Office hours are weekly meetings you will have with OCV partners. The goal of these meetings is to help you with your most pressing concerns and blockers. Meetings are typically 25 minutes and time-constrained to help you focus on the most important topics. You will have one 25-minute meeting per week rotating between Individual Office Hours and Group Office Hours.
Individual Office Hours
Individual office hours are meetings you have with OCV partners. This is your meeting and you are responsible for making sure they are productive. Prepare your agenda ahead of time and take notes during the meeting. OCV’s Group Partner will work with the founders to schedule individual office hours. You can request additional ad hoc office hours as needed.
Meeting format
There is no set agenda for Individual Office Hours. You can prepare your agenda in any way that works for you. Include the current meeting date and a few bulleted topics to cover at a minimum.
Preparing for your first individual office hour
At your first individual office hour OCV partners make introductions and will briefly cover format and cadence of individual office hours. Expect to spend the majority of the call covering business-related items. Founders should be prepared to discuss:
- Founder background (consider practicing your introduction ahead of the call)
- Project background (who own’s the repo, telemetry, existing users)
- Growth story (what’s the north star goal that will drive the fundraising story in 12-18 months)
- Two-week goal (typically a growth metric, often “get first user”)
By your second individual office hour, be prepared to discuss
- Website and company “launch” status (pricing page, top-of-funnel metric)
- Product roadmap (often “MVP commercial version” and adding telemetry)
- Hiring and CEO sourcing strategy
To make the most of your time with OCV partners, review administrative information (see First Dayand First Week onboarding materials) prior to your first individual office hour. Share administrative questions in your designated company channel.
Group Office Hours
Group Office Hours are meetings you have with OCV partners and other OCV company founders. The objective of Group Office Hours is to learn how to set appropriate goals at your current stage and to develop good hygiene around communicating goals and measuring results. The meeting will include 3-4 companies at a time to encourage peer learning. Group pairings are loosely based on the company’s stage of development and/or industry focus. Additional topics can be discussed during Individual Office Hours.
Group Office Hours are automatically scheduled by OCV. Company CTO and CEOs are invited to join; please refrain from adding additional team members to the group bi-weekly call.
Read Goal Setting ahead of your first office hours meetings to best prepare for setting your first goals.
Meeting format
Each meeting will follow the same meeting format. Companies will be asked:
- Share the 2 sentence description of your company
- What did you accomplish last week (in terms of your previous two-week goals)
- What did you learn, or what were your biggest blockers
- What are your goals for the next two weeks
Goal setting and progress are captured in the Group Office Hours Goals spreadsheet. At the start of each meeting, founders will be asked if they achieved (green) or missed (red) the previous 2-week goal. It’s important for founders to evaluate their goals within the binary of achieved or missed and avoid classifying progress as “yellow.” If it’s unclear whether the goal was achieved or not, you may need to define the goal better. Nuances can be covered during the office hours discussion.
See the Meeting & Communication page for guidelines on meeting etiquette and scheduling.
Two-sentence company description
Write down the two-sentence company description that you will recite at every Group Office Hour. Building the habit of being able to effectively and succinctly describe your company will benefit you for the entirety of your tenure as a founder. Even CEOs of well-known public companies typically lead with some version of a two-sentence description when introducing their themselves.
The goal of the two-sentence company description is to make if very clear what your company does and to establish credibility. Your description should give people just enough to be interested in learning more. The audience for the two-sentence description is investors and the general public, not potential users or customers. Mention the open source project you’re building around if it’s well known and an important part of your growth story and/or you are the creator or the company is the lead maintainer.
Post-Seed Stage Companies
Companies that have successfully fundraised graduate out of the bi-weekly office hours cycle.
Post-Seed Stage Office Hours cycle:
- Monthly Group Office Hours with OCV’s General Partner and other Post-Seed stage companies.
- Quarterly Individual Office Hours with OCV’s General Partner.
Founders are responsible for preparing agenda items for monthly Group Office Hours and quarterly Individual Office Hours. Post-seed stage companies are still welcome to book office hours ad-hoc, as needed.
Shadows on Investor Calls
Portfolio CEOs should consider how conversations about positioning and high-level strategy and roadmap, whether with their board or with large shareholders, will impact the team in terms of distraction/confusion before opening up those conversations to a wider audience.
Advice from one OCV CEO: set expectations with shadows on investor call before inviting them to meetings. Otherwise, general discussions can create confusion about major ongoing company activities.