Hokie alumna and tech founder to visit campus Oct. 18 in celebration of Women in Entrepreneurship Week

13 Oct 2022

Nora Jones. Photo courtesy of Nora Jones

Nora Jones, Virginia Tech alumna and founder and CEO of incident analysis platform Jeli, will host a networking event and deliver a keynote address at the Apex Center for Entrepreneurs on Tuesday, Oct. 18, in celebration of National Women in Entrepreneurship Week.

“I'm incredibly excited to return to Virginia Tech after almost 10 years. It's hard to think of a better place to be than Blacksburg in the fall,” Jones said.

In her keynote discussion, titled “Learning from Failure: From Virginia Tech to Jeli,” Jones will highlight the lessons she learned from the highs and lows of her entrepreneurship journey.

Prior to founding Jeli, Jones held positions as the head of Chaos Engineering and Human Factors at Slack and as a senior software engineer at Netflix.

Jones’ work focuses on the sociotechnical aspects of engineering and how people and software work together in practice in distributed systems. This tenet is a founding pillar of Jeli as well as the Chaos Engineering movement and learningfromincidents.io community, both of which Jones helped build from the start.

“I look forward to sharing my journey with the student and university community. I have learned a lot from success and failure since I have been in their seats,” Jones said.

“We love having our alums come back to Blacksburg. The opportunity to have Nora engage with our students provides an excellent opportunity for the students to learn from someone who has been at this institution and has gone on to accomplish great things,” said Derick Maggard, executive director of the Apex Center for Entrepreneurs.

National Women in Entrepreneurship Week is Oct. 17-21 and is a celebration of female founders and business leaders.

“This week is a wonderful week-long celebration of women in entrepreneurship and the powerful force women are in the world of business and the impact women have on our communities,” said Maggard, executive director of the Apex Center.

The event featuring Jones is open to anyone who is interested in learning about Jones’ journey as an entrepreneur. Students, employees, and community members are encouraged to attend.

“Students especially will gain so much from learning from Nora and her incredible background while networking and connecting with fellow students and community leaders. The Apex Center for Entrepreneurs thrives on providing experiential learning opportunities for our students and this includes connecting them with our esteemed alumni,” Maggard said.

During the Oct. 18 event, there will be a social and networking session with Jones at 6 p.m. prior to the keynote address at 7 p.m. For more information on the event and to RSVP, please visit the Nora Jones event page.