Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 9)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: You were talking about public debate about angels versus VCs, throughout the blogosphere and how in some instances it has gotten pretty colorful. Mike: Yes, it doesn’t make sense to be antagonizing an entire category of investors that you’re going to need to be partnering with.

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Mike: If a company is not coalescing into something where you think it’s a very big outcome, in that case, what you want to do is think about either getting cash flow positive on the existing positive, or if there’s going to be a need for more

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What are some character traits that you look for in entrepreneurs? Mike: You know, if we had to generalize, the things that most likely to get us excited, that correlate to success are extraordinary product abilities, in terms of functional expertise, and then that intangible but

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Mike: For seed deals, typically we get a small amount of the ownership. In many instances, we’re less sensitive than angel investors for whom the seed is . . .  that’s when they buy shares. That’s their investment. For us, maybe we’ll invest $100,000 or $200,000 in

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Mike: No founder has the complete package. Whether it’s great technical chops or product chops or business and strategy acumen, you never have a founder who has all of that. When you define what the company needs to do, during the next, say, 12 to 24 months,

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: On average, from all your sources, how many applications do you personally get per month? Mike: That’s a good question. Hundreds. Irina: Out of those hundreds, how many deserve a closer look? Mike: I would say maybe 8 to 10 are worth pondering to some extent.

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Mike: [With Dogpatch Labs], the idea is for the entrepreneurial community to be engaged and see this as both a place and a group of people to engage with across a variety of different means. The benefit to us is not ownership in the company necessarily. It’s

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Mike: We do quite a bit of seed investing. We’ve been doing seed investing since Polaris was started. Irina: When was Polaris founded? Mike: It was founded in 1995. That’s when they started raising the first fund, and they started investing in 1996. Irina: What is your

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