Michael Abbott

Mike Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2011 and focuses on investments in the firm's digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. Mike serves as an expert resource on enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and "big data." He also helps entrepreneurs win the race for talent in a hyper-competitive recruitment environment.

An engineering leader, entrepreneur and investor, Mike led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft before he joined KPCB. Mike is also an expert in "big data" businesses, having been the founder of Composite Software (acquired by Cisco).

Formerly the vice president of engineering at Twitter, Mike led the team to rebuild and solidify Twitter's infrastructure to eliminate "The Fail Whale", 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. Before joining Twitter, Mike led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm's next-generation webOS platform.

Earlier in his career, Mike was the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. He was also co-founder of Passenger Inc. Mike has advised and invested in numerous software companies throughout his career, including Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Jawbone, Saynow, Reverb Technologies, Toytalk and Locu. He is a member of the Board of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, on the PepsiCo Digital Advisory Board, was a member of the HealthCare.gov Tech Surge Team and remains an advisor to the US Digital Service effort.

Mike holds a bachelor's degree from California Polytechnic State University and has completed coursework toward a Ph.D. at the University of Washington.