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Open Core Ventures Handbook/⛸️Office Hours

Office Hours

Office hours are weekly meetings you will have with OCV partners. The goal of these meetings is to address your most pressing concerns/blockers and help you accelerate growth. OCV Founders regularly attend group meetings with other founders, and confidential information may be shared. This information is not to be shared.
Office hours with OCV partners should be highly leveraged. Think of your meeting time as a force multiplier: 25 minutes of face time, amplified by preparation, yields maximum value. This is your chance to get answers you can't get anywhere else. Make every minute count by being highly prepared and highly specific.
When meeting with Sid, share your draft agenda with the OCV team at least a day before the meeting. We will review and help prep to ensure you get the most out of your time. If there are common questions that have already been addressed in the handbook or a blog post, the OCV team will share reference links ahead of the call. Please read the provided material before the meeting and adjust your questions to address any follow-up questions or company-specific nuances you’d like to cover.

Meeting Prep

Every meeting must have an agenda attached to the meeting invitation. No agenda = no meeting. Agendas should be prepared before the meeting begins. You will use your individual office hours doc for most meetings.

Meeting etiquette

  1. Always have an agenda prepared ahead of the meeting.
  1. Ensure all meeting attendees have access.
  1. Add a header for each new meeting that includes the meeting date and lists attendees.
  1. Use a numbered list for agenda items. A numbered list makes it easy to reference where you are in the agenda.
  1. Founders and any additional meeting attendees are expected to take notes in the doc during the meeting. This helps clarify understanding in real time.
  1. Founders should confirm takeaways, action items, and timelines before the end of the call.

Individual Office Hours

Individual office hours are 1:1 meetings you have with OCV partners. They are typically 25 minutes and time-constrained to help you focus on the most important topics. OCV will schedule a recurring, biweekly individual office hours and ad hoc 1:1’s with Sid Sijbrandij. You can request additional ad hoc office hours as needed.
This is your meeting, and you are responsible for ensuring it is productive. Prepare your agenda in advance and take notes during the meeting.

Preparing for your first individual office hour

At your first individual office hour, OCV partners make introductions and will briefly cover the format and cadence of individual office hours. Expect to spend most of the call discussing business-related matters. Founders should be prepared to discuss:
  1. Founder background (consider practicing your introduction ahead of the call)
  1. Project background (who owns the repo, telemetry, existing users)
  1. Growth story (what’s the north star goal that will drive the fundraising story in 12-18 months)
  1. Two-week goal (typically a growth metric, often “get first user”)
  1. Two-sentence description
By your second individual office hour, be prepared to discuss
  1. Website and company “launch” status (pricing page, signup funnel/UX, top-of-funnel metric)
  1. Product roadmap (often “MVP commercial version” and adding telemetry)
  1. Hiring and CEO sourcing strategy
To make the most of your time with OCV partners, review administrative information before 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. Group Office Hours are focused on growth and goal setting, and developing 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. OCV schedules Group Office Hours. Company CTOs and CEOs are invited to join; please refrain from adding additional team members to the group bi-weekly call.

Meeting format

Each company will share its update using the standard format:
  1. Read your two-sentence description
  1. Review growth updates
  1. Open discussion
Each company should prepare its agenda ahead of time and will have ~10 minutes to cover agenda items. Use the Group Office Hours Agenda template to prepare your update.
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Group Office Hours Agenda Template

Prepare your group office hours agenda in your office hours doc ahead of the meeting. Use the following template.

Date | Group Office Hours

  1. Goal Progress
    1. Planned (what you said you would do at the last meeting)
    2. Achieved or missed (if missed, include % achieved)
    3. Next goal (singular, binary, measurable)
  1. Growth Plan (how will you achieve your next goal)
  1. Open Discussion

Goal progress

Goal progress should focus on a single, measurable goal. Include any additional goals/metrics in a separate section titled “Secondary metrics” when relevant. Evaluate progress as either achieved or missed, and avoid classifying progress as yellow. If it’s unclear whether the goal was achieved or missed, you may need to reframe your goal. OCV will pressure test your next goal during office hours (i.e., is it the right goal, is it ambitious enough).

Growth plan

Share how you plan to achieve your next goal.
Prompts (only share what’s most relevant)
  1. What worked last week, and how are you doubling down on that?
  1. What was the biggest challenge, and how are you addressing that?
  1. Your primary growth channel and how you are leveraging it
  1. Any big bets you're placing on a new hypothesis, channel, or tactic.

Open discussion

Share any additional wins, learnings, blockers, and add any specific questions you want to address with OCV.
Prompts (only include what’s most relevant)
  1. Big wins that weren’t already covered
  1. Any material changes to strategy, burn, etc.
  1. Any concerns about the runway, updates on fundraising, etc.
  1. Learnings or insights that can benefit other founders in the group
  1. Challenges that this group can help unpack

Two-sentence company description

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 begin with a two-sentence description when introducing their company. Write down the two-sentence company description that you will recite at every Group Office Hour in the description field on your company dashboard.
The goal of the two-sentence company description is to make it very clear what your company does and to establish credibility. It should be forward-leaning and provide enough information to pique people's interest in learning more. The target audience for the two-sentence description is investors, rather than 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.
It’s most convenient when there is a closed-source incumbent that makes a lot of money, and its customers don’t love it. When this option is available, consider including a statement like, “we are the open source version of X.” For example, “Authentik is the open source alternative to Okta. Okta makes $X per year and has had # of security breaches in the last year. Open source Okta makes sense because… ”

Open Core Roundtable with Sid Sijbrandij

The Open Core Roundtable is a monthly question-and-answer forum for Pre-Seed companies to ask OCV’s founder and general partner, Sid Sijbrandij, questions about their product and GTM. The Open Core AMA is your opportunity to dig deep on a topic with Sid and get direct and specific feedback and perspective related to your company.
Submit your question at least one week before the meeting, and plan to review and workshop it during individual office hours. We workshop questions to ensure they prompt a high-quality, high-fidelity, and fruitful discussion. Founders are encouraged to ask follow-up questions and participate in discussions throughout the session. For common questions with a documented answer, OCV will share existing guidance from the handbook, blog posts, and video recordings. Please review the provided documentation and rephrase your question to address any remaining uncertainties or ask a different question.
Questions should focus on open core topics like product development, community engagement, pricing, and GTM. You are welcome to propose a question outside of these themes, and the OCV team will help assess if it’s a good question for this forum. Future-focused, abstract, or trending topics are welcome. The OCV team will assist in crafting these questions to make them tactically applicable to our companies.
The forum is curated for Pre-Seed companies, but Post-Seed companies are welcome to join. New founders joining for the first time are invited to review previous roundtable notes/recordings and observe during their first live discussion. If you’d like to ask a question when joining for the first time, please work with the OCV team to workshop your question ahead of the call.

Meeting format

The Open Core AMA is a 50-minute question-and-answer session with OCV partners.
The OCV team will curate the agenda, and we may not get to each company every time. We will post the agenda a day ahead of time and ensure that companies that didn’t get a chance to ask a question are at the top of the agenda for the next session. Founders are encouraged the attend the sessions even if they don’t have a question on the agenda.
The meeting is recorded and distributed internally in the #ocvfounders channel. OCV will publish a recap blog post covering the high-level takeaways. The blog post will not include any company-specific information. OCV may use clips of the video for other marketing purposes, but will not share any company-specific information publicly.
Agenda format
  1. Name, Company, Title
    1. Company overview (two-sentence description, two-sentence GTM)
    2. Question, including any relevant context

Post-Seed Stage Companies

Companies that have successfully fundraised graduate out of the bi-weekly office hours cycle.
Post-Seed Stage companies are invited to join Monthly Group Office Hours with OCV’s General Partners and other Post-Seed stage companies. Monthly Group Office Hours are scheduled through the General Partner’s office. Any change requests regarding time, meeting format, or agendas should be made through the General Partner’s team. Post-seed stage companies are still welcome to book office hours on an ad-hoc basis, as needed.

Meeting format

Monthly Group Office Hour discussions are focused on growth. Each meeting will follow a standard format: company updates will be followed by an open discussion and Q&A session. We request that founders add their previous and forthcoming four-week company goals and achievements to the Group Office Hours Goals spreadsheet (example linked here only) and include open discussion items on the agenda before the call begins. Both the goals spreadsheet and the company-specific agendas are linked in the recurring calendar invite.

Company updates (goals and achievements)

Founders will be asked to share a company update.
  1. The company’s two-sentence description
  1. High-level plan/goal for the year (e.g., $5M ARR)
  1. Goals for last month, and whether they were achieved. What was the biggest challenge (if you missed) or what worked (if you hit).
  1. Goal for next month, and the primary bet/investment you're placing to achieve it.

Open discussion and Q&A

Founders are encouraged to share
  • Big wins that weren’t already covered
  • Any material changes to strategy, burn, etc.
  • Any concerns about the runway, updates on fundraising, etc.
  • Learnings or insights that can benefit other founders in the group
  • Any questions or FYIs for investors
  • Challenges that this group can help unpack
Additionally, OCV may also add investor questions to the agenda.
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Template Agenda Format
  1. Date of the meeting
  1. Company Updates
  1. Open discussion items / FYI updates
  1. Questions from the company to the investor
  1. Questions from the investor to the company
 
Calendar invites for Post-Seed Stage Companies should include:
  • Each company’s own agenda doc is listed in the same order as the meeting invite title
The presentation order during the live meeting follows the meeting invitation title and agenda list.