About Open Core Ventures:

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. GitLab co-founder and executive chair Sid Sijbrandij started Open Core Ventures (OCV) to accelerate the Open Core opportunity.  

OCV starts 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. 

About the Role:

OCV is seeking a motivated part-time intern who is passionate about content creation and curious about venture capital to join our team. As a Content Marketing Intern, you'll help us create content that serves multiple goals simultaneously: attracting founders, educating portfolio companies, and building a reputation with downstream investors. You’ll gain exposure and experience in venture capital, emerging software, and startups. 

Key Responsibilities:

• Content creation: Write a weekly article for OCV’s blog; edit and prepare content for publication. 
• Social media: Create social media content derived from OCV’s handbook. 
• Ad hoc support: Provide timely writing and editing support on other special projects as needed.

Schedule:

• Independent Work: Approximately 10 hours per week, offering flexibility to balance your studies or other commitments.
• Team Collaboration: Join us for at least one live Zoom meeting per week (~25 minutes) to share ideas and collaborate with other interns.

Details:

• Compensation: $20/hour.
• You will be engaged as an Independent Contractor (not an employee).
• As an Independent Contractor you will be responsible to provide your own computer and internet access.
• Must be authorized to work in the USA as an Independent Contractor.

How to Apply:

Send your resume, 2 writing samples, and a statement of interest. 

The Open Core Ventures (OCV) Catalyst Program is a 3 month OSS project incubator aiming to support open source maintainers in the growth of their open source projects. Projects such as developer tools, artificial intelligence infrastructure/implementation, and data transformation (or any that solves a real problem and has potential for commercial viability) will be considered for Catalyst and will receive support and mentorship from OCV team. There is potential for top-performing projects to become OCV companies at the end of the program — 4/11 Catalyst projects became OCV companies, or their authors became OCV CTOs, in 2025. 

Participants in Catalyst will collaborate with OCV and their batch to establish and work towards clear, measurable objectives, focusing on metrics such as contributor growth, community expansion, and increased adoption. OCV provides $10,000 to support the growth of Catalyst projects, and it is not expected that authors work on their project full-time during Catalyst (most particpants hold full-time positions while in Catalyst). OCV is committed to advancing the growth of open source through providing the sponsorship resources and aims to amplify the impact of open-source projects and position them for long term success. Eight project authors will be accepted Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis and are due by June 19, although may close sooner if all eight spots are filled.

Catalyst v2 kicks off on July 7, 2026.

Founding CTO at Redbolt.ai 

Redbolt AI is the security and reliability layer for in-production AI systems. It’s the commercial open core evolution of NVIDIA's open source red-teaming framework, garak, and NeMo Guardrails. Redbolt builds on trusted open source technology and adds the security layer that empowers users to deploy AI at scale.

We're looking for a Founding CTO to build Redbolt into an era-defining AI technology. As the founding CTO, you’ll define initial product vision, build commercial features and an engineering team to accelerate product velocity, get closer to customers, and deepen open-source contributions to NVIDIA's Garak. 

The opportunity

The market for AI security is early but moving fast. The risks of unguarded AI systems are well-known but the infrastructure to protect against these risks don’t really exist yet.

Redbolt starts with a meaningful foundation: NVIDIA's open-source tools already have community traction and credibility. Your job is to turn that into a product and company that enterprises depend on.

If you've been looking for the right moment to build something that matters, this is it.

The role

As the technical founder, you will: 

• Defining the vision. What should this company become? What's the product roadmap that turns open-source adoption into a billion-dollar enterprise business? You'll own that strategy.
• Building the foundation. You're writing code, shipping product, and making architectural decisions that will compound for years.
• Hiring the team. You'll recruit and lead the engineers who build Redbolt alongside you.
• Partner with a CEO. Once there's traction, OCV will lead a search for a co-founder CEO to partner with you - someone to own go-to-market, fundraising, and business operations while you own product and engineering. You'll be deeply involved in selecting that person.

About you 

You're a deep technical expert in LLM security, ML engineering, or adjacent infrastructure. You understand how these systems fail and how to prevent them.

You've operated at a high level technically: staff/principal engineer, engineering lead, or founded something yourself.

You're entrepreneurial. You've been waiting for the right opportunity to build something from the ground up, with real support and resources behind you.

You have conviction about the AI security space. You've thought about what needs to exist and have opinions about how to build it.

About 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.

Location:  Fully remote, ideally located in CA, CO, NY, TX, FL, GA, MA, NJ, PA

Open Core Ventures (OCV) is looking for an exceptional talent leader to build and scale our CEO recruiting function. Your primary responsibility is to identify, attract, and close world-class founders for OCV companies. This role will also shape OCV’s talent strategy, recruiting efforts, and build scalable People Function platform processes for our companies.

As a key member of our small but mighty team, you'll help us achieve our ambitious goal of launching 2,000 new companies per year. From sourcing founder CEOs to advising new companies on their first hire strategy, your work will directly impact the success of every company in the OCV portfolio.

What You’ll Do

• You will own the CEO recruiting process (scaling from 2 companies per month currently to 100+ companies per month in the future).
• You will leverage AI to build and source scalable talent pipelines and to automate workflows from ATS to reference checks and founder onboarding.
• You will build out recruiting platform processes (from interview guides to offer approvals) and tools (including external search firm relationships) to support OCV companies’ early growth.

Who You Are

• A relationship-builder who thrives on connecting with high-caliber talent and can sell a compelling vision.
• Able to identify exceptional leadership potential and independently drive searches from start to finish.
• Passionate about startups, open source, and emerging technologies, with a strong drive to support founders.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and excited by the challenge of defining new roles for companies that don't yet exist.
• Process-driven and live for constant efficiency improvement.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree.
• Proven track record of closing senior leadership hires at startups, venture-backed companies, or technology firms.
• Deep network within the venture ecosystem.
• Strong assessment skills and the ability to evaluate founder competencies and founder-company fit.
• Excellent communication and negotiation skills.
• Experience working in fast-paced, high-growth environments; venture capital or startup studio experience is a plus.

About Open Core Ventures

Founded by Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab co-founder and Executive Chair, Open Core Ventures (OCV) starts companies around promising open source projects. We recruit the founders, often from the OSS project we're commercializing, and help them accelerate growth to raise a Seed round. We’ve started 30+ companies around open source projects, including Fleet, FlowFuse, and Mermaid Chart. 

At Open Core Ventures, we operate in a transparent environment, with clear terms and open communication, guided by our public handbook. 

The actual offer, reflecting the total compensation package and benefits, will be at the company’s sole discretion and determined by a myriad of factors, including, but not limited to, years of experience, depth of experience, and other relevant business considerations. The company also reserves the right to amend or modify employee perks and benefits at any time.

We are an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.

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.

Location:  Fully remote, ideally located in CA, CO, NY, TX, FL, GA, MA, NJ, PA

Open Core Ventures (OCV) is looking for a Full Stack Software Engineer to build web applications and embed AI capabilities across all our core functions. Your primary responsibility is to improve workflow efficiency and empower the entire business through smart, scalable AI and custom software. The ideal candidate will also participate in sourcing, evaluating, and starting new open source projects that support OCV’s thesis.  

As a key member of our small but mighty team, you’ll help us achieve our ambitious goal of launching 2,000 new companies per year. From reviewing open source codebases to owning internal systems like domain transfers and access controls, your work will directly support the company formation engine at the heart of OCV.

What You’ll Do

• You will own the custom, internal software that we use to launch and support 2 companies per month currently, and 100+ companies per month in the future. You will use AI to build this software and to automate the various manual workflows.
• You will help us find and assess open source projects that we will start companies around.
• You will help support our companies, sometimes before we even have founders, by making contributions to the underlying OSS. 
• You will be the system administrator for OCV.

Who You Are

• A self-starter who thrives in fast-paced environments.
• Able to identify automation opportunities and independently bring them to life.
• Passionate about AI and systems design, with a strong drive to innovate and improve how work gets done.
• Passionate about open source software and love to solve new technical challenges.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field — or equivalent experience.
• Software engineering background, especially in backoffice systems and workflow automation.
• Proficiency with LLMs (OpenAI, Claude, etc.), APIs, RAG, and prompt engineering.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails is a plus.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab, etc.), including testing, containerization, and deployments.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work independently.

About Open Core Ventures

Founded by Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab co-founder and Executive Chair, Open Core Ventures (OCV) starts companies around promising open source projects. We recruit the founders, often from the OSS project we're commercializing, and help them accelerate growth to raise a Seed round. We’ve started 30+ companies around open source projects, including Fleet, FlowFuse, and Mermaid Chart. 

At Open Core Ventures, we operate in a transparent environment, with clear terms and open communication, guided by our public handbook. 

The actual offer, reflecting the total compensation package and benefits, will be at the company’s sole discretion and determined by a myriad of factors, including, but not limited to, years of experience, depth of experience, and other relevant business considerations. The company also reserves the right to amend or modify employee perks and benefits at any time.

We are an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.

About Open Core Ventures

Open Core Ventures (OCV) is a venture capital firm that starts commercial open source software companies. Our team identifies open source software projects with traction, recruits passionate project founders and contributors, and launches new companies. OCV companies aim to create tangible value for the open source community by providing access to resources and reducing the barrier to entrepreneurship. Our culture is handbook-first. 

About the OCV Model

OCV believes in the power of open core, and the impact of open learning and collaboration. Our approach diverges from conventional venture capital because OCV starts companies and recruits founders; OCV does not invest in existing companies. The OCV model enables experienced, capable, and technical open-source authors and contributors  to found companies,who otherwise would not have the resources to launch a successful startup. Sid Sijbrandij, founder and CEO of GitLab, serves as our General Partner. 

Location

Fully Remote

Duties/Responsibilities

• Manage and contribute to your project and company full-time, collaborating with OCV and leveraging OCV resources including, and not limited to, CEO sourcing
• Conduct customer discovery and leverage iterative feedback to build a commercial arm around your OSS project
• Grow your open-source community alongside your business, advancing OCV’s mission

Required Qualifications

• Has made significant contributions to an open-source project with an existing community
• Strong enthusiasm and excitement about being the founder of a company
• Understanding of basic startup considerations

Preferred Qualifications (Not Required)

• Created or is the author/owner of the OSS project
• Has prior entrepreneurial experience/experience as a founder 

The actual offer, reflecting the total compensation package and benefits, will be at the company’s sole discretion and determined by a myriad of factors, including, but not limited to, years of experience, depth of experience, and other relevant business considerations. The company also reserves the right to amend or modify employee perks and benefits at any time.

At Open Core Ventures, we operate in a transparent environment, with clear terms and open communication, guided by our public handbook. We celebrate and embrace differences as a strength and source of innovation. We dare to dream, dare to lead, and dare to change. We are resourceful, think creatively, and adapt quickly. We persevere, take challenges head-on, and do not bat an eye at the hard stuff.

Open Core Ventures is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.

🚀 Hermes Web: Call for Founding Engineer

Hermes Web is looking for a founding engineer to build the first polished, hosted personal AI agent product.

Some facts about us:

• Incubated by Open Core Ventures, the studio founded by Sid Sijbrandij (ex-CEO of GitLab)
• Building the hosted, non-technical-user version of Hermes Agent — the fastest-growing open-source agent framework after OpenClaw
• OCV underwrites infrastructure and LLM costs, so you optimize for growth and polish, not unit economics
• Fully remote, product-focused, compressed sprint cadence

If you want to own product and engineering end-to-end, ship consumer-grade polish in a space that's still raw, and help define what a mainstream AI agent product looks like, this is for you.

Project described below.

Requirements

• High agency, ship fast without hand-holding
• Strong Python skills — FastAPI or similar production web framework experience required
• Strong frontend skills (React, Next.js, TypeScript) for the chat, memory, and activity surfaces
• Experience with auth, billing, and multi-tenancy in production products
• Container orchestration experience (Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS, or equivalent)
• Experience with AI-native tools (Cursor, Claude Code, model APIs)
• Knowledge of agents, LLM gateways, rate limiting, and abuse prevention
• Comfortable working across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI workflows

The kind of person we want: someone who has shipped a consumer or prosumer product they're still proud of, and who responds to an aggressive timeline with "tight but doable if we cut X, Y, Z" rather than "let me spec it first."

Bonus skills:

• Experience with agent frameworks (Hermes, OpenClaw, LangGraph)
• LLM gateway or proxy work
• Stripe subscription billing at scale
• Production experience hardening agentically-generated code
• OSS contributions
• Consumer AI product experience (Cowork, Cursor, or similar)

Project: Hosted Hermes Agent Platform

1. Introduction

We are building a multi-tenant hosted platform that gives anyone their own personal Hermes agent running in the cloud in under 60 seconds. No terminal, no API keys, no configuration. The agent persists, remembers them, and gets better over time.

This project includes:

• Per-user Hermes containers with network and storage isolation
• A warm pool provisioning system for instant signup-to-first-message
• A production-hardened chat, memory, and activity interface
• An LLM gateway that meters usage, enforces caps, and prevents abuse
• Bundled Claude Sonnet access — users never see an API key or model selector
• Stripe billing infrastructure and self-serve subscription flows

2. Requirements

Platform and provisioning

• Per-tenant container orchestration via Kubernetes or Nomad
• Warm pool pattern for sub-90-second provisioning
• Idle sleep and fast wake (under 2 seconds on incoming message)
• Persistent per-tenant memory and conversation storage
• Auth via Clerk or Auth0 (email + Google OAuth, email verification required)

Frontend

• React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn
• Multi-tenant chat, memory, and activity surfaces
• Graceful handling of connection loss, agent timeouts, container restarts
• Streaming responses, conversation history, new-thread flows

LLM gateway

• Proxy every Anthropic API call from every tenant container
• Hold Anthropic API keys server-side; tenant containers never see them
• Per-tenant metering with second-by-second granularity
• Hard daily and monthly cost caps
• Circuit breakers for runaway loops
• Ops kill switch for any tenant

Billing and ops

• Stripe subscription integration at $20/mo
• Self-serve upgrade, downgrade, cancel
• Internal ops dashboard for user management and anomaly response
• Runbooks for common failure modes

3. Non-Goals

• Developer-facing platform
• Self-hosted desktop or mobile apps
• Skills marketplace or plugin ecosystem
• Workflow builder, triggers, scheduled agents
• Team accounts, SSO, enterprise features
• Multiple LLM providers or model selection
• Bring-your-own API key
• Forking Hermes — we track upstream and contribute back

4. Prior Art

• Hermes Agent — the open-source framework we build the hosted experience on top of
• OpenClaw — the largest agent framework today and reference for community patterns and growth dynamics
• LangGraph Deep Agents — architecture patterns for stateful long-running agent workflows
• Anthropic MCP — server design patterns for tool interfaces and permission-aware context
• Cowork (Anthropic) — polish bar and UX patterns for non-technical AI agent products
• Cursor agent UI — interaction model for AI agents in consumer products