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Jesse Robbins

Founder, Investor, Advisor

I am fortunate to have spent my career working with extraordinary people starting and scaling things that matter. Along the way I cofounded Chef, pioneered chaos engineering at Amazon, and cofounded the DevOps movement. Today I invest in and advise founders building AI developer tools and infrastructure. I have helped a lot of founders build companies, and have five IPOs and a number of nice exits so far.

My personal and firm portfolio includes over sixty companies. Nineteen are valued at $500 million or more, including Snyk, Figure AI, Shield AI, LaunchDarkly, Sanity, Tailscale, Netlify, Blockdaemon, and CircleCI. PagerDuty, Instacart, and Fastly have gone public.

Before investing I cofounded Chef, the open-source infrastructure automation platform adopted by Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM. Chef was the pioneer in Infrastructure as code. It became the operating system for how organizations deploy software and was acquired for over $220 million. The company's success was built by hundreds of incredible engineers, contributors, and community members. I was fortunate to help start it.

Before Chef I was Amazon's Master of Disaster. I created the GameDay program, the practice of deliberately breaking production systems to find failure modes before they find you. That work pioneered chaos engineering, site reliability engineering, and modern incident management. I also cofounded the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, which became the gathering point for the community that became the DevOps movement.

I started as a software engineer, then stepped away from tech to train as a firefighter and EMT. That experience shaped how I think about high-stakes operations, team coordination, and what it actually means to build reliable systems. I hold over ten patents and have contributed to published research on resilience engineering.

I invest in founders with taste. Relentless, unstoppable people solving problems they know firsthand. I have been inside the same pattern multiple times as a builder, and I know what it looks like when a company is becoming the layer everything else runs on. I try to be useful to the founders I back, and I am lucky to work with some of the best.

Related Questions

How did Jesse Robbins’s experience at Amazon shape his approach to chaos engineering and reliable systems?
What lessons did Jesse Robbins take from cofounding Chef and pioneering infrastructure as code?
How does Jesse Robbins evaluate founders building AI developer tools and infrastructure?
How did Jesse Robbins’s firefighter and EMT training influence his thinking about high-stakes operations and team coordination?
What qualities does Jesse Robbins look for in founders solving problems they know firsthand?
How did Jesse Robbins help contribute to the development of the DevOps movement through the O'Reilly Velocity Conference?
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Jesse Robbins
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Location

San Francisco, CA