Jesse Robbins is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and firefighter notable for his pioneering work in

Cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over m ...

, role in creating

DevOps DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (''Dev'') and IT operations (''Ops''). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary t ...

Chaos Engineering Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. Concept In software development, a given software system's ability to to ...

, and efforts to improve

emergency management Emergency management or disaster management is the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disasters. Emergency management, despite its name, does not actuall ...

Career

Robbins is a

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

investor at "developer-focused" firm Heavybit, with notable investments in companies like

PagerDuty PagerDuty is an American cloud computing company specializing in a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments. It has been recognized by ''Forbes'' on its "Cloud 100" as well as the ''USA Today'' list for the top small and mid-sized compa ...

Snyk Snyk is a cybersecurity company specializing in cloud computing. It was founded in 2015 out of London and Tel Aviv with headquarters in Boston. History Snyk was founded in 2015 by Guy Podjarny (Hebrew: גיא פודחרני), Assaf Hefetz (אס ...

, and Tailscale. Robbins worked at

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

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

). 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 Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure. Reliability describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specifi ...

, and

normal accidents ''Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies'' is a 1984 book by Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, which provides a detailed analysis of complex systems from a sociological perspective. It was the first to "propose a framework for charac ...

. Game day/

and similar approaches are considered a best practice for large technology companies. GameDay-like programs have been adopted by many other organizations, including

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a ...

(called

Chaos Monkey Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. Concept In software development, a given software system's ability to to ...

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

, and many others. After Amazon, Robbins founded the Velocity Conference to advance the field of Web Operations &

with

Tim O'Reilly Tim O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0. Education and early life Born in County Cork, Ireland, Tim O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, Ca ...

. He also founded

Chef A chef is a trained professional cook and tradesman who is proficient in all aspects of food preparation, often focusing on a particular cuisine. The word "chef" is derived from the term ''chef de cuisine'' (), the director or head of a k ...

, a pioneering cloud infrastructure automation company. Jesse Robbins was also an early investor in

. Robbins was recognized in 2011 with the

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

TR35 The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by ''MIT Technology Review'' magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. at ''Technology Review'' with lists of winners at technologyreview.com ...

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

and serving as the first CEO.

Other work

Robbins founded Orion Labs, a technology startup which created a "Real-Life

Star Trek Communicator A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth ...

".He says he "wanted to bring heads-up, real-time communication to everybody" to build "a world powered by voice".

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 OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed ...

on techniques and patterns to improve technology adoption in disaster response & humanitarian aid. These improvements were adopted by the

United Nations Joint Logistics Centre The United Nations Joint Logistics Centre (UNJLC) was created to optimise and complement the logistics capabilities of cooperating agencies within a well-defined crisis area for the benefit of the ongoing humanitarian operation. In 2005 the UNJLC wa ...

in response to

Cyclone Nargis Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Nargis ( my, နာဂစ်, ur, نرگس ) was an extremely destructive and deadly tropical cyclone that caused the worst natural disaster in the recorded history of Myanmar during early May 2008. The cyclone ...

in 2008 and are now widely adopted. One example was CrisisCommons in response to the

2010 Haiti earthquake A catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake struck Haiti at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The epicenter was near the town of Léogâne, Ouest department, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's ca ...

Awards and recognition

2021 - Robbins named to The Seed 100: the Best Early-Stage Investors of 2021 2012 - Robbins was named as a Top 10 Cloud Computing Leader of 2012 by

TechTarget TechTarget is an American company which offers data-driven marketing services to business-to-business technology vendors. It uses purchase intent data gleaned from the readership of its 140 + technology focused web sites to help tech vendors rea ...

2011 - Robbins was selected by

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

magazine as one of the top "35 under 35"

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 Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econom ...

and at

. 2010 - Robbins was selected by Business Journal as one of the top "40 under 40" entrepreneurs in 2010 for founding

and raising $13 million in venture capital funding.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Robbins, Jesse American computer scientists Living people 1978 births American technology company founders Amazon (company) people