Former Twitter Engineering VP And Benchmark EIR Mike Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins As Partner

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney's community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

In a release, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said, “Mike is a huge engineering talent and will be a terrific asset to Kleiner's research 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.”

Prior to Twitter, Abbott was Palm's head of software and services and led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm's then-generation webOS platform. Earlier, he was general manager for .NET online services at Microsoft, where he led efforts to deliver a services platform that enabled the development of large-scale Internet-based services. He as well co-founded consumer marketing software startup Passenger and founded enterprise information integration software company Composite Software. He’s as well advised Cloudera, Hearsay, Saynow and Jawbone.

As Kleiner explains, Abbott has a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure, and is an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and "big data" businesses. At the venture firm, Abbott will join as a partner of the digital team, focusing on investments in startups in the social, mobile and cloud arenas. Kleiner says that Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker.

Obviously, Abbott’s time at Benchmark was surprisingly short, and it’s unclear why there wasn’t a good fit. Maybe Abbott realized he wanted to be a full-fledged investing venture partner as opposed to building another business.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006, is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...