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Seed to Harvest
🎙️ Seed to Harvest | Stories from Technical Storytellers
Welcome to Seed to Harvest, the podcast by Behind Genius Ventures.
We talk to early-stage founders, operators, and investors—people building with code and conviction. Each episode is a chapter in their story: from the messy beginnings to the quiet pivots, from planting ideas to growing companies that matter.
Expect:
🌱 Honest conversations on the earliest chapters of company-building
🧠 Tactical insights from technical minds with narrative soul
✨ Reflections on resilience, rituals, and reinventing what’s possible
This podcast is for the builders who think in frameworks and metaphors. The ones who whiteboard in wild places. The ones writing their own mythologies—one commit, pitch, or poem at a time.
From spark to story.
From seed to harvest. 🌾
Seed to Harvest
TQ Ventures Investor Jana Iris on Developing Community Experiences Inspired By Burning Man, Her Tech Career at HashiCorp as a “Non-Technical” Talent, and Making Her First Angel Investment | Seed To Harvest Ep43
Seed to Harvest is a podcast focused on stories & tactics from a diverse array of investors, founders, and creators, hosted by Paige Finn Doherty, a founding partner at Behind Genius Ventures and author of Seed to Harvest, an illustrated children's book for adults.
Today, I’m joined by Jana Iris. She’s a coffee lover, start-up advisor and investor. Since 2008, she’s been an early employee of startups, including Engine Yard, New Relic, and HashiCorp, focused on building their developer communities. In 2022, she switched gears into angel investing and advising companies like Spacelift, Fermyon Technologies, SuperTokens, and CloudQuery.Now she invests alongside her team at TQ Ventures.
00:00 Welcome to Seed To Harvest: Jana Iris
05:25 Meeting the founder of HashiCorp
10:04 The difference between open core and open source
15:46 HashiCorp going public
20:05 Incorporating Burning Man into HashiCorp
25:12 Jana declaring her mentor
Show notes:
Jana Iris | https://twitter.com/janaboruta
HashiCorp | https://www.hashicorp.com/
TQ Ventures | https://www.tqventures.com/
Engine Yard | https://www.engineyard.com/
Groupon | https://www.groupon.com/
Mitchell Hashimoto | https://twitter.com/mitchellh
Vagrant | https://www.vagrantup.com/
Yehuda Katz | https://twitter.com/wycats
Evan Phoenix | https://twitter.com/evanphx
Brian Ford | https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-ford-231b4732
Gitpod | https://www.gitpod.io/
Gabbi | https://www.gabbi.com/
Grace Isford | https://twitter.com/graceisford
Michael Stoppelman | https://twitter.com/stopman