Mike Abbott

Mike Abbott is a product and engineering leader, entrepreneur, investor and AI thought leader and advisor. He has developed products from inception as well as scaled products and infrastructure for both consumers and enterprises at the largest and most impactful companies in the world.

Mike most recently co-founded Open Athena, a nonprofit focused on accelerating academic research with capabilities from the AI frontier. Open Athena is also building Marin, a true open-source AI model.

Previously, Mike was the Executive Vice President of Software and Services at General Motors, where he oversaw nearly 20,000 engineers responsible for software and services across the enterprise, including Software-Defined Vehicles, Autonomous Driving, OnStar, and the CIO function.

Before GM, Mike was VP of Engineering for Apple Cloud Services, overseeing the infrastructure for all of Apple’s services, from core storage, networking, and compute infrastructure to products including iCloud, iMessage, Private Relay, Mail, account security, and AI-driven subscription experiences, as well as Apple’s education and enterprise offerings.

Prior to Apple, Mike was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), where he conducted AI research in computer vision and convolutional neural networks for autonomous driving. Previously, he was a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), where he focused on the firm’s digital practice and worked with entrepreneurs in social, mobile, and cloud computing to rapidly scale teams and ventures.
Earlier in his career, Mike led the development of innovative, secure, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm, and Microsoft before joining KPCB as a General Partner.

Mike serves on the Board of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, the UC Berkeley Engineering Advisory Board, and the Cal Poly Foundation Board. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in Stanford’s Computer Science Department and previously served on the HealthCare.gov Tech Surge Team. He has also serves on numerous boards of companies and investments he founded or backed.

Mike holds a bachelor’s degree from California Polytechnic State University and was a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington. He currently teaches at Stanford, where his course () on building AI-powered software systems has become particularly popular.