Mike Abbott

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Mike Abbott
EducationB.S. Biochemistry
Alma materCalifornia Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo
AwardsTechFellow Award - Engineering Leadership 2009
Websiteuncapitalized.com

Mike Abbott was the Executive Vice President, Software for General Motors.[1] He was formerly the vice president of Apple's Cloud Services team. He also previously worked as a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,[2] vice president of engineering at Twitter, team lead for Azure at Microsoft and senior vice president of apps and services at Palm.[3][4][5]

Early life and education[edit]

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.[6]

Career[edit]

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 virtualization company, from his home office.[7][8] 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.[9][3]

In May 2010, Abbott joined Twitter as Vice President of Engineering.[10] 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.[11]

After a short stint at Benchmark Capital, Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner on its digital team in December 2011.[12]

In 2017 Mike Abbott announced that he was leaving his role of general partner at Kleiner Perkins.[13][2][14][15] Kleiner Perkins partner Ted Schlein said that Mike Abbott left the firm because he "wanted to go back and be an engineer".[16]

In February 2018, Abbott joined Apple.[1][3][17][18] He left Apple in March 2023.

In May 2023, Abbott joined General Motors.[19]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Flint, Tripp Mickle and Joe (2020-01-29). "Apple Hires Key Netflix Engineer in Bid to Boost Subscription Services". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  2. ^ a b "Several departures at venture firm Kleiner Perkins". TechCrunch. August 2017. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  3. ^ a b c "Apple Reportedly Hires Former Twitter Engineer Michael Abbott, Who is 'Captivated' by AR and AI". MacRumors. 27 February 2018. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  4. ^ Julie Bort (December 3, 2012). "Kleiner's Mike Abbott: Venture Capital Must Change". Business Insider.
  5. ^ "Mike Abbott". Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Retrieved December 8, 2014.
  6. ^ "Executive Profile Michael R. Abbott Ph.D." Bloomberg Businessweek. December 12, 2014. Archived from the original on December 13, 2014.
  7. ^ Derek Andersen (January 12, 2013). "Startup Grind Interview With Mike Abbott". Startup Grind.
  8. ^ Zack Whittaker (June 20, 2013). "Cisco to acquire Composite Software for $180M". ZDNet.
  9. ^ Dan Primack (December 1, 2011). "Ex-Twitter engineer Mike Abbott joins Kleiner Perkins". Fortune.
  10. ^ Colleen Taylor (December 1, 2011). "Ex-Twitter VP engineering Mike Abbott joins Kleiner Perkins as partner". Gigaom.
  11. ^ Julie Bort (December 2, 2012). "Kleiner's Mike Abbott: Venture Capital Must Change". Business Insider.
  12. ^ Leena Rao (December 1, 2011). "Former Twitter Engineering VP And Benchmark EIR Mike Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins As Partner". TechCrunch.
  13. ^ "Kleiner Perkins Shuts Down Its Seed Venture Fund". Bloomberg.com. 2017-07-31. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  14. ^ Schleifer, Theodore (2017-07-31). "Former Twitter engineering guru Mike Abbott is leaving Kleiner Perkins". Vox. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  15. ^ Geron, Tomio (2018-07-31). "Kleiner Perkins Grabs New Talent in Bid to Be 'the First Part of the Conversation'". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  16. ^ Konrad, Alex. "Slack Investor Mamoon Hamid's Mission At Kleiner Perkins: Restore Its Venture Glory". Forbes. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  17. ^ Fingas, Roger (February 27, 2018). "Apple said to have lured away Twitter, Palm, Kleiner Perkins veteran Michael Abbott with AI and machine learning". AppleInsider. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  18. ^ "Netflix Engineer Switches To Apple". www.morningstar.com. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  19. ^ "Tech Industry Innovator Mike Abbott Joins General Motors as Executive Vice President, Software". General Motors Investor Relations. 2023-05-09. Archived from the original on 2023-05-09. Retrieved 2023-09-08.


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