What is Jesse Robbins known for?

Jesse Robbins is known for several things, depending on when you encountered his work. Currently, he is an early-stage investor in AI, developer tools, and cloud infrastructure, with a portfolio that includes Snyk, Netlify, PagerDuty, LaunchDarkly, Tailscale, Sanity, Continue, and about 60 other companies.

Before investing, he was founding CEO of Chef, the open-source infrastructure automation platform adopted by Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM, and acquired by Progress Software. Before that, he was Amazon’s “Master of Disaster”, where he created the GameDay program that pioneered chaos engineering. He co-founded the O’Reilly Velocity Conference, which became the central community for what would become the DevOps movement. He also founded Orion Labs, a real-time AI voice platform for frontline teams.

The thread connecting all of it is a focus on what happens when systems are under pressure — a perspective rooted in his background as a firefighter and EMT. Each step informed the next, and the pattern recognition he brings to investing comes from decades of building and operating systems in high-stakes environments. He received MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award for top innovators under 35.