Partner at Pear VC
Vivien is a Partner at Pear, investing in healthcare and AI, and leads Female Founder Circles, supporting 115+ female founders. Formerly with Airbnb and BCG.
Vivien participated in Saywise's AMA series during the San Francisco Tech Week in October 2024.
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I'm a partner at Pear. I invest in healthcare and AI, but we are a generalist fund. We invest in all sectors. We're a pre-seed/seed fund, based in the Bay Area. We've been around for 12 years and we love helping founders get their startups off the ground and getting to product market fit until an exit.
You want to know every competitor in your landscape and why you're going to be better. You don't want to hide anything on your competitive slide, just because you think they're scary, I mean, they're going to find it anyway.
We have a pre-seed program and we see applications and when people fill in, do you have any users or traction or product? And you say, no. That's okay. But I think you can be like, I did it manually and I tested it with 10 people. You can build an MVP without building anything. If I were going to go raise, I would want to at least validate with like a fake MVP or a prototype or something like that, just to be like, hey, I've tried it out. You could do a little bit more to get investors excited.
We created PearX because we thought the way to invest in pre seed companies, we really need to work with them closely and we meet every week. Usually for a seed investment, you don't have to meet every single week. But for us, we want to really be close to the founders and help you figure out what is the thing that you should be focused on this week. Maybe we do a validation and say okay the market is great, so we just really need to build a product. Or sometimes it's the market. So why don't we just do some market sizing to make sure it's a big enough market before we even build a product. Do you have a core team, like minimal fundable team, do you have the right market? What can we do in three months to prove that we have interest. And so sometimes, at the end, it's really just getting customers and building that pipeline up. But what you get from us is a dedicated partner. So we only have 20 companies per batch and you meet every week. You get to work out of our office in Mission Bay. You also get to be part of the community. We host a lot of events. You get a talent partner, go to market partner. And then you also work with our PearX partners who are former founders.
If you pitch a bunch investors and you get a bunch of no's and they ask the same questions and you don't iterate your pitch, it's probably not going to work the next 20th time. How do you take that feedback and not waste any more investor conversation? One advice is, I know a lot of people do casual conversations with investors and they're like, I'm just getting to know them. But every conversation with investor is a pitch. That's their job. So, be really thoughtful about how you want to present yourself and when you're ready to do that.
Have you guys heard of Adam Grant's saying, give before you take? So, similar to this ethos, we also have that at Pear. When I joined, we were like, let's build a founder community. And then I thought, okay, female founders make sense for me. And I was an engineer as well. There are not many technical female founder groups in general. It was a community or group that didn't have a space already. We decided, instead of doing a one day thing where they just meet and they go home, they would meet every single week and see each other every week and become friends. And we would build content around it and not just a founder fireside chat, which is great. We also had fun spa days or we would do a founder speech workshop. There's a lot of things that you could do with community and bring people together.
People just want to be with each other. I think founders really need support from one another. We will create groups and then I won't even join the conversations. I want them to be super honest and complain about VCs or their fundraising process and all that. Or celebrate together. And I think that's really special. And that's something that we think is really powerful for helping companies get to the next stage. It's been really fun to see these people every week and build my own friends.
No one at Pear had been an investor before. We all come from operator backgrounds or different backgrounds. And that's translated into our fund. We're just super hungry. We're like a startup. We always wanna keep building. We host 150 events a year. We're always doing stuff and even at our size today, we're still super hungry and we look for that in our founders as well.
It's great to get to know people over a longer period of time. When you go to investor events, you're building a relationship, but ultimately, it's also a good way for us to be like, okay, this is what you said you were going to do in six months. And six months later, you're like, wow, you did it. Don't go to too many of these events, really focus on building and speed to execution, and then showing your personality through those interactions. What your values are. We care a lot about our founders being super mission driven and also being kind.
It's hard to find a co founder. I've helped a couple of our companies find co founders. Some people are like I can't build this alone. I need a co founder. What's worked better is really just looking around who you've worked with in the past, your good friends. You would be surprised, maybe they're an engineer and you never thought they would start a company. But you have to ask and you have to recruit them. You have to be, it's going to be like a massive company and you're going to join me on this journey.
Doing a lot of references, making sure you really know all the aspects of what other people have worked with. Because the equity stuff is complicated. Make sure you have vesting. I've seen a lot of successful founders be solo founders as well. They hire for their gaps in their founding team and that works really well.
My last deal was probably early August. He was a CMO of Notable Health before. He's a clinician at Stanford. He's building Counsel. They are like asynchronous messaging with your doctor. I really loved that. He was a doctor, and worked in a healthcare AI startup before. It was a seed investment, so they already had some traction. It was an exciting company. Hopefully everyone will have access to a doctor through texting.
A lot of VCs are requesting decks now. You don't have to send 15 pages. Just send six pages. What's your company do? Problems, solutions. It's a teaser, right? You want them to be like, ooh, tell me more. I think you can be open to sharing a little bit. Sometimes it's a red flag when I don't have a deck.
You're already doing your homework talking to people, especially when you're deciding who to go with. I wouldn't do references before you actually have conversations with investors. The websites all look the same, to be honest. How do we explain our services when everyone sounds the same? You really just have to talk to people. Every partner is different, every firm.
I think what works is like, okay, this is a really big problem, and this is where I'm going to start. And this is the reason why I picked this specific wedge, and this is going to allow me to get in the door. This is where I'm going. The main thing is after that, it's like, this is what I'm doing in this wedge and this is why I'm better than everyone else in this space. People get lost when it's like, oh, look at all the things I'm gonna build versus what are you starting with? Who's our first customer? How do we make them love us?
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