← About Jesse Robbins

What I invest in

I invest at the seed and early stage in companies building AI developer tools, infrastructure, security, and data and observability. My personal and firm portfolio includes over sixty companies.

The core of my thesis is simple: the best developer tools eliminate toil, and AI is the most powerful lever for doing so since cloud computing itself. Every major wave of developer tooling has been about automating what was previously manual. AI is the next one, and it changes the model from automation to delegation.

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 evaluate companies through the lens of someone who has shipped and operated the same categories of software my portfolio companies are building. I pay particular attention to open source as a go-to-market strategy and developer experience, having learned firsthand at Chef that community is a superpower nearly impossible to replicate. Marketing spend does not replicate that.

Further reading