Join us December 17th as we welcome Mike Abbott, Parter at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Mike focuses on investments in the firm’s digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. Mike serves as an expert resource on enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and “big data.” He also helps entrepreneurs win the race for talent in a hyper-competitive recruitment environment. An engineering leader, entrepreneur and investor, Mike led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft before he joined KPCB. Mike is also an expert in “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software. Formerly the vice president of engineering at Twitter, Mike led the team to rebuild and solidify Twitter’s infrastructure, 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 250 million daily tweets. Before joining Twitter, Mike led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Earlier in his career, Mike was the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. He was also co-founder of Passenger Inc. Mike has advised and invested in numerous software companies throughout his career, including Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Jawbone and Saynow. Mike holds a bachelor’s degree from California Polytechnic State University and has completed coursework toward a Ph.D. at the University of Washington.

6:00 - Networking and Pizza

6:30 - Fireside Chat

7:30 - Questions and More Networking

Startup Grind is a 30-city event series hosted in 13-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. Rooted in the heart of Silicon Valley, Startup Grind brings the world's greatest founders and investors to tell their stories on stage and share it with our global startup community. There are brilliant entrepreneurs everywhere so start learning and networking with them at your local Startup Grind community. 

For more information visit www.StartupGrind.com or follow us on twitter @StartupGrind.

Derek Andersen - Founder of Startup Grind

Derek Andersen spent four years in product management at Electronic Arts working on games like the Godfather, Burnout, and Mirror's Edge.  He left in 2009 to found Vaporware Labs, a company that has tried and failed many times, but successfully launched products like Startup Grind, Commonred, and Steve Young Football (iOS).  He's also a contributing author for Techcrunch and Business Insider and lives in Palo Alto, California.