their parts to be part of that. (“I run into him on flights going out there,” Hirshland says of Sabet.) But both agree the climate for social media is getting far better in the Boston area—both in terms of VCs and entrepreneurs. In fact, Hirshland even said it might be time for a social media incubator here, like Polaris’ Dog Patch Lab in San Francisco (more below on Dog Patch, which isn’t widely associated with Polaris. “We don’t position it as a Polaris lab, but it is,” Hirshland told me.).
“I do think there is a breed or a generation of early-stage Web entrepreneurs and Web investment opportunities that we are seeing a lot more of on the West Coast, frankly,” says Hirshland. “We are pretty focused on making sure we are present in that ecosystem and knowing the people and the trends, so that we are positioned to be seeing [deals], but also appreciating when something potentially very compelling is bubbling up.”
In the case of Automattic, Hirshland met founder Matt Mullenweg back around Christmas of 2004—and cultivated their relationship over the next nine months or so, before taking the lead in a small ($1.1 million) Series A round in September 2005. Polaris also led the $29.5 million Series B round in January 2008—and you can find my full story of Mike and Matt here.
Sabet told a similar tale of getting to know the Twitter team ahead of West Coast VCs. He met two of the three founders (Evan Williams and Biz Stone) in early 2007, through a mutual friend at Google, where the two Twitterers had previously worked—some six months after Twitter’s public launch the previous summer. At the time, Williams was running Obvious Corp., which owned Twitter. And Twitter, says Sabet, “was a spinout out of Obvious.”
Twitter had already received some $5 million in funding from angels, including Netscape’s Marc Andreesen, as well as venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures in New York, says Sabet. For his part, the Spark partner built a relationship with the Twitter team over a year or so. And in early 2008, when they were ready for a second round, “they asked us [Spark] to invest.” (This was a reported $15 million round, announced last June, that included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who invested through Bezos Expeditions, his personal venture firm. Sabet joined the Twitter board as part of Spark’s investment.)
So why did Spark get in ahead of Valley VCs? “I think we were much more enthusiastic about the company earlier on,” he says. “I was a user first.”
Sabet and Hirshland continue to spend a lot of time on the West Coast to cultivate the next generation of Web and social media entrepreneurs. About a year ago, Polaris formed Dog Patch Lab, a kind of incubator for young entrepreneurs located in the Pier 38 area. The lab has about 15 people percolating through it at any given time, and Polaris offers them what Hirshland describes as camaraderie, bandwidth, workspace, and electricity.
Already Dog Patch has helped spawn Plinky, a conversational Web startup that was founded in May 2008 by Jason Shellen, who worked with Ev Williams at Blogger and then continued on to Google after it purchased Blogger in 2003. Shellen later was founding product manager of Google Reader, “and we backed him to figure out how to make sense and money of the conversational web,” says Hirshland. (Each day, Plinky, in which Polaris took a seed position and where former Polaris partner Sim Simeonov is interim CTO, poses a question or challenge to try and spark a conversation—and people can contribute to the dialog in a number of ways, sharing answers on Facebook or Twitter, for instance.)
Also part of the Dog Patch litter is LOLapps, which provides applications that
