About
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Short
Jesse Robbins is an early-stage investor in AI developer tools and infrastructure. His personal and firm portfolio includes over 60 companies including Snyk, PagerDuty, Tailscale, and LaunchDarkly. He cofounded Chef, cofounded the DevOps movement, and built the communities and movements around them.
Long
Jesse Robbins invests at the early stage in AI developer tools and infrastructure. His personal and firm portfolio includes over 60 companies — Snyk, Netlify, PagerDuty, LaunchDarkly, Tailscale, Sanity, and Continue among them. Three went public: PagerDuty, Instacart, and Fastly.
Earlier in his career, he stepped away from tech to train as a firefighter and EMT. He brought that discipline to Amazon as "Master of Disaster," responsible for the availability of every property bearing the Amazon brand. He created the Incident Management program and the GameDay exercises — deliberately breaking production systems so teams could practice before real disasters hit. That work pioneered chaos engineering, incident management, and site reliability engineering.
After Amazon, he cofounded the Velocity Conference and the DevOps movement, reshaping how the industry develops and operates software. As founding CEO of Chef, he built one of the most widely adopted open-source infrastructure automation platforms — adopted by Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM — and grew one of the largest open-source communities in infrastructure software. Chef was acquired by Progress Software. He went on to found Orion Labs, a voice-first AI platform for frontline teams.
He works with founders today as board member, advisor, and investor. He has shipped v1 to skeptical buyers, grown communities from nothing, and fought through the years when the market had not caught up to the idea. He helps founders with what he knows firsthand: open-source go-to-market, product positioning, and turning communities into competitive moats.
What I do now
I invest at the seed stage in AI developer tools and infrastructure. My personal and firm portfolio includes over sixty companies — Snyk, Netlify, PagerDuty, LaunchDarkly, Tailscale, Sanity, and Continue among them. I serve on the boards of Continue, Memgraph, Sanity, and Mobot.
Before I was an investor, I was a builder. I cofounded Chef, the open-source infrastructure automation platform adopted by Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM. I cofounded the DevOps movement and the Velocity Conference. I pioneered chaos engineering at Amazon. At every step I built the tools, then built the communities and movements around them. The tools mattered. The movements they created mattered more.
I invest in this category because I have lived it.
What I look for
Founders with taste. People desperate to solve a problem they know firsthand, not one they read about. The products I get excited about change how you think about a problem the first time you use them. You try it once and wonder how you ever worked without it.
I care about developer experience and open-source go-to-market because I have seen them compound. At Chef, community trust became our deepest moat. Marketing spend does not replicate that.
How I got here
Earlier in my career, I stepped away from tech to train as a firefighter and EMT. The fire service teaches you that failure is inevitable — your only choice is whether you prepare for it or get surprised by it.
I brought that discipline to Amazon as “Master of Disaster,” responsible for the availability of every Amazon property. I created the Incident Management program and the GameDay exercises — deliberately breaking production systems so teams could practice before real disasters hit. That work pioneered chaos engineering, incident management, and site reliability engineering.
After Amazon, I cofounded the Velocity Conference and then Chef. We built the platform, then the community, then a movement that changed how the industry ships software. Chef was acquired by Progress Software.
I went on to found Orion Labs — a voice-first AI platform for the same kind of people I had served alongside as a firefighter: frontline teams who need information fast, hands-free, under pressure.
Where this is going
AI is already reshaping every aspect of software and society. I see it as a new layer of abstraction — and like every layer before it, it brings new complexity and new opportunity to empower more people.
Every major abstraction in computing created a new generation of tools to manage the complexity it introduced. AI is no different. I invest in the companies building those tools: agentic systems that automate complex workflows, data infrastructure that makes AI reliable at scale, and platforms that embed intelligence into the software lifecycle.
AI agents are just another kind of developer. They need good documentation, clear APIs, reliable infrastructure, and tools that reduce toil. The companies building that foundation are the ones I want to back.