Open Source Startups: An Investor's Guide to GitHub Signal Analysis

Open source startups require a different analytical lens for GitHub signal interpretation. Community contributions inflate commit counts and contributor numbers, making raw velocity metrics misleading. The key adjustments: focus on the company-owned repositories (not the community fork), track contributor growth in core maintainers (not occasional contributors), and look for the commercial infrastructure signal – new private or semi-private repos for billing, auth, and enterprise features. The strongest open source investment signal is when community engagement and commercial GitHub engineering acceleration (commit velocity + contributor growth, not accelerator-program participation) happen simultaneously.