May 16 2022

Mar Hershenson - Founder, Pear VC

Advised 100+ startups, $100B+
Works with just founders - Palmer Luckey, Melanie Perkins, Elon Musk
Founders are:
- Risk takers
- Resilient
- Ambitious
- Self motivated
- Creative
- 42% started a business in their childhood
- Can be made
- 37% are repeat founders
- 59% of top unicorns are by repeat founders
Of every 10 companies they back:
- 2 fail
- 2 succeed
- 6 can be influenced
Creating more successful entrepreneurs is about:
- Attending Stanford - 10% of unicorn founders, 40% of AllIn speakers 🙂
  - Intrinsic - peers
  - Network - capital and opportunities
- Paypal Mafia
- Rappie mafia - 100+ companies by their alumni (based in Colombia)
Lean Launchpad - a class she teaches
- 8 teams/year
- 10 weeks
- Should have no previous experience
- Female founders
Lessons
- Surround yourself by the best people and play up in life
- Read a lot
- Get a coach | peer group
- Its about character building
- Early founder intervention program

Great moment
- Mar: This is intimidating
- JCal (without skipping a beat): Yes the 4 of us are terrified (him, Sacks, Chamath, Friedberg)
Have to choose people for the program so its already selective
Paypal mafia worked because they hired only friends of the founders
Paypal Mafia > Google Mafia
- Because they need to learn failure
- Googlers are soft
Friedberg’s keys to a successful founder
- Grit
- Bias to Action
- Narrative
Chamath story
- Steve Chen founder of YouTube wrote all his original code on a Facebook laptop