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. The others you can quickly funnel off as hasn’t hit the bar to spend any time on at all.

The quicker you can get to that point, the better. You know, 8 to 10, I think you pause to give some consideration. Of those, we only have time to look at a handful, you know, three or four. Of those, some months you’ll pick one and really dig in hard and give a very serious look, and some months you won’t. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Eric Pozzo, Fund Manager, Oregon Angel Fund (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: When you invest do you consider the size of the market?

Eric: We just invested in a company that does a catheter for cardiothoracic surgery. It basically is a self-cleaning catheter with a little wire in it and a magnet device that can clear gunk out of a catheter for keeping the chest cavity drained [during the surgery].

We looked at the overall market there. It’s probably not even a $100 million market, the entire market size. However, this technology is licensed out of the Cleveland Clinic. The company is run by a very experienced entrepreneur and cardiothoracic surgeon, and we’ve got great connections into three hospitals and hope to establish it as the standard of care in chest surgery.

So, it is a very small market but one where, with the technology, we think we can dominate and create a position where someone wants to buy the company sooner rather than later.

So, at the low end of the market that would be a $100 million market. Some of our other markets can be absolutely enormous, but who the heck knows how much market share you’re going to get long term? >>>

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 really getting to know this whole new generation of entrepreneurs. The bread and butter, the lifeblood of our business, is people flow much more than deal flow. The deal flow comes from great people. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Eric Pozzo, Fund Manager, Oregon Angel Fund (Part 6)

Irina: What percentage of equity do you usually seek?

Eric: I think at the low end we’ve been in the 5% to 8% [range]. But I’d say our typical equity percentage would be in the 15% range, you know 12% to 20%.

Irina: Do you think in terms of the return that you would like?

Eric: Yes. We like to see conceivable exits in the 10x range, five to seven years out. And conceivable is the operative word because nothing ever happens according to plan. >>>

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 specific role?

Mike: I’m a general partner. There are a handful of us who are partners and we all do the full gamut, you know, investing, board work, firm management, the range of VC activities. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Ventures (Part 1)

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 under management and investments in more than 100 companies, primarily in Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Eric Pozzo, Fund Manager, Oregon Angel Fund (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Eric: In our last financing, we, the Oregon Angels Fund, put in $650,000; there was another $440,000 that came in from just our investors who are within our group. That was a record but typically, one of our investments is followed by a $100,000 to $200,000 of side-by-side investments from people within our investment pool. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Eric Pozzo, Fund Manager, Oregon Angel Fund (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What is your educational background?

Eric: I have a bachelor’s of science from Brown University. I sold scientific instrumentation for number of years out of college, and then I went back to Dartmouth for an MBA. I graduated in 1980 and came out to work for Intel as a financial analyst.

I started at a company in 1982 when I was – I don’t know – 29 years old and ran that for seven or eight years. We enjoyed a modest exit, and I’ve just been involved in helping to manage or start little companies ever since. And moved over to this side of the table about three years ago. >>>