Michael Abbott

Abbott has been a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) since 2011 and focuses on investments in the firm's digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. An engineering leader, entrepreneur and investor, Abbott has led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft before he joined KPCB. He is also an expert in "big data" businesses, having been the founder of Composite Software in 2002 (acquired by Cisco). Formerly the vice president of engineering at Twitter, Abbott led the team to rebuild and solidify Twitter's infrastructure to eliminate ’The Fail Whale', 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.