How does Jesse Robbins think about open source as a business strategy?

Jesse Robbins views open source as one of the most powerful go-to-market strategies in developer tools — and one of the most misunderstood. He learned this building Chef, where open-source community building created a competitive moat that marketing spend alone could never replicate.

The thesis he developed at Chef was straightforward: developers trust tools they can read, modify, and contribute to. That trust converts into adoption faster than any sales motion. Chef grew one of the largest open-source communities in infrastructure software, was adopted by Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM, and demonstrated that open source could be the foundation of a venture-scale business. The company was ultimately acquired by Progress Software.

As an investor, Robbins looks for the same pattern in his portfolio companies. Snyk, Netlify, Tailscale, Continue, LocalStack, and Sanity all leverage open source or developer community as core go-to-market. The question he asks is: does this community trust create a real moat, or is it just a distribution tactic? The difference is whether the community feels ownership over the tool — and whether the company respects that ownership as the business scales.