Pat Kinsel is a Venture Partner at Polaris Partners. He joined the firm in August 2013. Pat specializes in designing and building innovative technologies and consumer products. He has built products in the mobile, search, social, local, productivity, and collaboration spaces.

Pat joined Polaris from Spindle, a company he co-founded and led as CEO from December 2010 until it was acquired by Twitter in June 2013. Spindle developed patent pending search technology to surface the most timely and interesting updates from services like Twitter and Facebook. Spindle’s technology advanced search by understanding the implicit context made available by mobile devices to compose a far richer query than a keyword alone ever could. He serves on the Board of San Francisco-based Lob.

Prior to Spindle, Pat spent several years at Microsoft leading teams within Microsoft FUSE Labs and Microsoft Startup Labs. Pat was responsible for incubating new concepts and bringing them to market. In this role, he led development of Docs.com.

Launched by Mark Zuckerberg at F8 in 2010, Docs.com was a collaboration between Microsoft and Facebook to bring Microsoft Office Online to the Facebook audience. Before Docs.com, Pat built several social discovery applications and helped launch Bing’s social search efforts, ultimately bringing Bing Social Search to market in October 2009. At Microsoft, Pat was a co-inventor of several issued and pending patents in the areas of social search and collaboration.

Pat is an advisor to SparkLabs Korea, an Expert in Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab, a mentor to Techstars Boston, and a former resident of Dogpatch Labs Cambridge. In September 2014, he was named to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s Neighborhood Innovation District Committee whose charter is to expand innovation within the city of Boston.