Why does Jesse Robbins invest in security?

Jesse Robbins invests in security because it is a developer tools problem. His portfolio includes Snyk and Conjur. The best security tools work the way developers already work.

Jesse Robbins on Security Investment: Snyk, Conjur & Developer-First Security

Security is a developer tools problem. The legacy approach, bolt security on at the end, hand it to a separate team, treat it as compliance, does not work at the speed modern software ships. The companies winning in security are the ones that meet developers where they already work.

Snyk put security scanning into the developer workflow. Instead of a security team running scans after the code was written, Snyk finds vulnerabilities as developers write code, in the IDE, in the pull request, in the CI pipeline. That is why it works. The developer is the customer.

Conjur took the same approach to secrets management. Instead of asking developers to follow a separate process to handle credentials, Conjur embedded secrets management into the tools and workflows developers already used. I served as an advisor.

The pattern is the same one I see across every category I invest in: take something that was painful, manual, and owned by a separate team, and turn it into a tool that developers reach for because it makes their work better. Security that developers adopt willingly is security that actually gets used. Everything else is theater.