Meet Pear Chotbunwong

 

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Pear Chotbunwong. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Pear below.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Right now, I’m focused on scaling Foundess, a startup accelerator and community supporting early-stage, underrepresented founders—especially students and first-time builders. We’ve supported over 500 founders across 15+ countries, hosted events at Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia, and recently launched Hatch House, a gender-equitable hacker house in New York City.

I’m also building out my skincare brand, Manyasiri, where we turn discarded Thai silk cocoons into high-performance skincare while providing additional income to silk farmers. It’s a love letter to my heritage, but also a new chapter in what sustainable beauty can look like when science and culture come together.

Across everything I build, there’s a throughline: creating access. Whether it’s access to capital, to confidence, or to self-worth—I want my work to help people feel like there’s space for them to take up more room in the world.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

If I had to name three qualities that have shaped who I am today, I’d say storytelling, community-building, and resilience.

Storytelling has always been my way of building bridges. Whether I’m pitching a startup idea or creating a campaign for a nonprofit, I’ve learned that the ability to move people—not just with logic, but with heart—is what creates real momentum.

Community-building is at the core of everything I do. From co-founding Foundess, a startup accelerator and community helping early-stage underrepresented founders, to organizing Dream Day—a workshop where I turned my favorite Stanford entrepreneurship class into a real-life experience for Thai high school students who never imagined themselves as founders—I’ve seen the magic that happens when people feel like they belong.

And resilience? It’s the quiet strength behind it all. I started my first nonprofit, HER, at 15, turning sugarcane waste into menstrual pads for women in underserved communities. No roadmap. No resources. Just a big idea and a lot of trial and error. That scrappiness still drives me, and it’s what I try to pass on to other young founders: you don’t need to have it all figured out—you just need to care enough to start.

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copyright: Pear Chotbunwong, Foundess

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