Mar
Hershenson

The Story

Barcelona to DoorDash, by way of Stanford

Mar Hershenson was not supposed to end up in venture capital. She was supposed to be an electrical engineer - a good one, and she was. Her Stanford PhD dissertation was on convex optimization applied to analog circuit design. She taught at Stanford for almost a decade. She held 14 patents. She built three companies. Two got acquired.

Then Pejman Nozad - the Iranian rug dealer turned angel investor who used to pitch founders from his shop floor in Palo Alto - spent four years trying to convince her to go into VC with him. She said no, repeatedly. Then she started attending one hour of meetings per week at Coupa Cafe. That was 2013. Today, Pear VC manages over $800 million.

Neither of them had any venture capital background when they started. So they did what curious, rigorous people do: they read. Amazon books on VC. They studied the patterns. They went in with beginner's eyes and engineer's minds - and backed companies that other funds overlooked at the moment they were hardest to see.

Character Study

The kind of investor you don't forget

There is a particular quality to how Mar Hershenson operates. She posts on LinkedIn about founder resilience, about the psychology of rejection, about what it means to be prepared. Her posts get bookmarked. Not reshared with a hot take - bookmarked. Saved for later. That's the signal: she's writing for people who need it, not for people who want to go viral.

She describes herself as measuring success by "growing people." Not by returns, not by funds, not by Midas rankings - though all of those have come. By how many people she helped become more capable, more confident, more ready to lead.

Her husband gave her a piece of advice early on: always be the dumbest person in the room. She internalized it as "play up." Surround yourself with people who challenge you. She chose Stanford over something easier. She chose Pejman Nozad's Coupa Cafe meetings over staying comfortable. She keeps choosing the harder room.

She also founded Female Founder Circles - now on its 6th cohort. And the Equity Summit, which connects underrepresented minority VC GPs to LPs. She noted that fewer women work in venture capital today than 30 years ago. That statistic is not background noise to her. It's a bug to fix.

Career Arc

From Madrid lecture hall to Sand Hill Road

Education

Three degrees. One through-line.

Recognition

Awards that track a singular path

• MIT Technology Review TR100 Innovator Under 35 (2002)
• EE Times Top 10 Women in Microelectronics (2009)
• Marie Pistilli Women in EDA Lifetime Achievement Award (2010)
• Women of Influence - Silicon Valley Business Journal (2011)
• Forbes Midas List #29 (2021) - repeated every year since
• Forbes Midas Brink List - top technology investors
• Fast Company Champion of Innovation
• First woman hired on Linear Technology's circuit design team