OCV Description
Founded by Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab co-founder and Executive Chair, Open Core Ventures (OCV) starts companies around promising open source projects. We recruit the founders, often from the OSS project we're commercializing, and help them accelerate growth to raise a Seed round. We’ve started 30+ companies around open source projects, including Fleet, FlowFuse, and Mermaid Chart.
Key Messages
- Open Core Ventures is a venture capital firm that forms open core commercial open source software companies around OSS projects. We believe open core will become the default for software, replacing proprietary software.
- Our mission is to democratize becoming a founding CTO. We do that by recruiting founders who otherwise might not have the opportunity or circumstances to become a founder. We take the risk out of doing that by paying them a salary at or above the market rate from the start. This way, there is no downside when they leave their day job, and the startup fails.
- We disrupt venture by running the non-differentiated but necessary parts of startup building for our founders so they can be laser-focused on company strategy. We help handle the day-to-day from setting up global payroll systems to vendor contract negotiations. Additionally, we act as advisors providing guidance from day one on topics such as content strategy, pricing, talent management philosophies, etc.
- We’re building a public resource for building a startup. As we continue to launch new companies, we’re constantly iterating and streamlining our processes and recommendations. The goal is to develop an open handbook for startup building that we share with all founders.