[Techtaffy Newsdesk]
Mike Abbott, former vice president of engineering at Twitter, has joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) as a partner on its digital team. Mr. 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, he is also an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software, and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.
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, Mr. Abbott grew the Twitter engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers.Prior to joining Twitter in 2010, Mr. Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Mr. Abbott was also the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger and founded Composite Software.
Mike Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker.
[Original upload date: 01-24-12]