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.

Finding a founding CTO

OCV contacts potential founder CTOs to start a company when our research indicates there’s a significant and real commercial opportunity under our model. Outreach is focused on finding the right founder CTO who’s ready to jump into building a startup.

While we prefer to start companies with a founder who is an owner or primary maintainer of the upstream project, it is not required. Founders who do not own or have access to the upstream project may face more challenges in the beginning than project owners, but we don’t expect those challenges to be insurmountable. We generally discourage forking a project.

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.

CEO recruiting

OCV recruits founding CEOs after the company is formed with a founding CTO in place. CEOs partner with the founding CTO to align the development roadmap and go-to-market strategies, drive growth, and lead fundraising efforts.

We look for candidates with a strong track record, preferably Y Combinator Alumni, who demonstrate exceptional analytical and strategic capabilities. The ideal CEO possesses natural leadership abilities, inspiring others through empathy and adaptable management skills. They should exhibit founder-level charisma, high emotional intelligence, and the ability to lead successful Seed rounds and think at scale.

We seek individuals with impressive career trajectories that exhibit both drive and ambition. The ideal candidate must also demonstrate the ability to thrive in fast-paced environments, actively driving change rather than simply responding to it.

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.