Jesse Robbins

Jesse Robbins is a General Partner at Heavybit, an early-stage venture firm focused on enterprise infrastructure and developer-first startups. Heavybit’s site describes the firm as investing from “Day 0” through Series A, with $500K-$5M checks and hands-on support for technical founders.

Before Heavybit, Robbins co-founded Chef, originally Opscode, in 2008 with Adam Jacob, Barry Steinglass, and Nathan Haneysmith. Chef became a major infrastructure automation and DevOps platform; Progress acquired Chef for $220 million in cash in October 2020.

Robbins previously worked at Amazon from 2001 to 2006 as the company’s “Master of Disaster,” responsible for availability across Amazon-branded properties. Drawing on his firefighter and EMT background, he helped develop GameDay practices and operational approaches associated with incident management, site reliability engineering, and chaos engineering.

He also co-founded O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference with Steve Souders, which became an important gathering point for the DevOps community. He later co-founded Orion Labs, a voice-first communications platform for frontline teams; Orion lists him as Founder, Advisor, and Board Member, and notes that he served as CEO from 2014 to 2020.

• Robbins states: “I invest at the seed stage in AI developer tools and infrastructure.”
• He focuses on founders building tools and platforms developers rely on, especially where AI is becoming part of the operating layer for software and infrastructure.
• His stated AI infrastructure view: “Every major abstraction in computing created a new generation of tools to manage the complexity it introduced. AI is no different.”
• He looks for “founders with taste” who are solving problems they know firsthand, and products that change how users think about a problem after first use.
• He cares about developer experience and open-source go-to-market, arguing that authentic community cannot be replaced by marketing spend.
• Heavybit’s firm-level focus includes engineering tools, AI, cloud-native infrastructure, open source, DevOps, and DevSecOps.
• In a 2026 airCFO interview, Robbins emphasized market size as a key investment gate and said Heavybit studies founder dynamics closely, including whether co-founders support each other under pressure.