About Open Core Ventures
"As software has eaten the world, open source is eating software." - Peter Levine
Commercial open source software companies have captured hundreds of billions in enterprise value, yet this represents only a fraction of the trillions delivered by OSS today. We're still in the early innings.
GitLab co-founder and executive chair Sid Sijbrandij started Open Core Ventures (OCV) to accelerate this opportunity. We start companies around promising open source projects, the same approach that took GitLab from OSS project to IPO in seven years.
We recruit founders and help them reach escape velocity. We've started 30+ companies around open source projects, including Fleet, FlowFuse, and Mermaid Chart. You can read more about our approach in our public handbook.
The Investor Role at OCV
As an Investor at OCV, you'll identify and research promising open source projects and build investment cases. Unlike traditional venture investing, your job doesn't stop there. You'll launch these companies as interim CEO, working directly with technical founders to drive early growth. Think part investor, part co-founder.
What You'll Do
- Source and evaluate open source projects for commercial potential, digging into codebase quality, architecture, contributor activity, and community traction to identify which projects could become venture-scale companies
- Identify and recruit CTO candidates directly from the maintainer and core contributor base of these projects
- Launch companies as interim CEO: define the initial product roadmap, ship the first version, land early customers or design partners, and run GTM until the company has real traction
About You
We're looking for 0-1 product managers, product-obsessed founders, or product-centric operators who can spot the next great technology and build it into a real company. You know how to talk to users, do things that don't scale, and build something people want.
You could be a great investor at OCV if:
- You move fast: you've operated in high-velocity environments and default to shipping and iterating over planning
- You have a founder mentality: you've taken big swings with imperfect information before, as a founder, early employee, or in another 0-1 role, and can point to what you learned from what didn't work
- You have real technical depth: you've written code or shipped software, and you have a strong grasp of engineering concepts and software architecture. Experience at a top-tier software company is a strong signal
- You're relentlessly curious: you dig into how things actually work, not just what they claim to do
- You bias toward action: you balance big ideas with concrete execution, including the grunt work, because movement creates momentum
Compensation
Cash: commensurate with market and experience
Equity: investors can receive direct equity issuance in companies they help incubate (grants and terms are set via company-specific equity grant agreements). As an example, and for illustrative purposes, OCV offers one of the most favorable risk-adjusted paths to wealth creation in venture:
- Direct equity ownership: receive 1% equity in multiple companies you incubate, vesting over just 9 months instead of the typical 4-year schedule
- Compared to carry in a traditional fund: you receive cash at exit without the entire fund needing to clear its performance hurdle (typically 8% annual returns to LPs before GPs earn carry). To illustrate: 50bps of carry on a $100M fund requires a 4x return on invested capital to earn $300K. A single $200M exit on a 1% stake at 50% dilution can yield $1M
- Compared to founder equity: you launch and support 3 active companies at a time, building a 12-company portfolio over 3 years. That's 12%+ aggregate equity across 12+ companies, founder-level ownership with more shots on goal