Suggestions
Mr. 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 at the seed stage. 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 including Snyk, Figure AI, Shield AI, LaunchDarkly, Sanity, Tailscale, Netlify, Blockdaemon, and CircleCI. Five have gone public, including PagerDuty, Instacart, and Fastly.
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
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 building ISPs in high school and had an early IPO in 1999. Then I 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 invest in founders with taste. Relentless, unstoppable people solving problems they know firsthand. I try to be useful to the founders I back.
Highlights
Over the last 12 months, it's become clear that Delegation is the New Automation, which is why I am so excited about Kubiya.ai and the introduction of AI Teammates. Super impressed by Amit Eyal Govrin & Shaked Askayo's approach in #DevOps and #PlatformEngineering, which is why I led this new financing at Heavybit with with support from Cal Henderson, Armon Dadgar, and others.
Check out Armon's video here => https://www.kubiya.ai/
On Tuesday I'm facilitating another DevGuild Summit for people using AI to build improve the lives of developers. If that is you, you are invited! (Space is very limited and event is highly curated)
