The Commercial Open Source Startup Manifesto

Let's start with a paradox.

By the data, Commercial Open Source (COSS) is a potent, high-performing investment category in the modern digital economy. It is a $26.4 billion investment category that systematically outperforms traditional software. Companies in this space achieve exit valuations that are 7x to 14x higher than their closed-source peers, and they graduate from Seed to Series A at nearly double the rate.

Yet, this extraordinary financial performance has, until now, been the result of an ad-hoc, chaotic, and unstructured art form. The success of pioneers like Databricks, Confluent, HashiCorp, and MongoDB was carved out through instinct, trial, and error. For every celebrated success, countless others failed, not due to technical inferiority, but due to a fundamental misunderstanding of value creation in an open source ecosystem.

Founders are forced to reinvent the wheel, and investors struggle to distinguish between a healthy, thriving company and a vanity project with misleading metrics.

COSS is now a category, as distinct and important as SaaS. But unlike the mature SaaS ecosystem, it lacks the unifying data, standards, and playbooks required to transform siloed successes into a scalable discipline. The ecosystem remains fragmented, creating two core problems:

• A Go-to-Market Execution Gap: Existing open source foundations are masters of stewarding technology, but they were never designed to be business incubators. Their programs do not address the key go-to-market challenges that are critical to a startup's survival: monetization, sales, and building a commercial flywheel. This leaves founders to navigate the most difficult part of their journey alone.

• A Lack of Infrastructure:The COSS ecosystem remains fragmented, lacking the unifying narrative, data, standards, playbooks, central events, and dedicated capital networks required to transform siloed successes into a repeatable, scalable discipline.

So where do we begin to build this missing infrastructure? We must start by addressing the most critical execution gap: the go-to-market strategy.