Project & Founder Selection

Project selection

OCV’s research team uses a standard set of criteria to assess an open source project’s commercial viability. Our research criteria are based on existing traction—typically the number of GitHub stars and monthly pull requests—and an overview of the potential market opportunity, trends, current competitive landscape, etc.

Our research and outreach process is based on years of experience reviewing projects and building open core companies. While our research is a good starting point, it is not exhaustive, and there may be many other paths to success. We believe the best path is to just get started, and we follow the typical startup-building model of hypothesizing, testing, and iterating often and quickly.

Founder selection

Recruiting CTOs

Ideally, we can recruit the original project author—and current maintainer—as the CTO. When the original author is unavailable or difficult to identify, we recruit a core maintainer or top contributor. In some cases, we recruit an engineer from outside the community with the technical depth to quickly become a leading contributor.

Founding CTOs are offered a starting salary (we often match your current salary) and granted 10-25% founder equity. We partner with you to build the narrative and early traction needed to recruit a CEO and raise follow-on capital.

Recruiting CEOs

We sometimes recruit a CEO within a couple of months of launch; in other cases, it takes a year or more.

We look for former founders—often from the YC community—who have built 0-to-1 products, led growth, raised capital, and navigated the challenges of early-stage company building.

The best CEO candidates already want to start another company. We give them the ability to skip the early foundational work—finding an idea, a co-founder, early investors, and first users— and offer a livable salary and equity. It's less ownership than starting from scratch, but the right candidates place significant value on the early momentum.

Outreach process

1. OCV completes an internal research doc and establishes the basis for commercialization.

2. OCV contacts a potential founder and schedules an informational meeting.

3. OCV schedules 1-2 additional calls to discuss the details of starting the business.

4. If there’s mutual interest in proceeding with forming a new company, OCV completes its internal approval process. This may include a conflict of interest check.

5. Once approved, OCV sends the founder an indicative offer letter and begins the formation process.

The outreach process typically includes 2-3 live calls with our team to discuss OCV’s model, potential commercialization plans, and answer questions. The process from start to finish can vary in length depending on availability and complexity. We are happy to take more calls and answer questions throughout the process.

Evaluating our model

OCV’s model differs from the typical VC model, making it difficult to compare with other venture models. Our model includes highly personalized and ongoing advisory and support from company formation through the Seed fundraising process. We understand that it's natural to seek advice when assessing a new opportunity, and caution that without a full understanding of our model, it may be difficult for someone to offer educated advice. We encourage you to ask as many questions and request as many calls as needed when evaluating an opportunity with OCV.

Requesting references from current OCV founders

We understand founders would like to speak with other OCV companies as a reference as part of their decision-making process. To best respect our founders’ time, we ask that you allow us to make direct intros after we have a mutual interest in moving forward.