"Amazon"
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- What is Jesse Robbins known for?
Jesse Robbins is an early-stage investor in AI developer tools and infrastructure who has invested in and advised over sixty companies including PagerDuty, Fastly, and Tailscale. He cofounded Chef, created chaos engineering at Amazon, and cofounded the DevOps movement.
- What is GameDay and chaos engineering?
GameDay is the practice Jesse Robbins built at Amazon: deliberately breaking production systems so teams could practice before real failures hit. It was the most visible piece of one body of work he built, which Netflix later adapted and named Chaos Engineering.
- What did Jesse Robbins build at Amazon?
As Amazon's 'Master of Disaster,' Jesse Robbins was responsible for the availability of every property bearing the Amazon brand. He helped define Amazon's always-on architecture. Adapting the Incident Command System he learned as a volunteer firefighter, he built three connected practices as one body of work: modern Incident Management, and what we now call Site Reliability Engineering and Chaos Engineering.
Articles and mentions
The Seed 100: The Best Early-Stage Investors of 2026
“I look for founders who want to build the operating system for entire industries. This requires extraordinary taste, grit, drive, and a vision for the future.”
The Seed 100: The Best Early-Stage Investors of 2021
Business Insider named me to the 2021 Seed 100, a list of early-stage investors built with Tribe Capital.
“Robbins is the right investor to call in an emergency.”
Q&A: Ex-Amazon 'Master of Disaster' Jesse Robbins on the Power of 'Relentless Optimism' in Startups
GeekWire ran a long Q&A while I was running Opscode and pulled out the operating principle I kept using inside Amazon: when people say no, find a way to make them say yes.
“When you're trying to change the way big organizations work, a lot of people say no a lot. Rather than try to fight them, you've got to find a way to make them say yes. Being a force for awesome in the world is finding ways to say yes.”
Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure
Jesse Robbins (Amazon), Kripa Krishnan (Google), and John Allspaw (Etsy) discuss how they built organizations that deliberately trigger failure to get stronger: powering off data centers, running 96-hour disaster simulations, and transforming blame cultures into learning cultures.
“You can't choose whether or not you're going to have failures — they are going to happen no matter what — but you can choose in many cases when you're going to learn the lessons.”
Changing Culture & Being a Force for Awesome
My 2012 Velocity talk on changing engineering culture from the inside. Start small, build champions, use metrics to create confidence, exploit compelling events.
“Don't fight stupid. Focus on where you can make more awesome.”
DevOps Cafe Episode 19: Jesse Robbins
Damon Edwards and John Willis hosted me on DevOps Cafe to walk through the path from teenage ISP work to firefighting to Amazon to Chef and Velocity.
DevOps Culture Hacks: Infecting your Boss & your Business with Awesome
DevOpsDays Boston 2011. I gave the culture hacks talk for the first time, no slides, no video, just the framework I had figured out the hard way at Amazon.
“Don't fight stupid, make more awesome.”
MIT Technology Review TR35: Innovators Under 35
The MIT Technology Review TR35 listing for 2011, citing my work on web operations, cloud, and resilience engineering at Amazon and Opscode.