Jesse Robbins Email & Phone Number

I am a General Partner at Heavybit, leading pre-seed through Series-A investments in exceptional DevTools, Cloud/Open Source Infrastructure, and AI/ML startups. My partners and I are uniquely experienced in turning products into platforms, contributors into communities, and visions into movements that change the way people work.I am perhaps best known for founding Chef, the early pioneer of Cloud Infrastructure Automation, and starting the DevOps movement. Chef became the market leader used by customers like Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, and thousands of other organizations with hundreds of thousands of developers. Chef was acquired by Progress Software for $220m in 2020. I also was founding chair of the Velocity Web Performance, & Operations Conference, editor of the Web Operations book, and a contributor to the O’Reilly Radar. These efforts became in what we now call the DevOps movement in 2008. Before my involvement with O’Reilly, I spent five years at Amazon.com as the “Master of Disaster,” where I owned website availability across all Amazon-branded sites. I created the GameDay Program and Incident Management, starting a radical shift in to reliability engineering practices that have since been widely adopted across the tech industry.I was honored to receive MIT Technology Review’s prestigious TR35 award for having “transformed the way companies design and manage complex networks of servers and software”. My career and education in building high-growth technology startups began when I was 16, starting as an early employee of a bay area ISP through acquisition and international expansion. I was self-taught, starting with writing software for managing dial-up modem banks and quickly rising to responsibility for deploying the network backbone for many of the first home broadband connections in the US.After a different startup IPO in 1999, I took a detour to complete a professional Firefighter/EMT certification program at Mission College and intern with the Palo Alto Fire Department. I continue to serve as Volunteer Firefighter and Emergency Manager. I continue to volunteer, including having led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. My experiences in the fire service profoundly influence my work in technology, and I strive to distill my knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.