Robb graduated from the United States Air Force Academy Honors Program with a Bachelor of Science in astronautical engineering in 1985 and completed USAF Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) in 1986.
Robb was made a senior analyst in January 1996 and led the launch of Forrester's first research service dedicated to covering developments on the Internet, called "Interactive Technologies".
The Gomez Scorecards provided objective decision support to hundreds of thousands of people opening online brokerage and banking accounts.
The Gomez network checked on the availability of transactions systems that operated at big banks and brokerage firms like Fidelity Investments and JP Morgan.
To educate a growing number of people on the power of social software networks, Robb formed a discussion group called K-Logs, Knowledge Management Weblogs[6] in 2001.
[citation needed] Numerous other contemporary military theorists have noted the significance of Robb's work, including Thomas P.M. Barnett,[10] William Lind and Chet Richards.
[11] Noah Shachtman, the editor of Wired's military column, "Danger Room", wrote, "For years, now, no one has had a better read on the enemies that America has been fighting — from Afghanistan to Iraq to Indonesia to here at home — than John Robb.
"[12] David Brooks in The New York Times wrote, "Over the past few years, John Robb has been dissecting the behavior of these groups on his blog, Global Guerrillas.
Robb is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and Yale University, and he has worked both as a special ops counterterrorism officer and as a successful software executive.
The concept was formally introduced in his article "Power to the People" published in Fast Company in March 2006,[13] and expanded in Brave New War (John Wiley & Sons, 2007).