At Amplify, we obsess over outliers. Not in the context of individual investments, companies or technologies, but rather people. As early-stage investors, we’re singularly-focused on identifying and helping the difference makers: the technologists who can bend the world to their will, and in doing so, forever change it.

So today, on behalf of everyone at Amplify, I am thrilled to announce that Sergio Benitez has joined us as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

We’ve gotten to know Sergio over the last several years both through his academic research at Stanford and his contributions in the open source community as the creator of Rocket, the wildly popular web framework for Rust.

From our very first interactions with Sergio, we’ve known he was an outlier. It’s not that he was coding by 12, running his own web development company by 15, graduating from MIT, and then going on to teach the CS140e Operating Systems class as a PhD at Stanford that convinced us that he was different. It wasn’t his roles at Google, SpaceX, and Apple working on projects ranging from creating new languages for programming robots to working on the performance of operating systems that run on rockets. Nor was our premonition rooted in the fact that 4,000 projects on GitHub and dozens of companies like NPM and Mozilla are relying on Rocket in production today.

No, we knew Sergio is an outlier because he is compelled by a vision of better world which he is uniquely qualified to build.

Spend five minutes with him and you’ll dive deep into a conversation about why containers and virtual machines are relics of a broken computing paradigm. Spend a few more minutes and you’ll start to believe that the way we’ve been designing and deploying applications breaks down in a world that demands uncompromising performance and security.

Leveraging his research in operating systems, programming languages, formal verification and security, Sergio believes we can do better; that we can build systems that are performant, secure by default and that don’t compromise on developer experience.

Beyond his unrivaled technical prowess and vision, Sergio exudes character, work ethic, and humility. He’s an extraordinary builder who is deeply committed to moving the entire tech ecosystem forward. It’s a privilege for us to have the opportunity to work closely together.

So with that, please join us in welcoming Sergio!