"Resilience Engineering"

Investing in Vibrant Labs: AI Agent Simulation Infrastructure

Heavybit invests in Vibrant Labs, which builds production-grade simulation for AI agents. Jesse Robbins on why you cannot ship reliable agents without testing them in realistic environments first.

“Vibrant Labs opens a new frontier in AI infrastructure: production-grade, RL-ready simulation and verifier-driven evaluation built for long-horizon agents.”

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.”

GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction

In this USENIX LISA'11 talk, Jesse Robbins explains GameDay: deliberately injecting failures into production systems to build organizational resilience before real outages happen.

“You don't choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.”

MIT Technology Review TR35: Innovators Under 35

Jesse Robbins named to MIT Technology Review's TR35, their annual list of the world's top innovators under 35, for his work in web operations, cloud computing, and resilience engineering at Amazon.

Five Whys: Try to Learn a Dollar's Worth of Lesson for Every One You Spend in Failure

Eric Ries quotes Jesse Robbins in his Venture Hacks guide to implementing Five Whys at startups, linking GameDay's failure-as-learning philosophy to lean startup practice.

“Try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every one you spend in failure.”

Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes

BusinessWeek's 2008 CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness featured Jesse Robbins' experience navigating post-Katrina Louisiana with broken maps, making the case for collaborative crisis mapping tools.

“One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art versus the state of the practice.”

Operations Is a Competitive Advantage (Secret Sauce for Startups!)

The post that started it all. Jesse Robbins argues on O'Reilly Radar that operations is a competitive advantage and occasionally a strategic weapon. Luke Kanies introduces him to Adam Jacob in the comments. The rest is history.