About

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.

What I do now

I invest at the seed stage in AI developer tools and infrastructure, and in companies across sectors where AI is becoming the operating system. My personal and firm portfolio includes over sixty companies, including Snyk, Netlify, PagerDuty, LaunchDarkly, Tailscale, Sanity, and Continue.

I invest in this category because I have lived it. I have shipped v1 to skeptical buyers, grown communities from nothing, and fought through the years when the market had not caught up to the idea. I serve on the boards of Continue, Memgraph, Sanity, and Mobot. I help founders with what I know firsthand: open-source go-to-market, product positioning, and turning communities into superpowers.

What I look for

Founders with taste. Relentless, unstoppable, driven people solving 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 they are the fastest way to change the way people work, to build companies and communities that turn into movements. At Chef, community became our superpower. Marketing spend does not replicate that.

How I got here

I was building ISPs in high school and working full-time hours on early wireless modems before most people were using the internet. I had an early IPO in 1999 and took a deliberate detour to become a firefighter and EMT.

When I joined Amazon in 2001 as a day job while testing for the Seattle Fire Department, two careers collided. I became “Master of Disaster,” responsible for the availability of every property bearing the Amazon brand. 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 O’Reilly Velocity Conference, which became the gathering point for people who were independently discovering the same thing: the wall between development and operations was the biggest bottleneck in shipping reliable software. That community became the DevOps movement.

Then Adam Jacob, Barry Steinglass, Nathan Haneysmith, and I cofounded Chef. We wanted to bring powerful infrastructure automation to the masses and build a core configuration utility for the internet. The custom tools built by Google, Amazon, and a few others were closely guarded secrets. We opened them up to everyone else. Chef let engineering teams define infrastructure as code — writing recipes to configure entire fleets of servers instead of managing them by hand. It was adopted by Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM. We succeeded. I am really proud of what we built and even more proud of the community we helped nurture. Chef was acquired for over $220 million.

I went on to cofound 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

The last twenty years changed the way we build and deploy software. The next ten years will change everything.

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.