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]
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] He resigned from that role in March 2024 due to health concerns.[20][21]
