#AIS: Pear VC’s Mar Hershenson on making successful founders

Hershenson’s investing model is that only about 60% of startups are meaningfully influenceable by investors. In her rough ten-company breakdown, two fail regardless, two succeed regardless, and six can be pushed toward better outcomes—making founder development, not investor heroics, the real leverage point.

Her broader thesis is that entrepreneurship is socially contagious: peers reshape ambition and self-belief more than coursework does. At Stanford she sees proximity to ambitious builders as transformative, and she points to Rappi—whose former employees have created more than 100 companies—as another example of a founder-producing culture.

Her strongest evidence comes from two deliberately engineered peer environments. The Stanford class produced one to three companies a year, two unicorns and $600 million raised; a separate women’s program turned 78 high-potential non-founders into 45-plus incorporated companies, with 35 raising more than $1 million.

Those outcomes do not show that any random group can be transformed into founders, because selection is doing substantial work. The Stanford class accepts about 20% of applicants, while the women’s program screens hundreds of applicants for high potential before peer pressure, role models and coaching begin.

David Sacks said the PayPal “mafia” began as friendship-network recruiting because almost nobody else wanted to join the risky startup. The culture was highly contentious, but prior trust let colleagues argue bluntly about truth and risk; Peter Thiel even hired Sacks partly because he wanted someone he could yell at.

The panel’s most useful contrast was that difficult companies may produce more founders than effortless winners do. They argued PayPal forced employees to learn through adversity, while Google’s explosive early success favored safer execution hires; one panelist said more unicorns came from the much smaller pre-IPO PayPal cohort than from early Google.

Repeated public failure was presented as a training mechanism, not merely a side effect of entrepreneurship. Hershenson makes teams report weekly and sometimes assigns a one-week 10× sales goal, while a panelist who ran Facebook’s growth circle recalled thousands of weekly experiments and hours of failed tests that made risky ideas feel normal.

Hershenson treats sales and storytelling as core founder skills that can be trained rather than fixed personality traits. She described narrative as selling the company to employees, investors and customers, said higher education largely neglects sales, and uses repeated practice and coaching in her accelerator.