We are excited to share our newest addition to the Pear family, Sean Strong! Sean was the CEO and Co-founder of Grove XR, a Pear portfolio company, and studied artificial intelligence at Stanford. A Pear Garage alum, Sean is the perfect fit to be our Head of Builders, working with student and post-graduate technical founders at the earliest stages.

At Pear, we pride ourselves on supporting early stage founders across all fields – engineering, marketing, recruiting, and more. We understand the unique importance of investing in student founders at the beginning of their bright careers, and Sean joins us to do just that.

Sean has been deeply immersed in the Bay Area startup ecosystem since freshman year, even taking time off from college at one point to start his own. He first met the Pear team as a member of Pear Garage during his senior year, and that relationship blossomed when Sean’s VR management startup GroveXR became a Pear portfolio company. 

Pear has been there for every stage of my startup journey, first as a student and later as founder.  Mar and the rest of the team were hands-on and supportive through the early times, fun times, and most importantly hard times.

The essence of what we do at Pear is help people pursue their dreams. We aren’t just investing in companies, we want to build programs and communities that launch founders to the next level. To do this, we need hands-on, people-first team members like Sean who understand the ins and outs of being a founder.

Beyond working hand in hand with our founders, Sean will also be leading our efforts to refine and build out our programs to support students and early technical founders through Pear Dorm and beyond as our Head of Builders. His efforts will span Pear Garage, recent grad initiatives, and more to expand our partnerships with future builders, founders, and investors.  

Interested in connecting with Sean? Email him at sean@pear.vc or follow him on Twitter at @sean_t_strong.

We’re excited to announce that Jo Zhu has joined Pear to lead PearX operations and invest on the consumer side! With a product background at Uber, Cameo, and DoorDash and investing experience at a16z, we are thrilled to have Jo on the team. 

Jo embodies all that we are at Pear: passionate operator, people-first investor, and jack of all trades. She is a skilled and seasoned product leader— her resume includes launching the new verticals product team at DoorDash, where she expanded the delivery app into “non-food” categories (grocery, convenience, and retail), growth and recipient experience at Cameo, and driver pricing and incentives at Uber. Most recently, Jo invested at the intersection of consumer and crypto at a16z. 

Jo first met the Pear team as a part of the W20 YCombinator batch, then joined us as a Pear Fellow while getting her joint MBA and M. Ed at Stanford. She was hooked on the Pear mentality. 

“A lot of people care about what the TAM is for any particular industry or problem. For me, if there is strong founder market fit, they will create a new market.”

As an early-stage firm, we have to be people focused. The people build the product, and knowing how to help the people is what defines great early-stage investing.

“What is the core problem you’re solving, and what are the features that you’re going to build to solve that? Together, we can craft a brand new space.”

As the Head of PearX, Jo will be in the trenches with founders from day one— riffing on GTM strategies, synthesizing key user problems, isolating for key metrics, and advising on growth, process, hiring, and fundraising. Her goal is to help founders avoid making mistakes she has learned the hard way, and to share practical and operational advice to build a business that is meaningful and enduring over time.

As an investor, Jo strives to open doors and dismantle structural inequities to make room at the table for diverse and underrepresented founders. She invests in platforms that bring convenience, collaboration, and community to everyday life that bridge the digital and the physical world.
Interested in connecting with Jo? Reach out at jo@pear.vc or on Twitter @joandthezhus.

At Pear, our founder-first approach is a people-first approach. One of the best parts about the last year has been welcoming back in-person events. We’ve just begun our fourth Female Founder Circle cohort with a kickoff in San Francisco this past month. We also recently held a fireside chat with Hussein Mehanna, Head of AI/ML at Cruise with 125+ AI/ML founders in attendance. And we’re excited for more great events in the coming months. We love to bring people together, and we couldn’t be more excited to have Kaitlin onboard to lead that charge as our Event Marketing Manager. 

Kaitlin is Bay Area born and raised. After graduating from Cal Poly, she moved to San Francisco where she’s been based ever since. Her work experience spans both the retail and event marketing industry. At George P. Johnson, Kaitlin helped plan and execute corporate events from intimate gatherings and retreats, to large scale corporate conferences across the US. At Pear, events are about building community, from university events to our PearX cohorts, and Kaitlin has that dialed in. “Helping facilitate an environment where people can collaborate, connect, and learn from one another is critical to early stage founders. Relationships are invaluable and events are a critical part of establishing a network.”

Over the last month, Kaitlin has already made a considerable impact on Pear events, from organizing our founder speaker series to preparing for PearX Demo Day and our upcoming events at LA, SF, and NYC Tech Week. We can’t wait for her to grow and expand the world of events at Pear.

Want to reach out? Connect with Kaitlin at kaitlin@pear.vc. 

We’re proud to announce our newest partners: Keith Bender, Vivien Ho, and Addison Leong!

Keith started at Pear almost three years ago and has already made a considerable impact in his time as a Principal. He focuses on vertical software, marketplace, and platform businesses, as well as leading all of our LatAm investments and our data-based sourcing team. Keith’s investments include Sudozi, Chainpass, Miter, Menta, and more. A Harvard Business School and Harvard College grad, Keith launched our Harvard Garage engineering fellowship and developed an HBS case study on Pear that is taught in the popular VC/PE course. He was named this year to Silicon Valley Bank and Terra Nova’s EVC List of 50 emerging investors charting the industry’s future. His people-focused, data-driven approach to investing is unparalleled, and we couldn’t be more grateful to have him on our side as a Partner.

Vivien embodies all that we are at Pear: not just investors, but operators. She invests in health — human health, planet health, and financial health including partnering closely with Budgie Health, Osmind, Valar Labs, Fairstreet, Stellation Care, Supercharge Finance, Syro and more. She helps founders hire key clinical and engineering leaders, introduces them to their first customers and surrounds founders with Pear’s braintrust of knowledge. Further, she spearheaded Pear’s Healthcare Playbook Podcast, interviewing leading healthcare founders, leaders and operators on building digital health businesses from 0 to 1. In her first year, Vivien started Pear VC’s Female Founders Circle, a biannual 3 month program with 3 cohorts and 105+ female technical founders in the community. We’re so grateful for Vivien’s leadership and her superpower in bringing communities together at Pear, and we’re very excited for her much deserved promotion to Partner. 

Addison has been a long-standing member of the Pear team: first as a Pear Garage member during his time at Stanford, then as a Pear Fellow, then an Engineer in Residence, Director of Engineering, and now Engineering Partner. In true Pear spirit, he wears many hats, from  spearheading our next-generation intelligent software and data layer that enables Pear to find and pick the best founders, to conducting technical interviews for our portfolio companies, to vetting highly technical investments. Addison draws on his experience as a software engineer, product manager, and designer to be our tech force multiplier, enabling us to hit well above our weight class: he has been instrumental in getting many initial engineering teams off the ground, single-handedly built the Demo Day software that has driven more than $60M in seed investments for our companies, and performed data analyses that inform our overall investing strategy.

Congrats Keith, Vivien, and Addison! We’re excited for the road ahead. 

At Pear, we have been leading pre-seed rounds in very early stage companies for the last 9 years. These pre-seed companies have typically participated in our Accelerator program, which was developed as a bootcamp for ambitious founders with high potential ideas. Through this program, we help founders pick the best idea, build the highest potential product, find the right market, and lay the foundations for a venture backable company.

Pear Accelerator has been the birthplace of category-defining companies like Affinity, Xilis, Capella Space, Nova Credit, Cardless, Viz.ai, and more. To date, we’ve invested in 120 companies at the pre-seed stage including Branch and Aurora Solar. In total, our pre-seed investments are now valued at nearly $10B. 

Today, we’re excited to announce that Pear Accelerator will now be known as PearX, an early-stage bootcamp. In addition to the name change, we’re expanding our pre-seed offering by investing up to $2M in companies that apply to the program. 

By expanding check sizes up to $2M, we’re now able to accept a wider range of founders into PearX. Some founders come to us while they’re still ideating on a company concept, yet others have products live and have demonstrated early traction, but still need help with critical company-building steps like recruiting or go-to-market. A larger initial check will enable to us to include a wider range of companies into PearX.

PearX had humble beginnings. 8 years ago, a few students in Pear Garage wanted to keep working on their projects through the summer. We wrote them a $25k uncapped note, and by the next year, we had an Accelerator program with a Demo Day that made headlines. Today, PearX is a core part of what defines Pear. 

We invest in people, and the name “Accelerator” didn’t quite capture our high-touch, hands-on approach to what that means. As a team almost entirely composed of founders across a variety of sectors, we’ve been in your shoes before. You’ll meet with the team several times a week and have two partners dedicated to you. We’re in the trenches right next to you, helping you find your co-founder, hone in on product-market fit, craft the right pitch— whatever variable makes the biggest impact to your company.

Today’s markets are shifting faster than ever before, and Pear is dedicated to evolving alongside them. We invest across the board from AI/ML to consumer to healthcare and more, and we accept teams in various stages of progress. Our program employs an all-star cast of mentors and culminates in a Demo Day to thousands of investors where 85% of our companies end up raising from tier 1 institutional investors. 

Eight years ago, we couldn’t have imagined what PearX would become, but no program exists that has a higher conversion rate from pre-seed to seed. We’ve developed an intimate, high-touch bootcamp to help the most ambitious founders build the next generation of groundbreaking companies – and the best is yet to come. 

Out of 120 companies that we have pre-seeded, 15 are worth $100m, and 3 are worth over $1b. You could be next— apply to be a part of the next PearX cohort here. 

Interested in learning more? Read more about PearX on our website and check out case studies from PearX companies Xilis, Bonfire, and Gathermade.

We’re excited to announce that Ilian Georgiev has joined Pear as a Visiting Partner! An experienced operator who recently sold his company Charlie to Chime, Ilian will be working with Pear companies to share his insights in fintech, consumer, and beyond.

Like everyone at Pear, Ilian is a builder first, investor second. 

After getting his MBA at Stanford, he spent several years in the gaming industry as a Product Manager at Pocket Gems, launching games like Paradise Cove and Episode to 100m+ users, and Head of Product at Chobolabs, focusing on mobile e-sport games.

Taking what he learned in gaming, Ilian spent the next 5 years building Charlie, an AI personal finance service. The goal was to “help ordinary Americans worry less about money and get out of debt faster, where the word ordinary Americans is actually key,” shares Ilian. Last fall, Charlie joined Chime. 

Come January, Ilian was ready for his next step. He was prepared to dive back into building a company when a friend gave an unexpectedly impactful recommendation: spend 2 weeks without a plan and see what happens.

 “At the end of those 2 weeks, I looked back and somehow I had talked to 20 different founders, helping them figure out how to find product market fit or how to fundraise or how to recruit… I wasn’t focused on going into venture, but I was focused on helping out founders.”

For the last 20 years, Ilian’s guiding questions have been: 

1. How to Develop New Products: What frameworks, priorities, and leadership maximize your odds of building something new that people will love?
2. How to Build Culture: How do you create an environment where good people belong and do their best work?

Moving from operating to investing is Ilian’s transition to exploring these questions with breadth rather than depth. He specifically wanted to join Pear for three reasons: 1) Pear is good people and that attracts good people, 2) Pear is collaborative, and 3) Pear is exclusively early-stage. Just like it takes a team to build a great company, it also takes a team effort to find and support early-stage founders.

Ilian’s advice for early-stage founders: 

“The most important thing, especially for people who have had a long history of success who then decide to become founders, is to recognize that strengths are infinitely more important than weaknesses.” 

Ilian shares that it’s important for founders to break the mindset that they need to first focus on what’s broken— even if you manage to fix everything that isn’t working, all you’ll get is perfect mediocrity. A great product does not do everything; it does one thing exceptionally. Focus on what’s working and double down on it. 

Ilian is working with our Accelerator, consumer, and fintech companies. Connect with him at ilian@pear.vc.