Git Round FAQ 👇

Who's behind Git Round?

GR was created by Peer Richelsen (co-founder of Cal.com) and Joseph Jacks (founder of OSS Capital). The program is funded and run by OSS Capital.

What are the funding terms of the program?

$25K for 2.5% of your company ($1M post-money valuation). In nearly all cases, we expect to help incorporate your company quickly just before or while you are going through the program. We use Stripe Atlas for speeding Delaware entity + Mercury for banking to incorporate on a global basis, you do not need to be a US citizen.

Who should apply to Git Round?

Any open source developer located anywhere with a computer and internet connection and building an active open source project (you can also apply before your project is open source, but it must be open source before the start date of the program). Open source projects must be released under an open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative. Specifically, GR is tailor designed for open source (FOSS) creators who want to become leading commercial open source startup (COSS) founders.

What are the prerequisites for applying?

Only 2 requirements: 1) you must not have raised any funding before. 2) must be committed to doing a startup full time and committed to the COSS approach.

What kind of startups does Git Round focus on investing in?

We focus on COSS startups that have the potential to become large independent businesses over the long term. Some of this is possible to identify by evaluating the traits of the founder, or the project, or both. By large, we mean companies that can generate hundreds of millions (minimally) and many billions (ideally) in revenue over time. This should clarify that we do not fund or have interest in projects that are very unlikely to grow into this size given the interests of the founders and/or the focus of the technology and problems it solves.

How does Git Round differ from YC or traditional venture funding?

GR is very different from raising a conventional pre-seed or seed round where generalist angels or VCs invest in a startup and then step aside, offering little active support or contextual mentorship. Investors funding pre-seed or seed rounds also expect the startup to make substantial progress over many quarters or years on product development, hiring, revenue generation, product market fit and more. GR does not take this approach and is not focused on encouraging achievement of those milestones within the program — instead, GR focuses the program on delivering knowledge transfer from the most successful COSS founders in history at the most informative stages of your startup journey.

We do believe that successfully going through GR can dramatically increase your chances of raising strong seed capital from great generalist VCs. Since OSS Capital runs the program, they are also a great potential source of seed funding after you complete GR.

GR is also quite different from YC in many ways: We focus on COSS startups exclusively. We also more narrowly focus the expectations of the program on intensive knowledge transfer and mentorship in parallel with helping you make domain specific progress building your project, growing your open source community and acquiring users + customers. Additionally, given the intentionally small amount of funding ($25K), the program is tailored for small founding teams (1-3 founders) and enabling them to focus all their time and energy working full time towards discovering if they can and/or should dedicate more resources (Capital) and energy (Hiring) as a consequence of graduating from GR.

We are big fans of YC in general, but requre the participants of our program to focus their energy on completing GR before applying to other accelerators.

What will the program be like?

Every week you will get 1:1 mentoring and support over multiple sessions (async / real-time and recurring video meetings) with world-class COSS founders who have built many of the largest COSS companies in history. These same people were in your shoes initially with nothing more than some code, and very few users. They helped grow their startups into businesses that employ thousands of people and generate tens of billions in revenue, in aggregate.

We expect each experience to be different but the focus of the program is to equip you with the fundamental knowledge and insight needed to get your project from the embryonic stages of growth to being able to clearly articulate a business model, ideal customer personas, understanding the nuances of open source project vs. commercial product (and how/when/why to draw the line between those two things).

The program is NOT meant to encourage or give you the opportunity to make hires for your startup, or raise VC money (during the program). Instead, our focus is to immerse you in an intense and custom tailored mentoring experience that transfers knowledge from people who have done exactly the same thing you aspire to do – but who have done it extremely successfully (in context, 100% focused on COSS) from zero to scale.

Demo day for our first GRQ423 cohort is planned for December 6th 2023, to be co-hosted at Open Core Summit III via livestream in SF.

The second Git Round cohort (GRQ124) is now accepting applications and will announce the teams who have been accepted in the program on December 30th 2024.