Kleiner Perkins Hires Former Twitter VP Mike Abbott As Partner

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said it hired Mike Abbott, a former vice president of engineering at Twitter, as a partner on its digital team. Mike Abbott is just the third senior partner added in three years, following Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker. He has a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure and also an expertise in enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.

PRESS RELEASE

Michael Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as Partner

Engineering Leader to Help Social, Mobile and Cloud Entrepreneurs Build Teams and Ventures

MENLO PARK, Calif. , Dec. 1, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced that Mike Abbott , former vice president of engineering at Twitter, has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team. Abbott led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft.  With a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure, Mike is also an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software, and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.

“I’m excited to join KPCB’s partners to build new ventures faster,” said Abbott.  “The partner mix of founders, operators and investors is ideal for entrepreneurs racing to scale at this disruptive time.”

“Mike is an exceptional and well-respected leader with an outstanding track record shipping great products,” said Ted Schlein , partner, KPCB.  “Mike’s deep expertise from Palm and Twitter will help social, mobile and cloud entrepreneurs win.”

Dick Costolo , CEO of Twitter, said, “Mike is a huge engineering talent and will be a terrific asset to Kleiner’s technology companies. He was instrumental in helping us scale Twitter’s architecture to support incredible growth ̶ from 100 million daily Tweets in January 2011 to about 250 million daily tweets today.”

In less than a year and a half, Abbott grew the Twitter engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in an intensely competitive recruiting market.  Abbott’s team rebuilt and solidified Twitter’s infrastructure.  Prior to joining Twitter in 2010, Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Abbott was previously the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger Inc. and founded Composite Software. Abbott has advised and invested in numerous software companies such as Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Saynow and Jawbone.

Mike Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker, each with exceptional records serving mobile, social and cloud entrepreneurs. KPCB’s digital team also bolstered its infrastructure expertise with the recent addition of Ray Bradford from Amazon Web Services, where he helped grow the company’s cloud database business.

About Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Since its founding in 1972, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has backed entrepreneurs in more than 500 ventures including AOL, Amazon.com, Citrix, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Genomic Health, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Sun, Symantec, Verisign, webMD and Zynga. KPCB portfolio companies employ more than 350,000 people worldwide. More than 150 of the firm’s portfolio companies have gone public, and many other KPCB ventures have achieved success through mergers and acquisitions. KPCB focuses its global investments in three practice areas – digital, greentech and life sciences – and provides entrepreneurs with company-building expertise out of its offices in Silicon Valley, Beijing and Shanghai .