Study Finds Most Big Open-Source Startups Outside Bay Area, Many European, and Avoiding VC
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
Over 90% of the fastest-growing open-source companies in 2020 were founded outside the San Francisco Bay Area, and 12 out of the top 20 originate in Europe, according to a new study. The "ROSS Index", created by Runa Capital, lists the fastest-growing open-source startups with public repositories on GitHub every quarter.
Interestingly, the company judged to be the fastest-growing on the latest list, Plausible, is an "open startup" (all its metrics are published, including revenues) and states on its website that it is "not interested in raising funds or taking investment. Not from individuals, not from institutions and not from venture capitalists. Our business model has nothing to do with collecting and analyzing huge amounts of personal information from web users and using these behavioral insights to sell advertisements." It says it builds a self-sustainable "privacy-friendly alternative to very popular and widely used surveillance capitalism web analytics tools".
Admittedly, "GitHub stars" are not a totally perfect metric to measure the product-market fit of open-source companies. However, the research shows a possible interesting trend away from the VC-backed startups of the last 10 years.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.