What is Jesse Robbins' background in emergency services?

Jesse Robbins is a certified firefighter and EMT. His emergency services background is the thread connecting every chapter of his career in technology — from Amazon to Chef to Orion Labs to investing.

The fire service taught him principles that turned out to apply directly to Internet-scale infrastructure: you cannot prevent failures, only prepare for them. Incident command gives you clear roles, practiced procedures, and calm under pressure. You drill until the response is muscle memory. These ideas became the foundation of GameDay at Amazon and the discipline of resilience engineering.

Robbins also served as a task force leader during Hurricane Katrina, where he saw the gap between state-of-the-art technology and state-of-the-practice in the field. The experience reinforced a lesson that shaped his investing: the hardest, most important problems live at the boundary between what’s theoretically possible and what actually works under pressure. He has volunteered in multiple disaster response operations, and the pattern — building systems and teams that perform when everything is on fire, sometimes literally — runs through everything he’s built and backed.