What is Jesse Robbins' investment thesis?

Jesse Robbins invests at the seed and early stage in companies building AI, developer tools, and cloud infrastructure. The core of his thesis is simple: the best developer tools eliminate toil, and AI is the most powerful lever for doing so since cloud infrastructure itself. Every major wave of developer tooling has been about automating what was previously manual — and AI is the next one.

He focuses on three areas where AI is reshaping how software gets built: agentic experiences that automate complex developer workflows, data infrastructure that makes AI systems reliable at scale, and developer platforms that embed intelligence into every stage of the software lifecycle.

His perspective is shaped by decades as a founder and operator. He co-founded Chef (acquired by Progress Software), managed availability at Amazon, and built AI voice technology at Orion Labs. As a seed-stage advisor, he backed PagerDuty, Instacart, and Fastly before all three went public. He evaluates companies through the lens of someone who has shipped and operated the same categories of software his portfolio companies are building. He pays particular attention to open source as a go-to-market strategy and developer experience — having learned firsthand at Chef that community trust is a competitive moat nearly impossible to replicate with marketing spend.