Polaris Ventures Makes A Hire To Bolster Its Dog Patch Labs

by editor on Aug.02, 2009, under TechCrunch

Dog Patch Labs is the name of Polaris Ventures‘ San Francisco-based startup incubator, that it launched a little over a year ago. So far, it has helped launch LOLapps and Thing Labs, the startup behind Brizzly, a new Twitter app that was first shown at our Real-time Stream CrunchUp last month. And now they’re adding to the team.

Ryan Spoon, formerly the Vice President of Marketing & Business Development at Widgetbox, is joining Polaris as a senior associate, with Dog Patch Labs being one of his key areas of focus. Like other senior associates, Spoon will also be helping to generally assess investment opportunities and work with portfolio companies, but he will be working out of the Dog Patch Labs at Pier 38 in San Francisco.

Polaris general partner Mike Hirshland describes the space, which they share with the startup Social Media, as sort of a “frat house for geeks.” It offers space for promising young entrepreneurs to work out of, giving them desks, bandwidth, lunch and coffee. And it offers all of this for free, with no commitment to Polaris required. The idea is that many of these startups aren’t quite at the investment-ready yet, but they can use the labs to work towards that.

Hirshland expects Spoon, who is also the founder of the sports social network InGameNow and the high school althete college recruiting service beRecruited, to be a great resource for the entrepreneurs that hang out at the Dog Patch Labs. And he certainly has the right experience for the labs, Spoon is also the founder of sfEntrepreneurs, and SF-based collective for young entreprenuers. He also worked at eBay for nearly 5 years as the manager of the Internet marketing efforts.

Here’s Spoon’s own post on the move.

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