About Me

The story behind this blog is pretty simple. When I became fascinated by the blogging revolution generally, and the WordPress phenomenon in particular, I convinced WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg (then the ripe old age 0f 21) to let me be his lead investor along with a couple other folks. There was a condition, though: if I wanted to be his investor, Matt told me, I would need to start blogging. Hence the birth of VCMike (Matt picked the title for me).

In the real world I am known as Mike Hirshland. For work I do Venture Capital at Resolute.vc; outside of work most of time and energy is consumed being a proud and busy father of four.

During the day (and occasionally nights as well) I am the Founder of Resolute.vc, a new seed stage venture fund.  Prior to Resolute, I was a General Partner with Polaris Venture Partners.

I invest in all things Internet. I am passionate about the Internet revolution and love spending time in the middle of it.  Most of my investments have been early stage (seed or series A) though occasionally I will dabble in later stage deals. As for geography: though I live in Boston, I alternate weeks between the East Coast (Boston and NYC) and San Francisco, though nearly all of my  current investments are in the Bay Area. I also was the guy who originally conceived and launched Dogpatch Labs.

Going from oldest to most recent, my investments are as follows:

• Turbine Entertainment,
• Automattic (the company behind WordPress),
• Heavy.com,
• Black Arrow,
• Quantcast,
• Hangout,
• Sprout,
• Thing Labs;
• LOLApps,
• The Start Project;
• Formspring.me;
• StickyBits (which has since pivoted to become Turntable.fm).

Prior to joining Polaris I had a wild ride in law, public policy and politics down in Washington DC.

After graduating from law school I spent a year clerking at the federal court of appeals, then spent a year clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, which I have to admit was as cool as it sounds. Later, I spent a couple years as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. There, I ended up stumbling into, and then being put in charge of the Microsoft Hearings (remember those hearings when Senator Orrin Hatch, Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, Jim Barksdale and Michael Dell went at it? For a good overview of that whole imbroglio check out this wired article).

Enough of that. I have four wonderful, fun and demanding children:

Henry, 15, who lives for everything sports, plus X-Box and Facebook;

Maggie, 13, who loves soccer, basketball and texting;

Oliver, 11, who is our little naturalist and loves all animals, but especially sea turtles;

and Lucy, 9, who, well, is a sweet little tyrant who runs the whole household.

We also have two rabbits, Speedy and Dodger. (Addendum: Dodger passed away in April 2006, but was replaced by Max). (Another Addendum: we have since added two dogs, Charley and Coco, to the craziness). (Another Addendum: Max vanished, most likely into the gullet of a wild coyote in the ‘hood. So Speedy is on his own again). (Another addendum: Speedy is now toast too). (One more addendum: now we have 2 hampsters, Teddy and Oreo). (Yup, you guessed it: Teddy vanished).

Our favorite family activity is dashing from one kids sporting event to the next.