that Counsel offers immediate, trusted medical guidance from real doctors through asynchronous messaging, providing advice within minutes to help patients make informed decisions and reduce unnecessary visits. As a virtual medical practice, Counsel reimagines how people access care, enabling patients to consult a doctor right from their phone, anytime they have a question. It’s like having a doctor in the family, ready to provide insights and support at a moment’s notice—ultimately improving access and enhancing the care experience.

“Growing up with a physician parent and physician myself, I know the magical feeling of having instant trusted advice anytime you need it about your health. How do we democratize that magical feeling to everyone through Counsel?”

Counsel’s Business Model and Go-to-Market Strategy

Muthu’s advice to startup founders on navigating GTM:

  • Muthu emphasizes that early go-to-market efforts in healthcare can be challenging without prior industry experience. He recommends bringing in an expert who understands healthcare incentives and partnerships early on, as the sales cycles in healthcare are lengthy and complex. It’s essential to address a pressing problem—one that is top-of-mind for your champion. If it’s only their second or third priority, the opportunity may not have as strong a foundation for success.
  • Muthu advises taking the time to find partners whose mission truly aligns with yours—like selecting the right lifeboat to reach the next big island. He emphasizes the value of finding long-term champions who are deeply invested in your success. For Counsel, this meant using an “echolocation” approach, engaging in wide-ranging conversations to identify what resonated most and led to meaningful alignment.

Advocating for Asynchronous Care as a Specialty

  • Counsel recently published an opinion piece in STAT, advocating for asynchronous care to be recognized as its own specialty. This push aligns with findings from the Corewell study in NEJM, which highlighted the effectiveness of dedicated “inboxologists” in managing patient messages. The study demonstrated notable benefits, including faster response times and more efficient triage of patient needs.
  • Muthu notes that patient behavior is shifting decisively toward messaging-based care and medical advice. Over several consecutive years, inbox messaging rates have nearly doubled annually, underscoring that asynchronous, text-based communication is rapidly becoming the preferred way people engage with healthcare.

“The last 100 years has been about in-person and video-based care, the next 100 years will likely be about messaging.”

  • Most providers currently treat messaging as an optional, add-on service, offering responses when possible but without a dedicated focus. But what if we made messaging-based care a specialized role? By doing so, we could provide high-quality, consistent asynchronous care, unlocking significant benefits for both patients and the healthcare system. Asynchronous care is particularly well-suited to many conditions, allowing ongoing monitoring at a low cost.
  • Counsel is at the forefront of this movement, defining, designing, and developing the right clinical protocols, optimized provider interfaces, and quality metrics specifically for asynchronous care. We’re thrilled that Counsel is leading the way in establishing asynchronous care as a recognized specialty.

What other healthcare paradigms will continue to change in the next decade?

  • Muthu is energized by the shifting paradigms in healthcare that are making the field more patient-centered rather than provider-centered. For instance, the current structure of medical specialties is designed around provider needs, often leading to confusion for patients. Muthu envisions a future where Counsel moves away from provider-centric structures, like specialties and “encounter-based” care, in favor of models that focus on the patient’s specific needs, creating a truly patient-first approach.
  • He’s also highly optimistic about generative AI’s transformative potential in healthcare, especially in streamlining administrative tasks to make the experience simpler for both patients and providers. While early advancements are likely to emerge in automating referrals, prior authorizations, provider templates, and scheduling, Muthu believes the most profound impact of AI will ultimately be on clinical care. He notes that while clinical applications face hurdles due to regulatory and safety requirements, as well as misaligned financial incentives, Counsel has developed a model that aligns all stakeholders to support these innovations.
  • In the broader context, Muthu sees immense promise in AI for life sciences, with potential breakthroughs in accelerating drug discovery and advancing personalized medicine. He’s hopeful that Counsel, along with other clinical AI pioneers, will help drive transformative changes in how AI is integrated into patient care.

Building a Team for an Early-Stage Healthcare Startup

  • Muthu seeks individuals who thrive in early-stage environments, as it requires a unique skill set and mindset. Strong mission alignment is essential. Counsel has built a lean, talented team unified around the mission, and they’re always on the lookout for those passionate about healthcare, AI, and startup growth.
  • The team is primarily composed of full-stack engineers, AI/ML engineers, researchers, and product managers, but they’re open to any roles for people who are energized by Counsel’s mission and stage. Explore the open roles: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/counsel!

Rapid Fire questions:

  • Listen to the episode on what people are surprised to find out and other pieces of advice from Muthu in our rapid fire questions at the end.

Sponsor note: This is the Pear Healthcare Playbook podcast. This season is brought to you by Banc of California. Banc of California partners with leaders to help them identify the right products and services for their business needs.

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

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 coming weeks, we’ll be breaking down each session of the summit, offering detailed insights and strategies from our speakers. Stay tuned!

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

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.

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)

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 

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!

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 a recap on each of the presentations for the entire founder community to enjoy. Stay tuned! 

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

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!

The Changing Landscape of Data in the AI Era

Data has always been the lifeblood of business. In the era of artificial intelligence, it is all the more important. The quality and quantity of data directly determines the performance of AI models and the insights they generate. As AI becomes more integrated across industries, data pipelines and architectures are rapidly evolving to meet these new challenges. In this article, we’ll delve into how data companies are adapting and the opportunities that lie ahead.

The Primacy of Data in AI

In the past, there’s been a great focus on the quality and complexity of the application itself. Today, the spotlight has shifted to the AI model and its underlying data. With techniques like fine-tuning, the same augmented dataset can be used to power multiple applications. This change has highlighted the vital importance of data in an AI-driven landscape.

The stakes are also higher now. In domains like healthcare and legal, where AI is being applied to critical decisions, high-quality data is non-negotiable. The human experts who provide feedback and label data need to be highly skilled. This underscores a shift in focus from the quantity, to the quality of data.

Why Data Quality Matters

So why exactly is high-quality data so crucial for AI?

Fine-tuning models entirely depends on the data used. Higher quality data also enables the use of smaller, more efficient models when 1) there are fewer errors in the data, 2) fewer features are needed to explain underlying patterns, and 3) overfitting to noise is less likely. This leads to improved performance, faster training times, and significant savings in compute costs. 

As a result, data scientists and engineers are becoming the backbone of any AI-powered organization. Their skills in collecting, preparing, and managing high-quality data are indispensable. Additionally, the work in data vectorization is transforming how we interact with unstructured data. By converting PDFs, images, audio, or video into embeddings, we can ask more nuanced questions and find relevant information faster. Vector databases, while still evolving, will play a central role in this new paradigm.

The Evolution of Data Pipelines

So how are data workflows and pipelines changing in response to these new realities? Here are some of the key trends we’re seeing:

1. New Data Types & Modalities: Unstructured data like text, images, audio, and video are gaining prominence. New modalities are emerging, powered by techniques like embeddings and vector search.

2. Automation & Augmentation: Data prep and analysis are becoming increasingly automated, with tools like co-pilot assistants and auto-generated code. This is freeing up data scientists to focus on higher-value tasks. An example of a company in this domain is Keebo, which automatically optimizes Snowflake parameters and queries to save engineers time and money. Another, Typedef, backed by Pear, is working to monitor DAGs within a multi-step datapipeline to develop auto-tuning and optimizations that enhance the efficiency of pipeline execution.

3. Scalable Data Infrastructure: Data infrastructure is becoming faster and more efficient to handle the demands of AI. Vector databases are enabling fast retrieval and inference on massive datasets. “RAG-as-a-Service” is emerging to connect an organization’s proprietary data with large language models. For example, EdgeDB is an open source database that enhances PostgreSQL with hierarchical queries that are more efficient in handling AI applications with tree-like structures. 

4. Collaborative Data Science: “Notebooks 2.0” — in addition to advanced platforms such as Jupyter Notebook, Databricks, and Tableau — are enabling more collaborative features and tools for accessible data science. Techniques like text-to-SQL and semantic analytics are democratizing data exploration.

5. Data Quality & Labeling: With the primacy of data quality, companies are investing heavily in data labeling and annotation. A whole ecosystem of services is emerging to provide high-quality, human-in-the-loop data labeling at scale. Synthetic data generation using AI is also being used to augment datasets. An notable example is Osmos, backed by Pear, automatically catching errors in data and removing the need for manual data cleanup.

6. Feature Stores & ML Ops: Dedicated feature stores are becoming critical to serve up-to-date features across AI models. ML Ops platforms are being adopted to manage the full lifecycle from data prep to model deployment. Versioning, metadata management, and reproducibility are key focus areas. Examples from the many existing ML Ops platforms include Vertex AI, DataRobot, and Valohai.

7. Real-time & Streaming Data: As AI is applied to real-time use cases like fraud detection and recommendations, streaming data pipelines using tools like Kafka and Flink are gaining adoption. Online machine learning is enabling models to continuously learn from new data. A prominent example is Aklivity, a company that makes a business’s real-time data streams connected to Kafka available through APIs.

8. Governance & Privacy: With AI models becoming more complex and opaque, there is a heightened focus on responsible AI governance. Tools for data lineage, bias detection, and explainable AI are being developed. Techniques like federated learning and encrypted computation are enabling privacy-preserving AI.

The Opportunity Ahead

The rapid evolution of data handling in the AI era presents a massive opportunity for data and analytics companies. Organizations will need expert guidance and cutting-edge tools to harness the full power of their data assets for AI.

From automated data prep and quality assurance, to scalable vector databases and real-time feature stores, to secure collaboration and governance frameworks — there are opportunities at every layer of the modern AI data stack. By combining deep domain expertise with AI-native architectures, data companies can position themselves for outsized impact and growth in the years ahead.

As AI continues to advance and permeate every industry, the companies that can enable high-quality, responsible, and scalable data pipelines will be the picks and shovels of this new gold rush. The future belongs to those who can tame the data beast and unleash the full potential of AI. Are you building in this space? Let’s talk.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Avika Patel and Libby Meshorer for their contributions to this post. Visit our AI page to read more about the 16 spaces we’re excited about.

Navigating Security: Opportunities and Challenges in the AI Era

The new generation of AI poses both huge opportunities and risks. While AI can open up a world of new capabilities, it also presents new security concerns, that require our focus at three levels:

  1. LLMs Reliability
  2. Security risks posed by GenAI
  3. AI-powered security solutions

In this article, we will explore the new reality with AI in each of these areas.

LLMs Reliability

LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing, but their reliability remains a concern. In 2023, researchers from Stanford University discovered that GPT-4 could generate highly persuasive disinformation articles that were difficult to distinguish from real news, highlighting ongoing reliability challenges with state-of-the-art language models. We see a growing number of companies addressing issues like biased outputs, hallucinations, and the potential for generating harmful content, through improved AI infrastructure like RAG and mechanisms to test and validate LLMs.

There are a few different methods enabling to test and promise the reliability of the LLMs in our usage, among them:

1. Red teaming: Actively trying to find ways to make the model produce undesirable outputs, to identify weaknesses. Companies like Anthropic, Halcyon, and Adept AI are using red teaming in their AI development processes. Startups like Haize Labs, Robust Intelligence, and Scale AI have products helping provide solutions to handle Red Teaming.

2. Oversight sampling: Regularly sampling outputs and having them reviewed by human raters for quality and safety issues. Startups like Fiddler AI provide solutions with humans in the loop to check for quality issues

3. Runtime monitoring: Analyzing model inputs and outputs in real-time to detect potential reliability issues. Guardrails AI, Galileo and TrueEra are building infrastructure for runtime monitoring of LLMs in production.

    Security risks posed by GenAI

    Generative AI introduces new security challenges. For example, deepfakes can produce highly realistic fake content, potentially leading to misinformation and fraud, and cybercriminals are leveraging tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to generate synthetic media for social engineering attacks. Additionally, GenAI systems are especially vulnerable to unique threats:

    • Prompt injection attacks attempt to craft inputs that cause the model to ignore instructions and do something else, like disclosing sensitive data. In 2023, prompt injection was used to get GPT-4 to reveal training data.
    • Jailbreaking aiming to bypassing safeguards and performing unintended actions, like creating harmful outputs or giving illegal instructions.
    • Model integrity erosion happening when an AI system’s performance deteriorates over time due to adversarial or unforeseen inputs, corrupting the effectiveness of of AI driven security measurements.

    Companies like Flow Security (now CrowdStrike), Sentra, Protect.ai and HiddenLayers are developing solutions to protect data and models from unauthorized access and malicious activity. Cohere, Anthropic, OpenAI, Adept and others are exploring new AI architectures that are more resistant to prompt attacks and jailbreaking attempts.

    AI powered security solutions

    Alongside these risks, AI offers an outstanding opportunity to address security challenges like never before. AI-driven tools can enable high-quality observability, accurate detection, clear prioritization, and accelerated mitigation. Overall, AI can transform the way we handle and mitigate security risks today. Here are a few areas with significant potential for improvement in the new era of AI:

    1. Anomaly and Threat Detection: LLMs are designed to analyze large amounts of data and identify anomalies more efficiently than humans. This enables the creation of better alert systems that detect fraud and security threats effectively and in real-time. For example, Noname uses AI to identify data leakage, suspicious behavior, and API security attacks, as they happen. Redcoat AI and Abnormal Security identify phishing attempts and malicious email activity.

    2. Penetration Testing: AI-powered tools can be used not only to test the reliability of LLMs, as demonstrated by companies like Adept and Haize Labs, but also to perform intensive and sophisticated penetration testing on systems to identify vulnerabilities, as offered by XBOW. AI-driven simulations of cyber-attacks on networks and systems can test their resilience and train cybersecurity professionals in incident handling, regularly improving security layers.

    3. Code as language: While GenAI-generated code can raise concerns among tech leaders due to potential vulnerabilities and logical flaws, LLMs can read code as if it were natural language, enabling the identification of problematic code blocks and configurations that may lead to security breaches. AI-powered tools and security-oriented LLMs like Snyk DeepCode and Codacy embody the ‘shift left’ philosophy, focusing on identifying and resolving security issues early in the development lifecycle rather than addressing them post-deployment.

    4. Vulnerability Management and prioritization: AI can be highly effective in assisting engineers with intelligent security vulnerability management and prioritization. By creating a unified source of truth for existing security vulnerabilities and analyzing factors such as severity and potential impact, platforms like Wiz and Balbix offer advanced vulnerability management and prioritization, resulting in decreased engineers confusion and response time.

    5. Incident Response and auto mitigation: AI can significantly enhance incident response and automated mitigation, like applying security patches and updates to vulnerable software components in real-time, reducing the time required to contain and resolve security breaches. Solutions like Palo Alto’s Cortex XSOAR, also leverage AI to speed up incident investigation, automate and expedite tedious, manual SOC work, towards the vision of mitigating risks with minimal human intervention.

      While the breakthroughs in AI present exciting opportunities, it is crucial to address the risks related to AI models and security. By focusing on the reliability of LLMs, understanding the new threats posed by GenAI, and leveraging AI to enhance security measures, we can navigate this new era of technology safely. Are you building in this space? Let’s talk.

      Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Pear AI Fellow Libby Meshorer for significant contributions to this post, as well as Avika Patel and Pear team members Lucy Lee Duckworth, Arash Afrakhteh, and Jill Puente for contributing.