Joseph Ruscio
General Partner, Heavybit
Joe is a general partner at Heavybit. He uses his many years of experience in academia, startup management, and venture capital to help practitioner-first teams scale their go-to-market strategy and their organizations. At present, he works with successful...

Joseph Ruscio is a General Partner at Heavybit. With more than 20 years of experience in academia, startups, and the enterprise, Joe is an expert in distributed systems, scaling high-performing organizations, and developer-first go-to-markets.
Joe has been working with Heavybit since 2013 when he joined the Heavybit portfolio as a Founder and CTO of Librato, one of the first cloud-native, infrastructure monitoring companies with an API-first approach to telemetry. He was responsible for the company's core product vision, R&D, and community-led growth. Librato rapidly scaled to thousands of customers and was acquired for $40m by SolarWinds (a public provider of IT monitoring and management tools) in early 2015. At SolarWinds, he took a leadership role in the firm’s nascent Cloud business division of SaaS offerings built for developers/operators working on modern, cloud-native architectures. Over the next several years he helped lead product strategy, scale R&D, and drive/integrate multiple strategic acquisitions including the likes of Papertrail, Tracelytics, and Loggly. Joe then joined Heavybit full-time as a General Partner in April 2018.
Joe works on the boards of Heavybit-backed companies like Tailscale, Localstack, Groundcover, and Partnerpage among others. He is passionate about products that give technical practitioners “superpowers” and remove any and all toil not related to their business’s core competencies. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech where he dropped out of a PhD program to focus on entrepreneurship. After a decade in San Francisco, he’s now based in Portland Oregon, and loves snowboarding, running, and coffee.
News & Announcements
Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Kosli
Heavybit welcomes DevOps change management startup Kosli.
Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Metrist
Heavybit welcomes cloud observability startup Metrist.
Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Crunchy Data
Heavybit welcomes open-source relational database management startup Crunchy Data.
Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Shipyard
Heavybit welcomes data orchestration startup Shipyard.
Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Tailscale
Heavybit welcomes zero-config VPN startup Tailscale.
Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Sanity
Heavybit welcomes structured content startup Sanity.
Content from the Library

Understanding Legal Issues for Open Source Software Start-ups
Viewing Open Source Startups Through a Licensing and IP Lens Open source software (OSS) is a vibrant and rapidly-growing space,...

How to Successfully Invest in Open-Source Startups
Investing in Open-Source Startups: What to Look for Open-source software (OSS) leverages the power of community to create a...

What Success Looks Like for Modern Open-Source Software Startups
How Open-Source Startups Succeed Estimates suggest that modern developers have built about 70%-90% of all modern software on top...
The Heavybit Partnership

Jesse Robbins
General Partner, Heavybit
James Lindenbaum
General Partner, Heavybit
Tom Drummond
Managing Director, Heavybit