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

The segment opens with a short introduction of Mara Hershenson, who is set to speak about entrepreneurship and about creating successful founders. The opening lines are garbled in the transcript, so little beyond the topic and the speaker's name can be relied on.

The speaker calls her talk fairly positive and optimistic, and presents herself as one of the founders of PairVC (spelled "Pear" later in the transcript). She says she has worked for about a decade with more than 100 startups that she describes as together worth over $100 billion, and that they all share one trait. That figure is her own claim and is not checked here.

As a first-check investor, she says she often invests when there is no product and no customers, only the founders. That leads to her central question: are founders born, with the cards dealt at the moment of investment, or is there something an investor can do to change them?

For the "born" side she points to Palmer Lucky (as the transcript spells it), who built the first Oculus Rift prototype at 17 and sold the company to Facebook at 22, and to Melanie Perkins, who started a business at 14 and built the largest yearbook business in Australia by 19. She adds Elon Musk as an example of someone with something special "in his DNA", which is a rhetorical flourish rather than evidence.

She notes that lists of founder traits such as risk-taking, resilience and ambition are easy to find, and cites academic research suggesting some innate component. In that research, as she reports it, Northeastern researchers found 42% of surveyed entrepreneurs had started a business as a child, which she suggests angel investors could use as a question to ask.

On the "made" side she says repeat founders account for 37% of founders in companies today but 59% in the top unicorns, which she reads as evidence that people learn from a first attempt. She accepts that birth matters to the odds of success, but argues there is still something one can do, and that the early part of the curve takes a lot of effort.

From her investing experience she offers rough numbers: of ten companies backed, about two will fail whatever she does. She mentions a 2015 blog post by someone she calls Jason, titled "you don't have what it takes", whose gist, as she summarizes it, is that some people cannot be changed enough to be worth the effort.

Two more, she says, will succeed regardless, and she names Tony Shoe, the CEO, as someone who would have made it with or without investors. That leaves about six companies, roughly 60%, that investors might influence. Her question is how to make those founders more successful, or to speed up the top 10%.

She argues, without citing specific figures, that more entrepreneurs means a better economy and a better world, and asks whether there is a "magic machine" that turns a regular person into a successful founder.