"Chef"
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- What has Jesse Robbins built and invested in?
Founder-investor backing AI developer tools and infrastructure.
- 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.
- How did DevOps actually start?
The DevOps movement started from the Velocity Conference. Jesse Robbins cofounded Velocity in 2008 as a gathering place for the people running the internet's infrastructure, and the movement grew out of the community that formed there. He went on to cofound Chef, the open-source tools that put infrastructure as code into practice.
- How does open source work as a business strategy?
Jesse Robbins views open source as one of the most powerful go-to-market strategies in developer tools. He learned this building Chef, where the community became a superpower. Marketing spend does not replicate that.
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.”
Jesse Robbins on the Rise of DevOps (InfoQ Interview)
InfoQ interviewed me on how DevOps started, why infrastructure as code changed operations, and what it actually takes to get developers and ops working together.
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.”
Jesse Robbins on DevOps as Business Alignment
Jez Humble interviewed me at Thoughtworks on DevOps as business alignment: developers, operations, and the company shipping faster without giving up reliability.
“The role of operations is the role of enabling as much awesome as you can.”
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.”
Jesse Robbins on the State of Infrastructure Automation
O'Reilly Radar interviewed me on Chef's evolution from open-source project to enterprise infrastructure automation, and where cloud operations was headed next.
Meet 2011 TR35 Winner Jesse Robbins
MIT Technology Review interviewed me as a 2011 TR35 honoree, recognizing the work on web operations, infrastructure automation, and reliability at Opscode.