my name is michael abbott, and welcome to my blog.

my goal for this blog is simple, two-fold. one, to share my story and evolution as an engineer with others, and to attempt to capture the essence of founding, building, and scaling technical companies so that it may be helpful to one other technical founder out there so that entrepreneurs who are in the same shoes i was in over 10 years ago know what i wish i would have known. through these experiences (some good and some not so good), i am inspired to chart my own path as an investor.

a little about me. i grew up playing sports intensely, team sports (soccer, crew, and rugby) for over a decade, followed by individual sports (triathlons, running, and swimming) for another decade. i didn’t realize it at the time, but each sport pushed me in different ways to be part of a team and focus as an individual. it sounds cliche, but at the same time, it defines me. and, i’ve found it’s just more fun to be part of a killer team. without those collaborative experiences, i may have been a very different type of engineer.

i began my technical entrepreneurial journey over a decade ago. after years of being a code monkey in elementary school (apple ][+ ftw), junior high, high school and college, and after dropping out of a PhD program. a couple of years later i started a company in my house, scraped up money to pay the founding engineers, and was fortunate to work with a team that build a venture-backed company that still exists today , a decade later. that was a success.
i’ve been involved in a company that didn’t pan out, too…that was really hard. we often don’t reflect on the ones that didn’t work out, but they’re important. more recently, i managed to head over to palm and led the team that built/shipped webOS, and most recently, led the engineering team at twitter where it is great to both the service and the team scale to new heights! be gone fail whale!

after twitter, i was fortunate enough to join kleiner perkins at the end of 2011, and this is what i’m going to do for the rest of my career. already just a few months in, and i love it. i love every minute of it. things are changing fast in the valley — and at kleiner, too — and i’m lucky to be a part of it. i have scaled technologies, teams, and companies, and also participated in rebuilding efforts at other times. i’m now trying to scale myself — as strange as that sounds — so that i can help the next generation of great technical entrepreneurs build the next big things.

if you’ve gotten this far, thanks! i’m going to post here about once a month, maybe more, and simply try to capture whatever knowledge i acquired over the last decade in the hopes that it will help others who are on the verge of starting their first, second, or third technology company. specifically, i want to cover all items a technical founder will face — from fundraising, to hiring, to recruiting, to scaling, to when to bring in nontechnical hands, how to pick advisors, and much more. if you have ideas, please also share below. i’m looking forward to it!

-mike abbott
@mabb0tt on twitter