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Google Veteran To Start Venture Fund

David Hirsch, one of the guys who helped establish Google's New York City presence, is about to launch a New York-based venture angel fund that invests in tech startups. Hirsch's Metamorphic Venture will focus on interactive media and mobile technologies.

Hirsch joined Google in 2000 from games portal Snowball.com and stayed with Google until last February. During his time there, he helped Google set up shop in New York. InformationWeek visited Google's New York digs last year as part of a larger story ("New York Gets Googled") on the local tech scene. Our photo gallery of Google's office space at 76 Ninth Ave. proved popular with readers.

(The New York Observer reported last August that Google is expanding in the Big Apple even more by leasing space at the Chelsea Market across the street from its current location. The New York Times reports Google is leasing 110,000 square feet at Chelsea Market with an option for another 100,000 square feet. That would give Google more than 500,000 square feet in the neighborhood.)

Hirsch was one of Google's earliest New York-based employees and the first manager of its business-to-business vertical markets team. He talked about the seven-plus years he spent at Google in a recent interview. Of course, that's all water under the Manhattan Bridge. He's now turning his attention to advising and investing in New York area startups.

As an aside, Hirsch is already an investor in Amie Street, a music site for independent artists. Amie Street got a spike in traffic last month when one of its artists, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, made the news for her involvement with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.

For more with David Hirsch, see the video interview below.

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