Jesse Robbins

Jesse Robbins is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and firefighter notable for his pioneering work in Cloud computing, role in creating DevOps/Chaos Engineering, and efforts to improve emergency management.

Jesse Robbins
Born1978 (1978) (age 45)[1]
Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts[2]
NationalityAmerican
Occupations
  • Entrepreneur
  • investor
  • computer engineer
  • firefighter
Employer(s)Heavybit, Chef, Amazon.com
Known for

Career

Robbins is a venture capital investor at "developer-focused" firm Heavybit, with notable investments in companies like PagerDuty, Snyk, and Tailscale.[3]

Robbins worked at Amazon with his manager-approved title “Master of Disaster,” where he was responsible for website availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand. He created "GameDay", a project to increase reliability by purposefully creating major failures on a regular basis (a practice now called Chaos Engineering).[4]

Robbins has said GameDay was inspired by his experience & training as a firefighter combined with lessons from other industries and research on complex systems, human cognitive stress models, reliability engineering, and normal accidents. Game day/Chaos Engineering and similar approaches are considered a best practice for large technology companies.[5][6]

GameDay-like programs have been adopted by many other organizations, including Google, Netflix (called Chaos Monkey),[7] Yahoo, Facebook, and many others.[5][8]

After Amazon, Robbins founded the Velocity Conference to advance the field of Web Operations & DevOps with Tim O'Reilly.[9] He also founded Chef, a pioneering cloud infrastructure automation company.[10][11] Jesse Robbins was also an early investor in PagerDuty.[12][13][14][15]

Robbins was recognized in 2011 with the Technology Review TR35 award for "transforming the way Web companies design and manage complex networks of servers and software" at Amazon.com, founding the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference, and founding Chef and serving as the first CEO.[1][16][10][12]

Other work

Robbins founded Orion Labs, a technology startup which created a "Real-Life Star Trek Communicator".He says he "wanted to bring heads-up, real-time communication to everybody" to build "a world powered by voice".[17][18][19][20]

Contributions to disaster response & humanitarian aid

Robbins volunteered as “Task Force Leader” in Hurricane Katrina. After he returned, he worked with Mikel Maron and OpenStreetMap on techniques and patterns to improve technology adoption in disaster response & humanitarian aid. These improvements were adopted by the United Nations Joint Logistics Centre in response to Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and are now widely adopted. One example was CrisisCommons in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake.[21][22][23]

Awards and recognition

2021 - Robbins named to The Seed 100: the Best Early-Stage Investors of 2021[24]

2012 - Robbins was named as a Top 10 Cloud Computing Leader of 2012 by TechTarget[25]

2011 - Robbins was selected by MIT Technology Review magazine as one of the top "35 under 35" TR35 innovators in for "transforming the way Web companies design and manage complex networks of servers and software" while building fault-tolerant online infrastructure at Amazon.com and at Chef.[1][10][12]

2010 - Robbins was selected by Business Journal as one of the top "40 under 40" entrepreneurs in 2010 for founding Chef and raising $13 million in venture capital funding.[2][16]

References
  1. "Technology Review TR35 Profile: Jesse Robbins". Retrieved 2011-12-14.
  2. "2010 40 UNDER 40 JESSE ROBBINS". Archived from the original on 2012-04-24. Retrieved 2011-12-14.
  3. Cai, Kenrick. "Heavybit Raises $80 Million Fund To Back The Developer Tools That Other VCs Misunderstand". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-02-24.
  4. John Allspaw; Jesse Robbins; Allspaw, John (2010). Web operations : keeping the data on time (1st ed.). Beijing: O'Reilly. p. 336. ISBN 978-1-4493-7744-1.
  5. Jesse Robbins; Kripa Krishnan; John Allspaw; Tom Limoncelli (12 September 2012). "Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure". ACM Queue.
  6. Logan, Martin. "DevOps Culture Hacks talk from Jesse Robbins". DevOps.com. Retrieved 13 Feb 2012.
  7. Williams, Alex. "Netflix Open Sources Chaos Monkey – A Tool Designed To Cause Failure So You Can Make A Stronger Cloud". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-03-07.
  8. Haryadi Gunawi; Thanh Do; Joseph M. Hellerstein; Ion Stoica; Dhruba Borthakur; Jesse Robbins (28 July 2011). "Failure as a Service (FaaS): A Cloud Service for Large-Scale, Online Failure Drills" (PDF). Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley: 7. Retrieved 24 June 2013. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. O'Reilly, Tim (17 June 2013). "Why We Started the Velocity Conference". O'Reilly Radar. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  10. Mets, Cade (26 October 2011). "The Chef, the Puppet, and the Sexy IT Admin". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  11. Asay, Matt (5 November 2015). "Building Your Own Cloud Is "Table Stakes," Says Former AWS Engineer". ReadWrite. Retrieved 7 November 2015.
  12. Vance, Ashlee (1 September 2011). "Puppet, Chef Ease Transition to Cloud Computing". Businessweek. Archived from the original on September 24, 2011. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  13. Brumleve, Harry (17 Jan 2013). "The Rise of DevOps with Jesse Robbins". InfoQ. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
  14. Taylor, Colleen (23 June 2011). "DevOps eliminates knee-jerk no's at the IT level". GigaOm. Retrieved 13 Aug 2011.
  15. Edwards, Damon; Willis, John (20 Sep 2011). "DevOps Cafe Episode 19". DevOpsCafe. Archived from the original on 28 September 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2013. Alt URL
  16. John, Cook (16 September 2010). "Fourteen local techies under 40, and the cool stuff they've done". Puget Sound Business Journal - Techflash. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  17. Fox, Pimm (6 Feb 2015). "Orion Labs Creates Real-Life Star Trek Communicator". Bloomberg Television. Retrieved 3 Mar 2015.
  18. Metz, Cade (21 January 2015). "'Star Trek Communicator Startup' Sets Out to Build a World Powered by Voice". Wired. Retrieved 12 March 2015.
  19. Gruber, Ben (29 Apr 2015). "Hands free talk with global reach and style". Reuters. Thomson Reuters. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
  20. Fox, Pimm (5 Feb 2015). "Orion Labs Creates Real-Life Star Trek Communicator". Bloomberg. BloombergBusiness. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  21. Ginsburg, Janet (7 July 2008). "The Do-Good Imperative". Businessweek. Archived from the original on July 12, 2008. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  22. King, Rachael (7 July 2008). "Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes". Businessweek. Archived from the original on July 12, 2008. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  23. Turner, Andrew. "CrisisCommons and Congress". Retrieved 29 January 2015.
  24. Haley, Margaux MacColl, Melia Russell, Candy Cheng, Michael. "The Seed 100: The best early-stage investors of 2021". Business Insider. Retrieved 2023-02-24.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  25. "Top 10 cloud computing leaders in 2012". 20 March 2012.
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