Pear VC Opening 30,000-Square-Foot Pear Studio Space in San Francisco for Tech Founders
SAN FRANCISCO, December 04, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Pear VC ("Pear") has announced that it is opening a 30,000-square-foot space in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood. Pear Studio will serve as a collaborative work environment for founders and entrepreneurs. This move by Pear marks a bright spot in an otherwise shaky San Francisco commercial real estate market, with the effective office vacancy rate in San Francisco hitting 30 percent last month.1 This space by Pear will be one of the largest spaces occupied by a venture capital firm in the Bay Area.
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Nomos Co-founders Edmund Loo and Davina Boedijono whiteboarding with Pear VC's Nate Hirsch (Photo: Sed McCray)
This will be a home base for a very active and engaged community of early-stage founders to work, learn, and grow as entrepreneurs. Pear is focused on one of the brightest areas in venture investing: pre-seed and seed, and regularly backs founders before they even have an idea. This space will be used to host fireside chats with tech leaders, to hold hackathons, for office hours with the Pear team across verticals like AI, Biotech, Consumer, Fintech, SaaS, Climate, and Deep Tech, and for work and hacker space for entrepreneurs.
"We’re thrilled to now have two Pear Studio spaces: SF and Menlo Park. We strongly believe in the power of community and feel strongly that the Bay Area is still the center of the tech universe. Regardless of the market conditions, strong founders are building startups from the ground up across multiple industries. We’re building this home for the next generation of tech entrepreneurs who we know will build a better future here," shared Pejman Nozad, Pear’s Founding Managing Partner.
The 30,000-square-foot space is a Grade A trophy space and will have 200+ desks for founders, 20+ conference and call rooms, and a dedicated events space to host talks with tech leaders, Demo Days, and more. Pear will host many of its programs in Pear Studio, including PearX, a 14-week-long early-stage bootcamp for founders, and its Female Founder Circles program, which is focused on helping train technical female founders moving into entrepreneurship. But Pear will also open up its doors to aspiring entrepreneurs, some of whom have not even started a company yet.
"One of our core values at Pear is to give before you ask for anything in return. We try to add value to anyone that comes in contact with Pear, which can mean inviting them to work from our space. We actually have a long history of opening up our doors to founders before they have an office of their own. One example is the Aurora Solar co-founders, Sam and Chris, who worked out of our Palo Alto space before we ever even funded them. They worked from Pear for over a year before they found their own space. Their team grew so big that we eventually had to kick them out. Flash forward to today: they’re a marquee climate tech company and they’ve raised $500M from top tier investors," commented Mar Hershenson, Pear’s other Founding Managing Partner.
"It’s actually quite amazing to look back at photos from our early Palo Alto space. I have photos with the founders of Branch Metrics, Affinity, and Aurora Solar all sitting close to each other, working, chatting and learning from one another. We strongly believe in the power of community," added Pejman.
Pear’s team has spent the last 10 years building the firm from the ground up and they recently closed their 4th seed fund at $432M. Pear’s first fund is a top 5th percentile performing fund and their track record now includes 3 public companies (DoorDash, Guardant Health, and Senti Bio) and many others valued over $1B (Gusto, Branch, Aurora Solar, Vanta and more).2
About Pear VC:
Pear VC is a pre-seed and seed stage VC firm that partners with entrepreneurs from their earliest days to build category defining companies. We've invested in top-tier companies including DoorDash, Gusto, Branch, Guardant Health, Aurora Solar, Vanta, Affinity and so many more. We're company builders, having founded 10+ companies ourselves: we help companies find product-market fit, recruit their first hires, and overcome other critical business challenges.
1 Cushman & Wakefield: https://socketsite.com/archives/2023/10/another-3-million-square-feet-of-vacant-office-space-in-san-francisco.html
2 Cambridge Associates benchmarks
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Contacts
Jill Puente - jill@pear.vc
