Mentions

Experimentation, Causal Inference, and AI: Sean Taylor of OpenAI and VC Jesse Robbins at Data Council 2025

I interviewed Sean Taylor of OpenAI ahead of Data Council 2025 on experimentation, causal inference, and why AI generates more questions that need empirical answers.

“AI provides an opportunity to radically improve how we do things.”

Next in Tech Ep. 197: Data Pipelines for AI

On S&P's Next in Tech I argued that enterprise AI is won on data pipeline quality, not model size, and that data infrastructure is having a DevOps moment right now.

“Data pipelines are having a DevOps moment, starting with a cultural and technical shift toward continuous integration and delivery.”

The Data Pipeline is the New Secret Sauce

I wrote this at Heavybit in September 2024. The argument: the data pipeline is the differentiating asset in enterprise AI. Includes four inference hosting models and four enterprise maturity phases.

“The biggest challenge emerging is building and operating the infrastructure both for creating and running the data pipelines to build, manage, and maintain a robust, secure body of proprietary data.”

AI Investor Jesse Robbins on NYSE Floor Talk

On NYSE Floor Talk, August 2024: a short statement of what I invest in now, AI-powered developer tools and infrastructure at the pre-seed and seed stage.

“I am focused on investing in pre-seed and seed companies using AI to enable new ways of writing software, of managing and deploying the software and infrastructure that powers everything.”

Jesse Robbins Named One of the 30 Most Successful Early-Stage Startup Investors

Business Insider named me to its 2024 list of 30 most successful early-stage investors.

Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Continue

Heavybit's announcement when Continue joined the portfolio, an open-source tool that brings LLM assistance directly into the IDE.

“I'm excited to welcome our newest portfolio company, Continue, which gives software engineers the power to streamline their development process using large language models (LLMs) and hit flow state faster and longer.”

Cloud Native StartupFest 2023

I co-hosted Cloud Native StartupFest at KubeCon NA 2023 with Erica Brescia and Dave Zilberman: fundraising in the post-2022 capital environment, open source business models, and what investors actually look for.

“Open source is not a business model. Open source is a movement. We're still figuring out the business models.”

Generative AI in DevOps and Incident Response: What the Experts Actually Think

I interviewed Nora Jones, Jeremy Edberg, Mandi Walls, and Brent Chapman on what generative AI actually does in incident response, and where humans have to stay in the loop.

“GenAI is good at confidently delivering text that is pleasant to read, but not always complete, or correct.”