Mike Abbott

Mike Abbott is general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.^[1] He was vice president of engineering at Twitter.^[2][3]

Early life and education

Raised in Saratoga, California, Abbott earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1994 from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and has completed coursework towards a PhD from the University of Washington.^[4]

Career

Abbott began his career in 1994 as a research associate at SRI International. After spending a year and a half working towards his PhD at the University of Washington, Abbott returned to the workforce as a research scientist with GeneTrace Systems. He then served as an architect/director at USWeb and VP of Engineering and Chief Technical Officer at Electron Economy. In 2001, Abbott started Composite Software (acquired by Cisco), a data visualization company, from his home office.^[5][6] He would then go on the co-found Passenger before serving as General Manager of Microsoft's .NET services and later leading the webOS software development team at Palm.^[7]

In May 2010, Abbott joined Twitter as Vice President of Engineering.^[8] At Twitter, Abbott is credited with rebuilding and solidifying Twitter’s infrastructure, growing the engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in less than a year and a half, and scaling Twitter’s architecture to support hundreds of millions of daily tweets.^[9]

After a short stint at Benchmark Capital, Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner on its digital team in December 2011.^[10]

References