This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube interview titled "How KCPB's Michael Abbott went from computing and biology to venture capital | Michael Abbott" (uploaded 2016-08-12). The excerpt is an interview-style conversation between an unnamed interviewer (labeled SPEAKER A) and Michael Abbott, in which Abbott recounts his non-linear career path—from learning programming on an Apple II and studying biochemistry/bioinformatics, to founding and selling startups (notably Composite Software to Cisco), leading engineering efforts at Microsoft (Azure), building webOS at Palm, scaling infrastructure at Twitter, and ultimately moving into venture capital at Kleiner Perkins focusing on enterprise investments. The discussion centers on his entrepreneurial experiences, lessons from board/advisor roles, and motivations for transitioning into VC.
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Okay, so before we kind of get into it, I usually like to start these kind of chats by asking a little bit about yourself, getting to know you and your background into where you got today. So can you just give us a little bit of a brief history of your journey?
Sure, I'll try to do it relatively quickly. Thanks again for having me and good morning. So my path to venture capital is about as far from linear as you can get. I was just sharing before, I'm actually 4 generations Bay Area. My grandfather taught engineering at Cal. My dad's an engineer. And so I learned actually how to program on the Apple II Plus. And I first actually, I think like most people, got into programming for games. And we didn't have that much money, so I taught myself how to break the security in games to illegally trade them. Then I learned that actually you could build things on computers besides just break things later. Actually, as I got older, I got really more interested in the intersection of computing and biology. So my undergraduate is actually in biochemistry. And I went to go work on a PhD at the University of Washington, which would have been at this intersection that's now labeled today bioinformatics. And I thought I wanted to go be a researcher. I had spent some time at SRI. But right after finishing my exams my second year, a friend of mine at SRI got a grant to spin a company out of SRI. He convinced me into taking a leave of absence. I remember telling my advisor, oh, I'll be back. I obviously didn't go back. That was my introduction into entrepreneurship. For the next 10 or so years, I started 3 different venture-backed companies. I saw one that worked. I was a founder of a company called Composite Software that eventually we sold to Cisco for almost $200 million. Did a Series A in 2002 with that company, so saw kind of the more challenging financing time. But I also saw a company not work where we raised $16 million day zero in '99. We raised $70 million in March of 2000 at the peak peak. Then a year later, I had to lay off 180 people out of 220 and sell the company because we still had $50 million in the bank. As an entrepreneur, I got to see things work, not work. I got to see some board members that were more helpful than others. But I also firsthand saw, especially when I was CEO, I thought it was odd that there were people on my board that were giving me advice on how to run my company when they never had done that. There was actually a seed investor in Composite who was a professor at Stanford, Rajeev Motwani, who demonstrated to me that it was possible to actually be an investor and actually be helpful. And he got me into advising companies. I got to advise Jobone investing, investing in companies like Cloudera. And so that was kind of my initial introduction, candidly, into like, wow, it seems like if I was a founder, if I'm a founder, I want someone on my board who can empathize with the journey that I've gone through. In 2006, late 2006, I decided I wanted to get back to— actually, I wanted to work on cloud computing, frankly. And I felt like I could do that at 2 places, either Microsoft or Google. And having sold so much of our software composite into the Fortune 100, I never saw Google there, but I saw Microsoft. So I actually went up to Microsoft as a very senior engineer, put my headphones on, and went back to just writing software. And after shipping one of their distributed hash tables that's now used in Azure, I became the general manager of the effort that led into the creation of Azure at Microsoft. It became really clear, though, in 2008 that Steve Ballmer was not going to cannibalize Windows Server anytime soon. And I had no interest of just getting paid. And so I left. And I actually joined Jon Rubinstein at Palm, where I led the team that designed and built webOS. We got that out in 10 months.
Woo!
Thank you. We're very proud of what the team did. Too bad that it didn't entirely work out for the company. I almost went into venture capital at the end of Palm, but was recruited into Twitter with kind of the following pitch from Peter Thiel. It was, the site's down all the time, we can't hire engineers, but it keeps growing. I'm like, oh, that sounds like an interesting problem. So grew the engineering team there from maybe like 75 to almost 400 and redid all the infrastructure to get rid of the fail whale. And that's how I actually got to know John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins. So I joined Kleiner Perkins about 4 and a half years ago as a general partner. I focus primarily on enterprise just by the nature of my background, but I have done a couple different consumer investments. So our later stage investment in Snapchat, companies like MobCrush in LA that's in esports. So I still, I do kind of some random stuff. So a little bit long-winded, but I have a very odd background.
I think you brought up a really interesting point just there in your answer where you said that you got a lot of value from people who had been through that process as an entrepreneur, which is kind of what we try and teach here, that these guys can help each other out by going through the process themselves and helping each other. So I guess my next question following on from that is, were you surprised that venture capital was your end goal with that in mind, like going from entrepreneurship into venture capital?
It was definitely not necessarily an end goal. I think For me, for better or worse, as I walked you through that journey, the only common denominator that I can really distill is that I really enjoy being uncomfortable and learning new things. I had never done anything in the consumer space when I went to Palm. I had no idea actually working at the scale of Twitter what that was like. I think for me, venture capital was an interesting experiment around, can I scale myself a bit? But also, I'm in the service business. I'm not currently building things. That's a very different thing that I have not done before. But I know what you're doing is so hard and it's so lonely. I know how some days you feel like everything's rocking and the next day you're like, oh my God, I'm going to die. That nature of entrepreneurship is, unless you do it, reading about it does not count.
