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

Cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

, role in creating

DevOps DevOps is the integration and automation of the software development and information technology operations. DevOps encompasses necessary tasks of software development and can lead to shortening development time and improving the development life ...

/ Chaos Engineering, and efforts to improve

emergency management Emergency management (also Disaster management) is a science and a system charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disasters. Emergency management, despite its name, does not actu ...

Career

Robbins is a

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

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

PagerDuty PagerDuty, Inc. is an American cloud computing company specializing in a SaaS incident management platform for IT operations departments. PagerDuty is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Toronto, Atlanta, London, Lisbon, Tokyo, and Sy ...

Snyk Snyk Limited is a developer-oriented cybersecurity company, specializing in securing custom developed code, open-source dependencies and cloud infrastructure. It was founded in 2015 out of Tel Aviv and London and is headquartered in Boston. Hist ...

, and Tailscale. Robbins worked at

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

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). Robbins has said GameDay was inspired by his experience & training as a

firefighter A firefighter (or fire fighter or fireman) is a first responder trained in specific emergency response such as firefighting, primarily to control and extinguish fires and respond to emergencies such as hazardous material incidents, medical in ...

combined with lessons from other industries and research on

complex systems A complex system is a system composed of many components that may interact with one another. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication s ...

, 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 is defined as the probability that a product, system, or service will perform its intended functi ...

, and normal accidents. Game day/ Chaos Engineering 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 and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Netflix Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...

(called Chaos Monkey),

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

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

with

Tim O'Reilly Timothy O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is an Irish-American author and publisher, who 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 Co ...

. He also founded

Chef A chef is a professional Cook (profession), cook and tradesperson who is proficient in all aspects of outline of food preparation, food preparation, often focusing on a particular cuisine. The word "chef" is derived from the term (), the di ...

, 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. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...

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".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 Hurricane Katrina was a powerful, devastating and historic tropical cyclone that caused 1,392 fatalities and damages estimated at $125 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding area. ...

. After he returned, he worked with Mikel Maron and

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (abbreviated OSM) is a free, Open Database License, open geographic database, map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveying, surveys, trace from Ae ...

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 Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Nargis (; , ) 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 made landfall in Myanmar on Friday ...

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

2010 Haiti earthquake The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic Moment magnitude scale, magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake that struck Haiti at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The epicenter was near the town of Léogâne, Ouest (departm ...

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, Inc. (doing business as Informa TechTarget) is an American company that offers data-driven marketing services to business-to-business technology vendors. TechTarget, Inc. was founded in 1999; it is headquartered in Newton, Massachuse ...

2011 - Robbins was selected by

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

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., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

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