Dana Oshiro

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.