The Pear Fellows program is your VC apprenticeship with a leading early stage venture capital fund.
Fellows collaborate directly with our investment team to learn how to discover founders, make investment decisions, and support portfolio companies. Fellows' activities range across sourcing, diligence, and portfolio support. This is also an opportunity to leverage Pear to extend your network and build your personal brand.
Fellows have the opportunity to:
Build relationships with student founders and draw on the full Pear team to help them.
Evaluate investment opportunities ranging from $25,000 to $2,000,000. We will teach you how.
Attend investment dealflow meetings. (A new addition to the program)
Lead our Pear Competition and Pear Pitch! activities.
Build your brand alongside Pear through hosting talks, dinners, and seminars.
Shadow Pear partners to support portfolio companies.
Education is core to the program. We usually host Fellows in Palo Alto for a Fellows Venture Summit, and this year we will replicate this educational event digitally. Our investment team will invite Fellows to exclusive workshops where we will share our company building beliefs and investment methods.
All activities are optional for Fellows and designed to accommodate your academic commitments.
We are seeking students who are genuinely interested in helping founders, and who are hungry to develop their venture capital knowledge and reputation.
We aim to maximize diversity of Fellows across student demographics, interests, and degrees.
The most successful Fellows tend to have an industry focus and have ideas on how to improve Pear.
We have limited this program to five campuses to ensure that our Fellows receive the focused attention of the Pear investment team. We are currently accepting applications from students at UC Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Columbia, and Stanford.
As founders, our team has built eight companies and we share that hands-on experience with the next generation. As investors, we have been fortunate to partner early with companies now valued at over $40B, including Doordash, Branch, Gusto, and Guardant Health.
Our strong belief in student founders is demonstrated by 49% of our portfolio companies being founded by students. Over the past seven years, we have formed a machine to support students who are building the next wave of category-defining companies. You can learn more about how we support founders here.
When you become a Fellow, you join a community of change makers. Pear Fellows alumni most commonly go on to become venture capitalists or founders. Here are some notable examples:
