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Joseph Jacks bets on open source startups, a ‘paradox of philanthropy and capitalism’
- Open Source Capital has invested in over 80 open-source startups, including Notion alternative AppFlowy, Web development framework Remix and management platform Cerbos.
- Founder Joseph Jacks believes open-sourced philanthropy dovetails with sustainable business models, making it possible to strike a balance between the two, regardless of the product or service offered.
- Jacks is betting 'open core' will take over from closed-core SaaS businesses and predicts such units will eventually dominate the start-up scene.
- Open Source Capital's limited partners include Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and founding Google investor Ram Shriram among other.
- OSS Capital has raised three funds, plans to close a fourth by early 2026, invested at seed level in most companies and led a Series A funding round for W4 Games last year.
- Jacks created KubeCon and founded commercial Kubernetes firm Kismatic, which was sold to Apprenda.
- OpenBB CEO Didier Lopes said OSS Capital's input and contacts were valuable after his $8.5m seed round, with Kismatic donating the Kubernetes community conference to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016.
- GitLab CEO and co-founder Sid Sijbrandij launched Open Core Ventures (OCV) in 2020, and while it's slightly different in that it's adopting more of an incubator approach to building and investing in companies around existing open source projects, it has a similar underlying philosophy.
- OSS Capital's focus is on commercial open-source software (COSS), typically software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps that use open source as a core component.
- OSS Capital has made a handful of investments in cryptocurrencies, including $40m for Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's ResearchHub, which has prompted it to move from an ERA to an RIA in order to comply with regulatory demands.
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