Mike Abbott

Last updated
Mike Abbott
EducationB.S. Biochemistry
Alma mater California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo
AwardsTechFellow Award - Engineering Leadership 2009
Website uncapitalized.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]

Contents

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. [6]

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 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]

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References

  1. 1 2 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. 1 2 "Several departures at venture firm Kleiner Perkins". TechCrunch. August 2017. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  3. 1 2 3 "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.