Dana Oshiro
General Partner, Heavybit
Dana has 15+ years of experience helping technical founders go to market. She has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, and VentureBeat, and spoken at major industry events such as CES, TEDx, and SxSW. As an investor, she holds board positions with...

Dana Oshiro is a General Partner and was Heavybit’s original Operating Partner. She manages Heavybit’s program and marketing teams including the advisor network, content program, office hours, Speaker Series, conferences, portfolio services, podcasting network, and social events. Since joining the firm, Dana has led early positioning and launches for 50+ leading companies including Snyk, LaunchDarkly, Netlify, Begin, Metrist, and Tailscale.
Dana joined Heavybit in 2014 to expand Heavybit’s marketing and community strategy, grow the firm’s network of advisors, and support teams in their early go-to-market efforts. As part of this, she launched the content library, newsletter, and first program curriculum, and cofounded the DevGuild conference series. Since then, Dana has expanded the Heavybit program and marketing team, engaged 600+ domain-specific advisors, and led the team to produce hundreds of onstage events and thousands of educational resources in support of developer company founders. One aspect of Heavybit’s growth includes Dana’s focus on Heavybit’s diversity and inclusion initiatives - maintaining a diverse pipeline of companies and advisors, mentoring underrepresented technologists to publish and speak, and co-creating the firm’s first inclusion, conduct, and hiring policies.
Before Heavybit, Dana held senior technical marketing positions at Code for America, Heroku, Salesforce, and NetShelter (acquired by Ziff Davis). Her insights on startup strategy, developer marketing, and technology have been featured in The New York Times, VentureBeat, The New Stack, Forbes, ReadWriteWeb, and The Next Web. Dana has also spoken at some of the industry’s most influential conferences including CES, DockerCon, TEDx, DevRelCon, and SxSW Interactive.
Before her career in tech, Dana was a public health and political strategist. In the past, she helped enact the nation’s first statewide biomonitoring bill, co-organized one of the earliest homeless counts as a campaign to establish North America’s first safe injection site, and managed a $20M public safety and ad budget for the Government of British Columbia. Oshiro has a BA in Literature from the University of Victoria and a PR and communications degree from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She’s based in San Francisco, CA.
News & Announcements
Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Aserto
Heavybit welcomes cloud-native authorization startup Aserto.
Orbit Joins Heavybit
Heavybit welcomes developer community management startup Orbit.
New Heavybit Member: Spark IO / Particle
Heavybit welcomes Internet of Things startup Particle.
Heavybit’s Newest Member Company: Apportable
Heavybit welcomes mobile app development startup Apportable.
New Member Company: Gradle
Heavybit welcomes open-source infrastructure startup Gradle.
Heavybit’s Blog is Live
Heavybit's blog is dedicated to providing valuable educational resources for founders of developer-first startups.
Content from the Library

Dear Founders: Start with Messaging
A Messaging Framework and Template for Founders Building SaaS Brands Dear founders: This article is intended to help you clearly...

Why No One Reads Your Pitch or Blog Post: Newsworthiness 101
Bad PR pitches aren’t just ignored, on slow days they’re reprimanded alongside screeds from some of the best and brightest...

Orbit Just Went Live, Here’s Why It’s a Big Deal
Heavybit led Orbit’s pre-Seed round just over 18 months ago and as of writing this post, the team just launched to the general...
The Heavybit Partnership

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