Pear Dorm is our infrastructure to help students build the next wave of category defining companies. Pear partnered with 49% of our portfolio founders when they were still students, so your role will be core to our ambitions to be the best seed fund in the world. We are a small and highly collaborative team, so you will gain exposure across the early-stage venture capitalists’ skillset.
The Role: Dorm Associate
You will work directly with Partner Ian Taylor on Pear’s university initiatives: Competition, Fellows, Garage, and more. You will find and help student entrepreneurs who are building the next wave of category-defining companies. Your responsibilities will include:
- Source student founders through hosting events and managing founder communities.
- Promote Pear through producing content and utilizing marketing tools.
- Manage planning and logistics for Dorm activities and create new initiatives.
- Identify strong early-stage founders and learn how to evaluate market opportunities.
What we’re looking for:
- 1–3 years of work experience. Preferably at a startup/VC fund, or in consulting/banking.
- Strong work ethic. We all roll up our sleeves.
- Exceptional organizational skills. You will help Pear Dorm run like a machine.
- Independent thinker. You can navigate unstructured, fast-paced environments.
- Strong people skills. You will be interfacing with founders all day, every day.
- Team first mindset. No task is too big or too small for any of us.
- Articulate communicator. You have strong written and oral skills.
- Marketing and design skills. You will use Mailchimp, Webflow, Figma, and more.
- Passion for startups. This is non-negotiable.
Requisites aside, as long as you think you can be successful in this role, we would be happy to consider you as a candidate. From our years of investing, we know that VC is often a game of exceptions.
Pear’s founding story
None of us quite set out to be VC’s. Pejman was a Persian rug salesman in Palo Alto whose customers were tech entrepreneurs. Mar was a two-time founder who’d built technical companies after graduating from Stanford with a PhD in electrical engineering. It’s no surprise that when they joined forces to create what would later become Pear, they started by relentlessly focusing on building a home for founders. Seven years later, with $300M AUM, that ethos is still the core of who we are. Every partner who’s joined after Pejman and Mar has done so not because they want to “look at deals,” but because they want, most of all, to work with founders. We consider ourselves founders with a checkbook rather than investors, and it’s why founders love us.
Pear today
Pear partners with founders from 0 to 1. We’re experts in helping companies go from idea (0) to Seed (0.5) to eventually raising a Series A (1). We provide hands-on support in product, growth, recruiting, and fundraising. Our Partners have founded & sold eight companies and have invested early in startups now worth over $40 Billion. We have been fortunate to partner with the founders of DoorDash, Gusto, Branch, Guardant Health, and many more. While our LPs may judge us on our funds performance, we judge ourselves on the experience we provide our founders.
