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,
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.
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
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
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold This is the thirty-seventh interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Mike Hirshland, General Partner at Polaris Ventures. The firm invests in seed, first round, and early stage technology and life science businesses. Headquartered in Boston, it has currently over $3 billion