Michael Hirshland

Mike Hirshland took an unusual route into venture capital. Before investing, he clerked for a federal judge and practiced law in Washington, D.C. He holds a degree from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. In 1999 he was recruited into venture capital at Polaris Venture Partners (later Polaris Partners), where he led internet investments and founded Dogpatch Labs, Polaris's incubator/community for early-stage entrepreneurs. During his Polaris years he backed companies including Automattic (WordPress), Quantcast, and a number of early consumer and internet startups.

In 2011 he co-founded Resolute Ventures with Raanan Bar-Cohen, building a bi-coastal seed firm (Boston and San Francisco) designed around backing founders at the absolute earliest stage. Hirshland is credited with pioneering a "seed-within-a-fund" approach and structures the firm around personal relationships with founders rather than heavy formal board processes — including founder retreats the firm calls "Camp Resolute." Resolute has raised multiple funds, most recently a $75M Fund IV, and typically leads or co-leads rounds as a founder's first VC.

Hirshland is also a longtime writer and speaker on early-stage investing (his "VCMike" blog and Twitter/X handle @VCMike), and has appeared on programs such as *The Twenty Minute VC* discussing acceptable versus unacceptable risk in seed investing.

• Invests at pre-seed/seed, comfortable writing checks "when there's a founder, an idea, and not much more" — often before any other investor.
• ~$1M average initial check, leading rounds and providing many founders their first institutional capital, then following on through later stages.
• Backs people over ideas. He looks for founders with a "messianic attitude" who knew their mission from day one — often people who walked away from prestigious roles (e.g., Google) because they couldn't abandon their vision.
• Prizes technical, product-building founders: he has said coding ability matters and that "MBAs alone tend not to succeed," and he favors highly experimental, data-driven founders who aren't afraid of rejection.
• Has a clear framework on acceptable vs. unacceptable risk: he accepts product and team uncertainty, but rejects deals with fundamental value misalignment or structurally small markets.
• Skeptical of early traction as a signal: "Early traction is very uncorrelated to success" because "there are many things that few people like. There are few things that many people like."
• Red flags: founders chasing a "perfect" product before launch, those who fall in love with technology over business fundamentals, and obsession with growth metrics from day one (which he calls "the kiss of death").