Kevin Morrill
Denver, CO · @MisterMorrill · LinkedIn
I’m a software engineer and investor based in Denver. For the past several months I’ve been building a system to map the frontiers of science and technology — finding cross-domain connections that traditional search can’t see.
The work started with a specific problem: hydrocephalus shunts fail at alarming rates, and the solutions likely already exist in other industries. A desalination engineer and a neurosurgeon might be solving the exact same physics — but they’d never find each other’s work because they use completely different vocabularies. I loaded 9 million US patents and 357 million academic papers into a database and started building tools to surface these hidden analogies using LLMs and embedding models.
What emerged was a bigger idea: a structured graph of human R&D organized by functional problem, not by field — with financial signals layered on top to show what’s valuable and what’s stuck. I write about all of it here.
Background
Before this, I spent nearly a decade at Microsoft, working on the Visual Studio IDE’s extensibility model so it could accommodate any programming language. Then I moved to San Francisco and went deep into startups — I built the initial version of HelloSign at HelloFax, cofounded Capito Life Technologies (clinical trials data), cofounded Referly, and cofounded Mattermark (later acquired by FullContact), where I led engineering across ML, web crawling, and data infrastructure.
After Mattermark, I led engineering on a new product line extension at Quizlet. In 2020 I joined Teamshares, where I’ve built deal-review software and a banking-as-a-service platform serving 100+ SMBs. I currently work there as a forward-deployed engineer.
The thread connecting all of it: I’m drawn to problems where organizing information differently creates leverage that didn’t exist before.