Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

How did TQ Ventures Investor Jana Iris learn her framework for community building?

14 Dec 2022 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:59

In this interview segment, Jana Iris reflects on how her early experiences in customer support shaped her approach to building developer communities. She recounts meeting Mitchell Hashimoto during his college years and sponsoring his work on Vagrant, an early open‑source project that became the foundation of HashiCorp. Iris explains that her organization, NGR, actively supported the Ruby on Rails ecosystem and established a comprehensive community‑building framework: sponsoring every meetup and conference, creating an open‑source project program that funded contributors, and hiring notable open‑source developers such as Yehuda Katz, Evan Phoenix, and Brian Ford. A core emphasis of this framework was education, delivered through workshops and hands‑on learning events. These practices collectively formed the basis of her strategy for nurturing vibrant developer communities.

Chapters

So, is there anyone that you've stayed in touch with from those early customer support days that has turned up in your life in a surprising way? A lot of people, I think. You know, I met Mitchell Hashimoto when he was still in college, right? The founder of HashiCorp. We sponsored him to work on Vagrant, right? The first open source tool that he launched that, like, you know, kind of started HashiCorp. But, NGR did a lot of really cool things for, like, the open source ecosystem, and particularly, like, pushing forward, like, the Ruby on Rails ecosystem. So, and that's kind of where I, like, learned my framework for community building, especially for developer communities. So we sponsored every meetup and conference, which is, like, a given now. We had an open source, like, kind of project program where we would sponsor open source contributors and projects. We would hire open source contributors. So we hired people like Yehuda Katz and Evan Phoenix and Brian Ford, right? And so we did a lot of things like that. We were really focused on education workshops.