Investor - Open Core Ventures

Azbout Open Core Ventures

"As software has eaten the world, open source is eating software." — Peter Levine

Commercial open source software companies have captured hundreds of billions in enterprise value—yet this represents only a fraction of the trillions delivered by OSS today. We're still in the early innings.

GitLab co-founder and executive chair Sid Sijbrandij started Open Core Ventures (OCV) to accelerate this opportunity. We start companies around promising open source projects—the same approach that took GitLab from OSS project to IPO in seven years.

We recruit founders and help them reach escape velocity. We’ve started 30+ companies around open source projects, including Fleet, FlowFuse, and Mermaid Chart. 

You can read more about our approach in our public handbook. 

The Investor Role at OCV

As an Investor at OCV, you’ll identify and research promising open source projects and build investment cases. 

Unlike traditional venture investing, your job doesn’t stop there. You’ll launch these companies as interim CEO – working directly with technical founders to drive early growth. Think part investor, part co-founder.

What you will do

• Research and evaluate OSS projects for commercial potential


• Identify CTO candidates from these projects 


• Launch companies as interim CEO, driving early product strategy and GTM


• Help identify and recruit CEO candidates once the company has momentum

About You

We're looking for 0-1 product managers, product-obsessed founders, or product centric investors who are obsessed with identifying the next great technologies and building generational products and companies. You know how to talk to users, do things that don’t scale, build something people want, and move fast.

You could be a great investor at OCV if:

• You move fast: Growth defines startups—you live for velocity and rapid iteration


• You have a founder mentality: You do whatever it takes, take big swings with imperfect information, and learn quickly from failures


• You understand technology: Technical background helps, but fluency in software concepts is required. Experience at a top-tier software company is ideal


• You're relentlessly curious: You dig deep to understand how things work at their core


• You sweat the details: Nothing falls through the cracks on your watch


• You bias toward action: You balance big ideas with concrete execution. You'll do the grunt work. Movement creates momentum

Compensation

Cash

Commensurate with market and experience 

Equity

Investors can receive direct equity issuance in companies they help incubate (grants and terms are set company-specific equity grant agreements). As an example and for illustrative purposes, OCV offers the most favorable risk-adjusted path to wealth creation in venture:

• Direct equity ownership: Receive 1% equity in multiple companies you incubate, vesting over just 9 months instead of the typical 4-year schedule.


• Compared to carry in a traditional fund: You receive cash at exit without the entire fund needing to clear its performance hurdle (typically 8% annual returns to LPs before GPs earn carry). To illustrate: 50bps of carry on a $100M fund requires an 4x return on invested capital to earn $300K. A single $200M exit on a 1% stake at 50% dilution can yield $1M.


• Compared to founder equity: You launch and support 3 active companies at a time, building a 12-company portfolio over 3 years. That's 12%+ aggregate equity across 12+ companies—founder-level ownership with more shots on goal.